Ben Brereton Diaz and the longest streaks without a win in a Premier League match

It's just the beginning, but you're afraid Southampton may set some unwanted records this season.

After seven matches, they are winless, having only a point and scoring only four goals.

At least the club has a glimmer of success ahead of them after winning promotion last season, although one member of his team doesn't even have that and instead has his sights set on one of the more undesirable individual records around.

Enter 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 a win. This is the record for the most games played by someone who has never won a match in the Premier League, ahead of Marvin Sordell (17) and Emanuel Villa (16).

Unlike this duo, he still has a chance to celebrate his first victory. However, the Chile international is also in danger of setting the record for the most games played by a single player before contributing to a Premier League victory (see table below).

We hope this is not intended to denigrate or mock Brereton Diaz. He was just unlucky to play for some weaker teams. You could argue that he was part of the fighting teams, so he bears at least some responsibility for their failure to win. However, scoring six goals in 14 games for Sheffield United, he finished the season as their joint top scorer, despite only joining the team in January, although he often looked like Southampton's most dangerous striker that season.

His teams haven't won a single game, but that's not necessarily his fault.

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

In any case, the list of players who took a long time to get their first win is not full of complete duds.

Take Gareth Bale, for example, who appeared in 24 games for Tottenham before winning his first Premier League victory. His case was slightly different in that it was not due to joining a struggling team, but rather a strange quirk during his first two seasons at Tottenham; a combination of chance, poor form and injuries that kept him out of games won by Spurs at the time.

Bale joined Spurs from Southampton in 2007 and although he had to wait a long time to achieve his first Premier League success, he emerged victorious in his fourth first-team appearance, beating Anorthosis Famagusta 6-1 in the UEFA Cup.

He appeared sporadically in the following months, and his season ended in December with an ankle injury. He returned at the start of the following season when Spurs infamously picked up just two points from their first eight games, but missed out on their first win of the season as he was sent off in the previous match. From then on, he appeared in and out of the team, with various injuries or out of favor, but his presence always coincided with draws or defeats, and in his absence the team won many times.

However, his goalless run in the Premier League became a joke and one of the first football memes on social media after Opta noticed the unfortunate statistic. Ultimately, the match lasted 1,607 minutes over 24 matches, lasting 762 days and involving three Spurs managers.

He ultimately ended his streak on a technicality: he came on in the closing stages of Tottenham's victory over Liverpool. Burnley in September 2009, when they were leading 4-0 and eventually won 5-0. It was a deliberate move by then Spurs manager Harry Redknapp to shake up an unwanted statistical millstone. Redknapp told talkSPORT in 2019: “I put him on against Burnley… with six minutes left. I thought, “He can't ruin this!”

He didn't do it. Over the following years, he won dozens of matches basically on his own, so by the time he left Real Madrid in 2013, he was in significant debt.

“It was a bit annoying that people talked about these statistics for so long, but it didn't concern me at all,” Bale said Guardian in 2010 after the tables had turned. “It was one of those bizarre things that happened. I knew that as soon as I got a chance to play, we would win a few games and it would be over.

Bale had to wait 24 games to taste victory against Tottenham in the Premier League (Clive Rose/Getty Images)

The current unfortunate record holder is Scottish striker Oliver Burke, who played 25 games to taste victory in the Premier League for the first time.

Burke played his first Premier League game for West Brom in August 2017, after joining from RB Leipzig, injuries meant he only played in 15 games, none of which West Brom won. And in his defense they didn't win much without him either: it was a season in which they were relegated, went through four managers and suffered an ill-fated mid-season trip to Barcelona where a group of players stole a taxi from outside McDonald's.

As for Burke, he re-emerged in the Premier League a few years later, signing for Sheffield United at the end of the transfer window in the summer of 2020. Once again, he was not a regular starter and had to wait until January this season before contributing to the win that came against Newcastle.

