Against Brentford on Saturday, Erling Haaland will attempt something no one has done since 1946.
The Manchester City striker has scored hat-tricks in his last two Premier League games and will join a very impressive list of players if he can hit another hat-trick against Thomas Frank’s side at the Etihad Stadium this weekend.
There have only been four instances of a player scoring three goals in three consecutive top-flight games in England, three of which occurred before 1930.
here, work out It tells the story of those four incidents and the men the 24-year-old Norwegian international looks up to.
Opponents: Liverpool, Leicester City, West Ham United
Tottenham centre-forward Osborne made 26 appearances in all competitions in the 1924-25 season… but failed to score a goal.
That summer, the offside law was changed. The number of opposition players who had to be in front of an attacker to make him onside was reduced from three to two. Unsurprisingly, this led to more goalscoring games, creating more opportunities for Osborne and his fellow attackers (the goals-per-game rate in the English top league in 1925-26 was 3.69, up from 2.58 the previous season).
The England international (capped three times, then without a goal) scored twice in the first game of the 1925–26 season, away to Sheffield United. He added three more before Liverpool visited White Hart Lane on 24 October, the 29-year-old scoring a hat-trick as Tottenham won 3–1.
A week later, in the next game, Osborne, born near Cape Town in what is now South Africa, scored another three goals away to Leicester. Tottenham lost the game 5-3, making this the only instance on this list where a player’s hat-trick came in a defeat.
The following Saturday, 7 November, Osborne became the first player in England’s top flight to score hat-tricks in three successive games as Tottenham won 4–2 at home to West Ham.
Frank Osborne (second from left) at a golf tournament in 1924 (Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
Osborne is the only one of those four not to have scored four goals in one of those games, and is also the only player not to have scored a hat-trick against Arsenal as part of the treble.
He failed to score in Tottenham’s next league match against Newcastle United, and only scored one top-flight hat-trick in his career: against Newcastle in January 1928 (4 goals).
However, Osborne’s fine form in the 1925–26 season, when he scored 25 goals in 39 league games, earned him a return to international football and a hat-trick against Belgium in May – the first time an England player had scored three goals in a game since World War I.
Tom Jennings of Leeds United in 1926
Opponents: Arsenal, Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers
Scotland’s Jennings scored hat-tricks in three successive games in the early autumn of 1926–27 to lift Leeds from 16th to seventh.
The striker joined the Yorkshire club from Scottish side Raith Rovers in 1925, and played in every league game and scored 26 goals in his first season (1925–26).
Aged 24, he started the 1926–27 season with three goals in seven League games, including a third against visitors Arsenal on 25 September, as Leeds won 4–1. Led by manager Arthur Fairclough, they travelled to Anfield on 2 October, where Jennings scored four goals against Liverpool goalkeeper Arthur Riley, two in the first and second half as his team won 4–2.
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A week later, Jennings added another four goals as Leeds beat Blackburn Rovers 4-1 at Elland Road.
In Leeds’ next league game away to Leicester, Jennings scored twice but failed to make it four in a row as they lost 3-2 – which remains the closest anyone has come to scoring four consecutive hat-tricks in the English top flight.
Jennings finished the season with 37 goals in all competitions (35 in the league), a record only surpassed twice in Leeds history, both times by John Charles (43 in 1953-54 and 39 in 1956-57), but in the first of those seasons Leeds were in the Second Division.
But the club’s good run was short-lived after Jennings’ three hat-tricks, with Fairclough’s side relegated after just six wins from their final 32 league games.
Dixie Dean of Everton in 1928
Opponents: Burnley, Arsenal, Bolton Wanderers
Arguably the greatest goalscorer in English football history, Dean scored 60 goals for Everton in the 1927-28 First Division. No player before or since has scored 50 goals in the English top flight.
Dixie Dean leads Everton – and sets a target for Haaland (Barker/Getty Images)
Dean, who had just turned 21 in January that season, scored 29 goals in 39 league games for Everton. He scored seven hat-tricks and his goals helped the club win the title for the first time in 13 years.
He scored seven goals in his last two games of the season to reach 60. He scored four in a 5-3 win over Burnley on 28 April and three in a 3-3 draw at home to Arsenal a week later, meaning he ended the season with back-to-back hat-tricks.
Then, in the opening game of the 1928–29 season, Everton won 3–2 away at Bolton Wanderers, with Dean scoring all three goals to complete a hat-trick. The England international then failed to score in Everton’s next game against The Wednesday (now Sheffield Wednesday, who later went on to win the title).
This is the only instance of a player scoring hat-tricks in three consecutive seasons, and it happened in two seasons.
Overall, Dean has scored a record 30 hat-tricks in the English top flight. Holland has eight, so he needs 23 more to surpass that record. Dean averages a hat-trick every 12.1 games in the English top flight (30 in 362 games), while the Norwegian averages one every 8.6 games (8 in 69 games).
Jack Balmer of Liverpool in 1946
Opponents: Portsmouth, Derby County, Arsenal
The 1946–47 season was the first to be completed in the English league since the outbreak of World War II, with the top division comprising 22 clubs who had competed in the 1939–40 season before it was abandoned after each team had played three games.
Liverpool won the title for the first time in 24 years, thanks to strikers Balmer and Albert Stubbins, who scored 24 league goals between them. Ten of Balmer’s 24 goals (42%) came in a three-game stretch in November.
At 30, Balmer is the oldest player on the list. He scored all three goals at Anfield in a 3-0 win over Portsmouth on 9 November, before scoring four goals in 17 minutes in a 4-1 away win over Derby a week later. Then, in a 4-2 home win over Arsenal on 23 November, Balmer scored three consecutive hat-tricks, a feat that had not been achieved for nearly 78 years.
He scored once away at Blackpool and four more before Christmas, but his form dropped off after that and between 25 December and the end of the season he had scored just four goals in 19 league games (having previously scored 20 goals in 20 games).
These are the only three hat-tricks Balmer scored in over 300 appearances for Liverpool between 1935 and 1952.
Haaland scores a hat-trick against Ipswich (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Holland has been in this situation before.
At the start of the 2022-23 Premier League season, in his first season for Manchester City, he scored back-to-back hat-tricks at home against Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest, but only scored once in the following game away to Aston Villa.
However, given City’s impressive form (Halland had scored 17 goals in 13 league games at the Etihad by then) when they face Brentford at home on Saturday at 3pm, there is a real chance he could join the likes of Osborne, Jennings, Dean and Balmer in the line-up.
It would be an incredible feat, and one we won’t see again for a long time.
Now it’s your turn, Elling.
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(Above: Haaland scores a hat-trick against West Ham; Catherine Ivill/AMA via Getty Images)
