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“Ian Muir played 95% of his games for Tranmere,” writes Robert Abushal. “One-club players aside, who’s the closest to 100% without being 100%?”
One-club men and women are among football’s more celebrated groups, the players who dedicated their entire career to one particular cause. Athletic Club give out the One Club Man and One Club Woman awards each year; the list of recipients include Paolo Maldini, Matthew Le Tissier and Malin Moström.
There’s no such recognition of Almost One Club Men and Women, unless you count answers in one-newspaper trivia columns. (The Knowledge has no comment to make on reports that we turned down a small-money move to a rival broadsheet in 2005.) We had dozens of answers to this question – thanks to all of you – so let’s count them down in ascending order of One Clubness.
First, a couple of bits of housekeeping:
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We haven’t included non-league teams, which rules out Paul Scholes (three games for Royton) and Le Tissier (Eastleigh) among others. We’ve also excluded Hamburg legend Uwe Seeler, whose one appearance for Cork Celtic was in a sponsored event.
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Data on appearances for individual players can vary from source to source, particularly for older players. We made a judgment call in each case, so the figures may only be 99.82% correct. But that’s appropriate for this question, right? Right?
97.51% Gabby Agbonlahor (401 appearances: 2 Watford, 8 Sheffield Wednesday, 391 Aston Villa)
Agbonlahor went on loan to Watford and Sheffield Wednesday at the start of his career
97.63% David Narey (886 appearances: 865 Dundee United, 21 Raith Rovers)
97.78% Manny Kaltz (754 appearances: 722 Hamburg, 1 Bordeaux, 16 Mulhouse, 15 Hamburg)
98.38%* Thomas Müller (804 appearances, 791 Bayern Munich/Bayern Munich II, 13 Vancouver Whitecaps)
Müller is still with Vancouver Whitecaps, so this percentage is likely to drop
98.63% David O’Leary (732 appearances: 722 Arsenal, 10 Leeds)
98.88% Daniele De Rossi (623 appearances: 616 Roma, 7 Boca Juniors)
99.01% Rogério Ceni (1,209 appearances: 12 Sinop, 1,197 São Paulo)
99.41% Lewis Dunk (512 appearances: 3 Bristol City, 509 Brighton)
Dunk also played eight games on loan at non-league Bognor Regis
99.58% Tom Finney (475 appearances: 473 Preston North End, 1 Toronto City, 1 Distillery)
99.62% John Ebbrell (266 appearances: 265 Everton, 1 Sheffield United)
99.69% John Atyeo (647 appearances: 2 Portsmouth, 645 Bristol City)
Atyeo also played for non-league Westbury United
99.81% Steve Death (538 appearances: 1 West Ham, 537 Reading)
99.82% Matt Bloomfield (558 appearances: 1 Ipswich, 557 Wycombe Wanderers)
“Current Oxford United manager Matt Bloomfield played for Wycombe Wanderers for 19 years, amassing 557 appearances in league and cup,” writes Andy Carswell. “However, despite being known by fans as Mr Wycombe he actually started his career as a trainee at Ipswich Town, the team he supported as a boy. He made one League Cup appearance for them, meaning that 557 out of the 558 matches (or 99.82%) he played as a professional were for Wycombe.”
“Your question about footballers’ funerals on TV reminded me that when the Turkey striker Hakan Sukur got married, that this was broadcast on live television. Have any other footballing nuptials been broadcast for any reason?” asks Andrew Miles.
Even by the standards of modern life, Hakan Sukur’s story is extraordinary. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2016 after being indicted for insulting Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on social media. Twenty-one years earlier, Erdogan – then the mayor of Istanbul – was present at Sukur’s wedding to Esra Elbirlik.
Sukur, Turkey’s star player, was in the process of his inspiring his country to qualify for Euro 96 – their first appearance at a European Championship. His wedding was a huge deal . The marriage lasted only a few months; tragically, Elbirlik died in a 1999 earthquake at the age of 24.
