Can Bukayo Saka break the Premier League’s weirdest record?

The race for the most assists across a single Premier League season is weird and unpredictable, often influenced by factors outside the control of its competitors. It is also a record that has stood for more than 20 years, or since Thierry Henry notched his 20th assist of the 2002-03 season. Since then, only Kevin De Bruyne has matched Henry’s figure over 38 games, in 2019-20, but it has been threatened on an almost annual basis over the past two decades.

This year, the immediate frontrunner, flying out of the starting blocks, is Bukayo Saka, who has seven assists through the first seven matches of the Premier League season. Saka has made an exceptional start. He is two assists away from equalling his tally last season, and has already drawn level with his total from 2021-22, a campaign where he made 36 starts and featured in every game.

Saka’s two assists in Arsenal’s 3-1 win over Southampton suggested an attacker continuing to add new tools to his game; as well as his goals and near-constant threat on the wing, Saka’s set-piece delivery is now up there with the best in the division, while the 23-year-old has unlocked the devastating back-post cross after cutting inside, a weapon he used to set up Gabriel Martinelli in the comeback against Southampton.

As a complete wide forward and set-piece taker for a title-contending team, who rarely misses a match, Saka may soon find that the assist record is within sight. He is already a third of the way there, after all, less than a quarter of the way through the season. Even if Saka’s current trajectory drops off slightly, the manner of his opening spell for Arsenal suggests he could challenge it.

Saka, though, is not the first player whose assist numbers have skyrocketed through the first couple of months of the season. In fact, it has become normal for one of the Premier League’s leading attackers to start the campaign by striking a rich vein of creative form. De Bruyne in 2022 started the season with nine assists in nine matches. Mohamed Salah reached nine in 15 in 2021. The year before, Harry Kane was 10 in 11. Go back further, and Mesut Ozil was 15 in 17 in 2015, Cesc Fabregas 13 in 18 in 2014.

Between them all, some of the best creative players in Premier League history made it through the first half of the season and entered December racking up assists at a rate that made Henry’s record look precarious. At points, Henry’s 20 assists appeared to be such an achievable target that it was at risk of being obliterated completely, in the same manner as Erling Haaland and the single-season scoring record.

But, as you have been warned, the race for the Premier League assist record is strange and susceptible to volatile change. If the campaigns of those who have recorded the most Premier League assists each season were all lined up on the start line, like at the 800m finals at the Olympics, what you would see is a blur of astonishingly quick first laps followed by a series of collapses after the sound of the halfway bell. Almost every year, the pace of the first lap is unsustainable.

Often, the challenges of football’s schedule have their impact, as matches pile up and fatigue or injuries contribute to a loss of form. De Bruyne and Salah, for instance, saw their fast starts broken up by long spells without recording an assist before and after the mid-season World Cup and Africa Cup of Nations respectively. In some cases, opposing teams took greater efforts to shut down particular threats, such as Kane’s partnership with Son Heung-min, whom the England captain assisted seven times in the first six games of the season.

In other examples, the plateaus can seem inexplicable. The 2015-16 season will forever be remembered in English football as the year Leicester City won the league but for Arsenal fans, it is the campaign they wasted a golden opportunity to reclaim the title. Their slump over the second half of the campaign was mirrored by Ozil’s dramatic flatlining, with just two assists recorded between the start of January and the end of April after reaching the new year on 15.

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Ozil, though, largely continued to create chances at a similar rate. The German finished short of the Premier League assist mark that year but still holds the record for most chances created in a single season, with 146. Perhaps the more significant drop-off that year came from striker Olivier Giroud, who went 15 matches in a row from January to May without scoring in the Premier League.

If there is an element of randomness at play, the seasons of the two holders of the assist record could be instructive. De Bruyne and Henry finished with 20 assists and PFA Player of the Year accolades in 2020 and 2003 respectively, while playing for the team that finished runner-up in the league. Both also had remarkable bursts towards the end of the season. For De Bruyne, his numbers recovered from a winter slump after the Premier League was suspended by Covid. Once the league returned, two months later, and with the title already won by Liverpool, De Bruyne finished the year with four assists in six games, the record equalled.

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Henry’s 20-assist season is even more spectacular once you consider that the French forward also scored 24 goals, and was playing at a time where assist numbers were not fixated upon like they are now, a fascination sparked by the rise of FPL (Fantasy Premier League). For Henry, it was the sheer satisfaction of selflessly setting up a teammate that motivated his eight assists over the final four games of the season. Henry was also in a battle with Manchester United’s Ruud van Nistelrooy for the Premier League Golden Boot going into the final two games but continued to provide for his teammates when he could have gone for goal himself.

As the Frenchman later told The Guardian: “To me, the most beautiful thing is making the pass when you are in a position to score yourself. You know you’re good enough to score, but you give the ball. You share.” And perhaps, as Saka prepares to continue his opening lap of this Premier League, that is the most valuable advice to follow.