Who Fired the Most Shots in the Premier League 2025/26?
1st June 2026
The 2025/26 Premier League season is done and dusted, and while the trophy debates and relegation post-mortems rage on, we’ve been digging into the numbers that actually tell you how teams played – not just where they finished.
Today’s question: who was taking the most shots? And more importantly, did all that shooting actually lead to goals?
Spoiler – not always.
The Shot Volume Table
If you watched Manchester United this season and felt like they were constantly shooting, you weren’t imagining it. United topped the Premier League for total shots with 596 across their 38 games – that’s 15.7 per match. Nobody else hit that number.
Right behind them? Manchester City with 594 (15.6/game) and Liverpool with 589 (15.5/game). The top three were remarkably close – just seven shots separating first from third over an entire season.
Here’s the full top 10:
- Man Utd – 596 shots (15.7/game)
- Man City – 594 (15.6/game)
- Liverpool – 589 (15.5/game)
- Arsenal – 553 (14.6/game)
- Bournemouth – 524 (13.8/game)
- Chelsea – 509 (13.4/game)
- Brighton – 495 (13.0/game)
- Newcastle – 492 (12.9/game)
- Fulham – 484 (12.7/game)
- Aston Villa – 483 (12.7/game)
The gap between 4th and 5th is worth noting. Arsenal at 553 still had a comfortable cushion over the rest, but the top three were in a different league when it came to pure volume.
Shots on Target – Where It Gets Interesting
Taking shots is one thing. Hitting the target is another. And this is where the story really starts to shift.
Man United led here too – 216 shots on target at 5.7 per game. City followed with 205 (5.4/game), then Arsenal with 187 (4.9/game). Bournemouth sneaked into fourth with 177, ahead of Newcastle and Brighton on 176 each.
But here’s the kicker – Liverpool, third in total shots, dropped all the way to seventh for shots on target with just 175. That’s a lot of leather flying wide or over the bar. Volume without accuracy, and it showed in the final numbers.
The Efficiency Gap
This is the bit that should matter most to punters, because raw shot numbers mean nothing if you can’t convert them.
Man City scored 77 goals from 594 shots – a conversion rate of 12.96%. Arsenal managed 71 from 553 at 12.84%. Both impressively clinical.
Man United? They scored 69 goals from their league-leading 596 shots. That’s a conversion rate of just 11.58%. They took the most shots in the division and still only finished third in the goals scored column. If you were backing United in over/goals markets based on their shot volume alone, you probably got burned more than once.
Liverpool’s numbers tell a similar story of inefficiency. Third in total shots, seventh in shots on target, fourth in goals with 63. For a team creating that much volume, you’d expect more output.
City, as usual, made it count. Fewer shots than United, more goals. That’s the Haaland effect in a nutshell – but it’s also about the quality of chances City were manufacturing.
Big Chances – Creating and Wasting
The big chances data backs this up perfectly. City created the most big chances in the Premier League with 120, just ahead of Arsenal on 117. Brentford were a surprise package in third with 113 – more on them in a second – and United came in fourth with 109.
But creating big chances is only half the battle. You’ve got to put them away.
Arsenal missed 79 big chances across the season – more than anyone else. City missed 74. United and Brentford both missed 68. Arsenal’s wastefulness is particularly striking given they only finished on 71 goals. Imagine if they’d converted even half of those missed big chances. The title race might have looked very different.
Brentford are the wildcard here. Creating 113 big chances but missing 68 of them suggests a team that was getting into brilliant positions and then fumbling the finish. Igor Thiago’s 84 shots across all 38 games hints at a striker who was always involved, always shooting – but the end product didn’t always match the effort.
The Player Shot Chart
Nobody came close to Erling Haaland. The City striker racked up 126 shots in 35 appearances – that’s 3.6 per game, and a full 36 shots clear of second place. In a league where most forwards are happy averaging two shots a game, Haaland was operating on a completely different level.
Behind him, Matheus Cunha hit 90 shots in 33 apps for United, Cody Gakpo managed 87 in 36 for Liverpool, and Bruno Fernandes added 85 in 35. United having two players in the top five tells you everything about their volume-first approach.
The most interesting cluster was at 83 shots, where four players – Morgan Gibbs-White, Ollie Watkins, Morgan Rogers, and Antoine Semenyo – all finished level. That kind of bunching shows how tight the mid-range is once you get past the elite shooters.
The Bournemouth Story
We can’t wrap this up without talking about Bournemouth. Fifth in total shots, fourth in shots on target, and joint fifth in goals scored with 58. For a side that finished sixth on 57 points, those shooting numbers are remarkable.
This wasn’t a team nicking results with defensive grit and set pieces. Bournemouth were genuinely one of the most attack-minded sides in the division, and the shot data proves it. If you were sleeping on them in attacking markets this season, the numbers were screaming at you all year.
What Does It All Mean for Punters?
The headline takeaway: shot volume alone doesn’t win you bets. United proved that emphatically – most shots, most shots on target, only third in goals. Conversion rate and chance quality matter just as much, and City’s ruthless efficiency with fewer opportunities was the difference at the top.
If you’re looking back at this season to calibrate your models for next year, the shots-to-goals ratio is the number to focus on. The teams that turned volume into output – City, Arsenal, Bournemouth – were the ones that consistently delivered in goals markets. The ones that just peppered away without converting? That’s where the value traps lived.
Season done. Data logged. Bring on 2026/27.