The Blades were also relegated, so Burke only played in two Premier League seasons, both of which ended in relegation. Poor Oliver. He currently plays for Werder Bremen after several loan spells following injuries to Millwall and City of Birmingham.

Rob Earnshaw is another top ten name who can't be entirely blamed for going a long time without a win. It took 18 games before he won one for West Brom in 2004-05, but that season he scored 11 goals, was the Baggies' top scorer and was second only to Thierry Henry in minutes per goal in the league in the entire division in that season.

“The context of that season and that team, there were a lot of new players,” Earnshaw says Athlete. “This was a team that wasn't really expected to play in the Premier League. We tried to get along: I had five different attacking partners this season. You always try to establish those relationships, so maybe that's why it took so long (to achieve victory).”

Earnshaw in a rare moment of joy for West Brom in the autumn of 2004 (Nick Potts – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

This cutting and changing of the team's offensive line was also the reason why Earnshaw missed their rare wins. West Brom took the first three points in their eighth league game with a 2-1 win over Bolton in October, but Earnshaw was an unused substitute. This in itself creates an interesting dilemma: if you haven't won a match yet, how do you feel when your team wins without your contribution?

“It's a very strange thing, a very strange dynamic,” he says. “No. 1, you are always very happy when you win. I was always the first to celebrate and congratulate my teammates. But there's always a strange feeling of disappointment. The most important thing is that that little kid inside you just wants to play football and win games.

Jan Aage Fjortoft was another unfortunate name on the list, having played 20 games to claim their first win against Swindon in the 1993–94 season. Swindon won only two games in the first half of the season, with Fjortoft missing both. However, unlike Earnshaw, he was not a victim of squad turnover or injury: he missed these games because he was not scoring goals.

After moving to Swindon for a club record fee from Rapid Wien following promotion to the Premier League, Fjortoft failed to find the back of the net at all before the turn of the year.

“You start to think, 'Maybe the way I play doesn't fit here, maybe I need to change,'” he says. Athlete. “This is the worst stage because then you won't get anywhere. You're preparing for that moment, hopefully when you score your first goal. But then you realize that you just have to keep doing what you're doing because it's enough.

“It was a great testing time and what saved me was that I scored goals for Norway, but it made the situation even more difficult for me. After all, I wasn't playing as much in the team anymore, which is normal: Swindon paid a lot of money for me to score goals.

“What annoyed me more was that I hadn't cracked the code. I have played against these players before in the Norwegian national team. We won against England. Why couldn't I crack this thing called the Premier League?”

Fjortoft celebrates scoring a goal for Swindon against Manchester United (Andy Heading/EMPICS via Getty Images)

The situation reached its worst when Fjortoft – still winless and goalless – played a substitute match against Wycombe Wanderers on Christmas Eve in which he was “of 22 players… the worst on the pitch”. As the 1994 World Cup approached and his place in the Norwegian national team was in jeopardy, he arranged a loan to his former club Lillestrom.

But then Keith Scott, who played up front for Swindon instead of Fjortoft, had a draw in the FA Cup match against Ipswich. Fjortoft played, scored a goal and a few days later retained his place in the league match against Tottenham. In this match, he finally secured his first league goal and first win in the English top flight after 20 unsuccessful attempts, beating Spurs 2-1.

“It was fantastic,” he says. “I was very relieved, but we beat Tottenham and we were allowed to dream. Could we do this? Can we get enough points to stay at the top?”

Fjortoft had a sensational second half of the season: failing to score a single goal in the first 20 games, he scored 11 in the next 16, although this was not enough to save Swindon from relegation, in short the team conceding a whopping 100 goals.

Ultimately, it would be extremely unfair to treat Brereton Diaz or any of the players mentioned here as characters of fun. Among other things, because even when they get to the Premier League, they are already in the top one of the best percentages.

“When you get the chance to play in the Premier League, the real achievement is playing,” adds Earnshaw. “This is a dream. You're playing with the best.”

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