Ben Brereton Diaz and the longest runs without winning a Premier League match

It’s early days, but you fear Southampton might set a few unwanted records this season.

After seven games, they are winless, with only a point to their name and just four goals scored.

At least the club has the faint afterglow of success from winning promotion last season, though there is one member of their team who doesn’t even have that — and, instead, has within his sights one of the more undesirable individual records around.

Step forward Ben Brereton Diaz, who has played 20 Premier League games in his career so far — six for Southampton, 14 for Sheffield United last season — without winning any. That is the record for the most games played by someone who has never won a Premier League game, ahead of Marvin Sordell on 17, and Emanuel Villa on 16.

Unlike that duo, he still has a chance of celebrating his first victory. However, the Chile international is also in danger of setting the record for the most games played by an individual before being involved in a Premier League win (see table below).

This, hopefully, is not designed to denigrate or mock Brereton Diaz. He has just been unfortunate enough to play for a couple of struggling sides. You could argue he has been part of those struggling sides, so bears at least some of the responsibility for the failure to win. But with six goals in 14 games for Sheffield United, he ended the season as their joint-top scorer despite only joining in January, while he has frequently looked like Southampton’s most threatening attacker this term.

His teams haven’t won any games, but it’s not necessarily his fault.

You could even argue that Brereton Diaz is almost being punished for being good. If you’re a terrible player in a terrible team, you probably aren’t going to stay in that team. But if you’re a decent player in a terrible team, you’ll be out there every week, your win-loss record at the mercy of the dysfunction around you.

In any case, the list of players who have taken a long time to get their first win isn’t exactly full of complete duds.

Take Gareth Bale, who appeared in 24 games for Tottenham before he claimed his first Premier League victory. His was a slightly different case, because it wasn’t down to him joining a struggling team, but more an odd quirk of his first two seasons at Tottenham; a combination of coincidence, poor form and injury conspiring to keep him out of the games Spurs won in that time.

Bale joined Spurs from Southampton in 2007 and, while he had to wait a long time for his first Premier League success, he did win in his fourth appearance for their first team when they beat Anorthosis Famagusta 6-1 in the UEFA Cup.

Having appeared sporadically in the following months, his season was ended in December by an ankle injury. He returned at the start of the following season, when Spurs infamously took just two points from their first eight games, but missed their first victory of the season because he had been sent off in the previous match. From there, he was in and out of the team, variously injured or out of favour, but his presence always coincided with draws or defeats and the team won plenty of times in his absence.

But his winless Premier League run became a running joke, one of the early football social media memes after Opta spotted the unfortunate statistic. In the end, it spanned 1,607 minutes over those 24 games, lasting 762 days and taking in three Spurs managers.

He eventually broke the streak on a bit of a technicality: he came on in the closing stages of Tottenham’s victory over Burnley in September 2009, when they were already 4-0 up and eventually won 5-0. And that was a deliberate move by then Spurs manager Harry Redknapp, to shake the unwanted statistical millstone. Redknapp told talkSPORT in 2019: “I stuck him on against Burnley… with six minutes to go. I thought, ‘He can’t mess this up!’”

He didn’t. And over the following years, he went on to win scores of games basically on his own so, by the time he left for Real Madrid in 2013, he was significantly in credit.

“It was a bit annoying that people went on about that statistic but it didn’t affect me at all,” Bale told The Guardian in 2010 after things had turned around. “It was just one of those things that freakily happened. I knew as soon as I got my chance to play we’d win a few games and it’d be done.”

The current unfortunate record holder is Scottish forward Oliver Burke, who took an excruciating 25 games to taste Premier League victory for the first time.

Burke played his first Premier League game for West Brom in August 2017 after joining from RB Leipzig, but injuries ensured he only played in 15 matches, none of which West Brom won. And in his defence, they didn’t win many without him, either: this was the season in which they were relegated, went through four managers and endured an ill-fated mid-season trip to Barcelona where a group of players stole a taxi from outside a McDonald’s.

