As Arsenal signed off for the October international break top of the Premier League, Bukayo Saka passed a wonderfully neat milestone.
The England international’s penalty against West Ham United last Saturday was his 100th goal contribution in the league, on what was his 200th appearance in the competition.
Aged 24 years and 29 days, he became the seventh-youngest player to reach a century of Premier League goals and assists combined. The winger is also the second Arsenal player to reach three figures in their 200th game after Thierry Henry, who had messaged him earlier in the day.
Here, The Athletic breaks down how Saka reached one hundred, from the numbers themselves to the trademark finishes and creative patterns that he’s developed over time.
The tidiness of reaching 100 goal contributions in 200 appearances almost carried over to the split between Saka’s goals and assists. He has scored 55 goals and made 45 for team-mates, showing that he is (almost) just as much a creator as he is a finisher.
Even with his three-month hamstring injury absence from last December, Saka has got to double figures for combined goals and assists in four successive completed Premier League seasons, starting in 2021-22.
10 – Bukayo Saka has now scored and assisted 10+ goals across all competitions in each of the last three seasons; the first Arsenal player to do so since Alexis Sánchez between 2014-15 and 2016-17. Back. pic.twitter.com/JVpYN4wrcS
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) April 1, 2025
For those wondering how big a role Saka’s penalties and corners play in these numbers, the answer is between a fifth and a quarter, respectively: 12 of the 55 goals, 10 of the 45 assists.
That means 22 of his 100 have come from some kind of set-piece situation. Since he started taking corners in 2021-22, the most he has assisted from them in a single season is three (in both 2021-22 and 2024-25).
As for penalties, Saka has scored 12 out of his 13 attempts since he first stepped up in the Premier League against Chelsea in April 2022 — nine months after his shootout miss as England lost to Italy in the European Championship final. Remarkably consistent from the spot, the highest number he has taken in one season is six in 2023-24, when he showed good variation in terms of ball placement (see below). It’s just unfortunate for him and Arsenal that his only penalty miss in the league came in a vital match — shooting wide in the 2-2 draw at West Ham in April 2023 that contributed to Manchester City overhauling them in the final weeks of the title race.
In some ways, West Ham being the opponents when Saka got to 100 Premier League goal contributions was fitting.
He has been involved in more goals against them than any other club (nine — five goals, four assists). Southampton are his second-favourite opponents (eight — three and five), with north London derby rivals Spurs third (six — three and three).
Saka has a happy habit of contributing in games against Tottenham (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
His record against fellow ‘Big Six’ teams as a whole is not too shabby either. After those six goal contributions against Spurs, he has five in games with both Chelsea and Manchester United, four when he faces Liverpool and three against Manchester City.
The timing of Saka’s goals has been just as important as who they come against and how they are scored. He is one of the most decisive players in the current Arsenal squad, with 29 of his 55 changing the state of the match concerned (in other words, they were either equalisers or gave his team the lead).
Over the years, the type of open-play goals Saka has scored has been varied.
He is capable of firing balls home from outside the penalty area, but in 2022-23 he made a habit of getting into more central positions to apply the right finish at the right moment, before a cluster of goals came from just off-centre the following season.
The winger has developed some trademark shots, and his right-footed ones into the roof of the net from an angle outside the near post have become a semi-regular sight in Premier League matches.
He first started finishing like this during that 2022-23 season. In the October, the F2 Freestylers’ Ultimate Soccer Skills channel on YouTube uploaded a one-to-one goalscoring coaching session video with Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta as their guest.
When discussing such roof-of-the-net finishes, Arteta said: “If you don’t have the angle to beat the ’keeper, (you have) two options. You put the ball high or put the ball across goal. If you put the ball here (high), look at his hands (they are low). He needs to react. If you put it across and he parries it, you have a rebound.”
The very day the video was uploaded, Saka applied that theory in a match against Leeds United, and he has done so three more times in the league — most recently against Leeds again this season.
Beneficial patterns have also emerged for Saka in north London derbies.
For three seasons in a row, Arsenal made sure to hit Spurs quickly on the break, with Saka as their outlet. He would stay high and wide, away from all the chaos, ready to take the ball into the final third to either score himself or set up a team-mate. Doing this led to six goals in this period.
More trends surface when looking at his assists year-on-year. Saka was used in multiple positions in his breakthrough 2019-20 season, so two of his assists came from the now-familiar position of right-winger, another two when he was deployed as a left-back and one while playing in central midfield.