While Sukur has a case for being Turkey’s greatest ever footballer, Ianis Hagi is unquestionably the son of Romania’s finest, a genius called Gheorghe who lorded over international football between 1983 and 2000 (and also played alongside Sukur at Galatasaray). In the summer of 2024, shortly after Romania’s participation at the European Championship, Hagi was married to Elena Tanase on live TV. It was reported that the rights were sold for over €200,000.
In December 1997, Peru and Boca Juniors winger Nolberto Solano – six months away from becoming a Newcastle player – married Claudia de la Flor in a ceremony that was broadcast live on Channel 4. That’s Channel 4 of the América Televisión network, obviously.
And it was Sky Sport Italia who showed Francesco Totti’s nuptials in 2005. “Totti, the darling son of Rome, married Ilary Blasi, a TV presenter and model,” writes Lee Wilson. “The whole day was covered live by Sky Sport Italia. Should you be so inclined, you can watch ‘highlights’ of it here … but I wouldn’t bother.
“The cameras were inside the church too and not just observing from outside. And given that this is 2005, there is a real feeling of Hello magazine about it all. Sadly, their union wasn’t one that would endure and things got pretty unpleasant when they decided to split in 2022. Still, for one day at least, they were the perfect couple, and the world got to peek inside Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli to see them radiating happiness and say ‘Io faccio’ live on TV!”
Knowledge archive
“Wikipedia says Melchester Rovers have won 35 major trophies. Are they the most successful fictional team ever?” tweeted SteadfastTweet in the days when you tweeted.
Thanks to Roy Race’s remarkable form for the team in the 1960s and 70s, Melchester’s haul of baubles is even more impressive than that reported by our good friend Wikipedia. It includes 14 league championships, 16 FA Cups, three European Cups, four Cup Winners’ Cups, one Uefa Cup, three League Cups and the 1981-82 Second Division title – 42 trophies in total. And nobody in the world of football fiction can compete with that.
In terms of prestigious titles only, Harchester United of Sky One’s drama series Dream Team weigh in with a significant number of trophies with eight (that includes three Second Division titles and, weirdly, the 1926-27 Third Division North title).
But success comes in different forms. It is clear, for example, that Rugged Island are always victorious over Father Ted’s Craggy Island in the All-Priests Five-a-Side Over-75s Indoor Challenge Football Match. Then there are the overachievers – who would’ve thought plucky, inexperienced Ukrainian side The Cossacks would win the World Cup despite away games in medieval England and renaissance France, or that Captain Tsubasa would take Japan to the 2002 World Youth Cup final?
And no list of successful fictional sides would be complete without mention of the, er, 1998 World Cup-winning Iceland side, as recounted in Robin Chambers’s 1976 book The Ice Warrior and Other Stories.
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“In Liverpool’s 6-0 win over Qarabag, Virgil van Dijk achieved a ‘perfect’ hat trick of assists (one with his right foot, one with his left foot, one with his head),” writes Joe Adamson. “How common is it for a player to manage this in one game? Is it a statistic that is even recorded?”
“All these European nights have got me thinking – what’s the smallest league out there?” wonders Stephen Hogg. “Let’s say it has to feature at least three teams and the possibility of relegation.”
“What’s the highest number of different players to score a league goal in a club’s season (excluding own goals)?” wonders Richard Askham. “Huddersfield Town reached a club -ecord 20 on Saturday and with three of their four strikers injured, suspended or loaned out, should add more in the last 16 games.”
“For clubs and country, Igor Jesus has scored in eight different competitions this season,” notes Andrew Boulton. “Can anyone top that?”
“In the Champions League match between PSV Eindhoven and Bayern Munich, the German team made four substitutions at the same time in the second half (62nd minute),” writes Stephan Wijnen. “The four players entering the pitch had a combined estimated value of €265m (Harry Kane, Michael Olise, Serge Gnabry and Alphonso Davies). Is this the most expensive combined substitution ever?”
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