As for Burke, he reappeared in the Premier League a couple of years later, signing for Sheffield United at the end of the summer 2020 transfer window. Again, he wasn’t a regular, so had to wait until the January of that season before contributing to a win, which came against Newcastle.

The Blades were also relegated, so Burke has only played in two Premier League seasons, both of which have ended in the drop. Poor Oliver. He is currently with Werder Bremen after a couple of injury-hit loans at Millwall and Birmingham City.

Rob Earnshaw is another name in the top 10 who can’t be entirely blamed for not collecting a victory for a long time. It took 18 games before he won one for West Brom in 2004-05, but he did rattle up 11 goals that season, was the Baggies’ top scorer and, in terms of minutes per goal, he was second only to Thierry Henry in the whole division that season.

“The context of that season and that team was lots of new players,” Earnshaw tells The Athletic. “It was a team that wasn’t really expected to be in the Premier League. We were trying to figure each other out: I had about five different strike partners in that season. You’re always trying to get those relationships, so that’s perhaps why it took so long (to get a win).”

That chopping and changing of the team’s forward line was also a reason why Earnshaw missed their rare victories. West Brom got their first three points in their eighth league game, a 2-1 win over Bolton in October, but Earnshaw was an unused substitute. Which itself presents a curious dilemma: when you haven’t won a game yet yourself, how do you feel when your team wins without you contributing?

“It’s a very strange thing, a very weird dynamic,” he says. “No 1, you’re always super happy when you win. I was always the first one to celebrate and congratulate my team-mates. But there’s always a weird feeling of disappointment. The No 1 thing is, that little kid in you just wants to play football and win games.”

Jan Aage Fjortoft is another unfortunate name on the list, having taken 20 games to earn his first first victory with Swindon in 1993-94. Swindon only won two games in the first half of that season, and Fjortoft missed both of them. But, unlike Earnshaw, he wasn’t a victim of squad rotation or injury: he missed those games because he wasn’t scoring goals.

After moving to Swindon for a club-record fee from Rapid Vienna following their promotion to the Premier League, Fjortoft did not find the net at all before the turn of the year.

“You start thinking, ‘Maybe the way I play doesn’t fit here — maybe I have to change’,” he tells The Athletic. “That’s the worst phase, because then you’re going nowhere. You’re building up to that moment, hopefully, when you get that first goal. But then you realise you just have to do what you do, because that’s good enough.

“It was a very testing time, and the thing that saved me was I was scoring goals for Norway, though that made it even more complicated in my head. Eventually, I wasn’t in the team as much, which is normal: Swindon had paid a lot of money for me to score goals.

“I was more annoyed that I didn’t break the code. I had played against these players before for Norway. We’d won against England. Why couldn’t I break this thing called the Premier League?”

Things reached a nadir when Fjortoft — still winless and goalless — played a reserve game against Wycombe Wanderers on Christmas Eve in which he was “out of 22 players… the worst on the pitch”. With the 1994 World Cup looming and his spot in the Norway team under threat, he arranged a loan back to his former club Lillestrom.

But then Keith Scott, who had been playing up front for Swindon instead of Fjortoft, was cup-tied for a game against Ipswich in the FA Cup. Fjortoft played, scored and kept his place for the league game against Tottenham a few days later. In that game he finally secured his first league goal, and first win in the English top flight, after 20 unsuccessful attempts, as they beat Spurs 2-1.

“It was fantastic,” he says. “There was a lot of relief for myself, but we beat Tottenham, and we were allowed to dream. Could we make it? Could we get enough points to stay up?”

Fjortoft had a sensational second half to the season: having failed to score at all in his first 20 games, he managed 11 in his next 16, although it wasn’t enough to save Swindon from relegation, broadly down to them conceding a whopping 100 goals.

Ultimately, it would be hugely unfair to treat Brereton Diaz or any of the players mentioned here as figures of fun. Not least because, by even making it to the Premier League, they’re already in the top one per cent of the top one per cent.

“When you get a chance to play in the Premier League, the playing is the actual achievement,” adds Earnshaw. “That’s the dream. You’re playing against the very best.”

(Top photo: Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)