Most goals scored in a single FA Cup season

All eyes will be at Wembley on Saturday, where Manchester City and Watford contest the 139th FA Cup final.

With 354 goals scored so far, the 2018/19 edition of the competition is unlikely to surpass the most strikes ever recorded in its long history, unless something that is bound to reshape the game as we know it happens.

Even with City in red-hot form going in as favourites to register an unprecedented domestic treble, we doubt anything like that is going to happen.

The FA Cup has come along way since its early days, where a handful of goals throughout an entire season were commonplace, and the Premier League era has contributed vastly to over 20 000 goals recorded in the competition’s history.

The restructuring of the Football League in 1992 came with the expansion of the FA Cup, which saw more teams participate in the competition, resulting in the number of games played per season shoot up to almost double the amount played in the preceding years.

As a result, the highest scoring seasons in the competition all occured in the Premier League era.

The 2016/17 season, where Arsenal prevailed – beating Chelsea in the final – provided the most goals in the competition’s history, as the net was found 490 times. As it’s often the case, the lower league and non-league battles that take place in the early stages of the competition contributed fairly to that number.

Even the early days of the Premier League provided flurry of FA Cup goals, with 1992/93 – the inaugural season after the revamp – registering no less than 466 goals, while the 1995/96 campaign, where Manchester United edged Liverpool in the final, remains the second most prolific with 485 goals.

Most goals in an FA Cup season

2016/17: 490 goals
1995/96: 485
2012/13: 471
1992/93: 466
2010/11: 464
2013/14: 464
2009/10: 461
1997/98: 457
2000/01: 459
2002/03: 452
1994/95: 451