Jamie Vardy to make another milestone and smash records in 2022/23

Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy is the second highest active Premier League player in the division’s all-time top scorers list – a sentence that would’ve seemed barking mad as he made his top flight debut at the midpoint of his career aged 27. Second only to Harry Kane by this metric, the Foxes forward sits 14th in the overall list, netting on 133 occasions so far, ahead of some stellar names such as Ian Wright and Didier Drogba. Currently in a Dutch sandwich between Robin van Persie and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, breaking into the all-time top 10 suddenly seems a realistic target.

Being sidelined for 11 of a 13-game spell in the middle of the last campaign, the forward may have thought his chances of producing a strong goals haul for 2021/22 had disappeared, but netting five times in his final four appearances including the season-closing thrashing of Southampton, boosted his total to 15 for the season from just 20 starts. Match that tally again this time around, and the Leicester man will be just two goals away from equalling Michael Owen’s total of 150, with the former Liverpool man sitting on the edge of the top 10.

If we extrapolate Vardy’s 21/22 numbers across a hypothetical full season at 3420 minutes, he’d have been expected to notch somewhere between 28 and 29 goals. Obviously, the chances of reaching that tally are incredibly slim, given that his record goals haul for a season is 24. The main caveat is that, with turning 36 in January and as age naturally begins to catch up, the Foxes forward cannot be expected to play every minute.