The following season, Saka’s connection with Emile Smith Rowe was pivotal to reigniting Arteta’s project.
The two young academy graduates combined naturally, allowing for more flowing one-touch passing moves that cut teams apart. Not only did the duo look good playing together, they reached groundbreaking levels by each other’s side.
Saka and Smith Rowe assisted each other six times in total while aged 21 and under, with the only double-act to do so more often in Premier League history by that stage of their careers being Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney of Manchester United (eight). They were also only the third pair of players aged 21 or under to score 10 or more goals for the same club in a single season, after Ronaldo and Rooney for United in 2006-07 and Harry Kewell and Michael Bridges for Leeds in 1999-2000.
Smith Rowe and Saka had an almost-telepathic relationship for a period (Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
From a personnel perspective, Saka has assisted Gabriel Martinelli more than any player (seven times). Gabriel is next (six), followed by Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz (five). He has assisted Smith Rowe, Alexandre Lacazette and Martin Odegaard three times each.
The winger’s assists became more recognisable in their style during the 2021-22 season.
That was when Arsenal’s attack really started flourishing under Arteta, and Saka created seven goals as part of that process. Three of his four open-play assists that season were right-footed cutbacks into the centre of the penalty area, as seen below.
This was Saka showing the Premier League that he posed more of a threat than simply cutting inside onto his left foot, and it immediately became a problem for defences to solve. Teams started to double-up on and even triple-mark him on Arsenal’s right wing, making it essential that he and his nearest team-mates adapt.
The following campaign, 2022-23, brought a slight change in Arsenal’s setup, with Ben White becoming their starting right-back instead of Takehiro Tomiyasu. A more attacking full-back than his Japanese colleague, White provided Saka with more support to help drag defenders away and create more space in the final third.
Saka’s 11 assists that season are still his personal best in the Premier League (though that was in 38 games and he got 10 from 25 appearances in 2024-25). Just two were from corners, three were simple lay-offs and five came from low crosses into the box for the opposite winger, either Martinelli or Trossard, as shown here:
Five of Saka’s open-play assists that season were with his left foot and four with his right, once again proving how dangerous he is both cutting inside and going around the outside if the other avenue is blocked off.
With opposition defences now fully aware of Saka’s threat, he has continued to add new aspects to his wing play during the past two completed campaigns.
Arsenal started 2023-24 slowly. Compared to the previous season, when they often scored in the opening 15 minutes of matches, they were now scoring late turn games on their heads. Saka was key to this, playing deeper crosses to the back post, deliveries which helped turn a potential loss away to Chelsea into a draw in the October and a potential point at Brentford the following month into three.
Arsenal’s first goal of last season was almost identical, with Wolves’ defenders too slow to stop Saka finding room to pick out Havertz. He supplied a similar delivery weeks later for Martinelli to put Arsenal 2-1 up against Southampton in a match where they had been trailing.
The England international’s stellar run at the start of that season is what made his pre-Christmas hamstring injury so painful for Arsenal.
They had not truly clicked by that stage, but Saka was making decisive actions week after week.
He became the fourth-fastest player to reach 10 Premier League assists in a season when he set up Trossard against West Ham in Arsenal’s 13th fixture. Five of those came in the campaign’s opening five games, matching a record set by predecessor Henry a decade earlier.
Saka was in sensational form at the start of the 2024-25 season before suffering a hamstring injury (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
Had he not sat out three months getting over that hamstring problem, Saka would surely have had a genuine chance of matching or beating the record shared by Henry and Kevin De Bruyne of 20 assists in a single Premier League season.
The current campaign has been more goal-heavy for Saka, with three from his seven all-competitions appearances (two in five in the league) and no assists yet.
Having celebrated turning 24 just over a month ago, it is hard to imagine where Saka’s ceiling is in relation to the numbers.
In the Premier League alone, he already ranks eighth for Arsenal goal contributions. Theo Walcott is fifth with 107, so he could realistically move up three spots this season. After that, he will be hunting Ian Wright (123), Robin van Persie (135), Dennis Bergkamp (181) and Henry (249), which will surely only motivate him even more.
“He (Henry) is always pushing me,” Saka told Sky Sports after replicating the Frenchman’s exploits with his latest milestone at the weekend. “I think he wants me there with him, so it’s nice to have that encouragement from him. I want it as well, so I’m really happy to have my name alongside these records.
“But I’m (also) going to keep pushing to get some team trophies, which is what we’ve been searching for.”
