With the 2025-26 Premier League season entering its final stretch, England’s World Cup hopefuls are making their cases to Thomas Tuchel with goals as their argument.
Fans following betting UK markets will know how tightly this group is bunched at the top. Here is how the leading English scorers in England’s top flight stack up right now.
Danny Welbeck: 12 goals
At 35, Danny Welbeck is the leading English scorer in the Premier League this season, and the story of his campaign at Brighton is one of the more unlikely at the top end of this list.
In October 2025, his free-kick against Manchester United confirmed his status as Brighton’s all-time top scorer in the top division, overtaking the 37-goal tally set by Michael Robinson in the early 1980s.
He has kept adding to that record ever since, and 12 goals in a season that many expected to be his last at the highest level is a remarkable achievement for a striker who has spent the better part of a decade being written off.
Dominic Calvert-Lewin: 10 goals
Calvert-Lewin, 28, has been the story of Leeds United’s first season back in the Premier League.
He scored seven goals in six consecutive matches between October and December 2025, including a brace against Crystal Palace and goals against Manchester City, Chelsea, and Liverpool.
His purple patch earned him the Premier League Player of the Month award for December, the first Leeds player to win it since Rio Ferdinand in October 2001. His 10th goal came in a 3-1 win over Nottingham Forest in February.
Cole Palmer, Morgan Gibbs-White And Ollie Watkins: Nine Goals Each
Three of England’s most prominent attacking options are level on nine goals, all of them pushing hard for World Cup places this summer.
Palmer has had a stop-start season by his own standards, but he scored his fourth Premier League hat-trick against Wolverhampton Wanderers in February 2026, with all three goals coming in the first half, becoming the first player to record three separate first-half hat-tricks in league history.
His second goal in that game was his 50th for Chelsea in all competitions. Nine goals and an assist from a player who has missed chunks of the campaign is still a serious return.
Gibbs-White has carried Nottingham Forest’s attacking play almost single-handedly at times, scoring nine and contributing seven assists.
It is a contribution that makes him one of the more complete midfielders in this list, and his tally would look even more impressive were it not for the number of chances he has also created for others.
Watkins, despite a slower start than last season, has worked his way back into the conversation with nine goals for Aston Villa.
His persistence through a difficult opening spell is exactly the kind of resilience that tends to carry forwards into tournament football.
Despite their returns in front of goal, Gibbs-White and Watkins were both absent from Tuchel’s squad for the March friendlies against Uruguay and Japan, while Palmer failed to make a significant impression during that window.
With the league reaching its final stretch, all three will need to make their case count before the final squad is named.
Jarrod Bowen And Morgan Rogers: Eight Goals Each
Bowen has been West Ham’s most reliable attacker all season, combining eight goals with six assists.
While the Hammers have been fighting in the bottom half and battling to stay in the division, Bowen has refused to let his standards drop, and without his contribution West Ham’s position would look considerably bleaker.
For a player who has been linked with moves away from the London Stadium for two seasons running, he has shown exactly the kind of loyalty and quality that keeps a club afloat.
Rogers has been the most complete performer of the group, contributing eight goals and five assists for Aston Villa while cementing himself as Tuchel’s preferred option at number ten.
What makes Rogers stand out from the others in this list is how involved he is in everything Villa do going forward.
He drops deep to collect the ball, drives at defenders, pulls out wide, and still gets into the box.
Running an accas calculator across this group for the Golden Boot race would throw up some genuinely interesting numbers given how tightly they are separated heading into the run-in.
With six games of the season still to play, any of these six could end the campaign as England’s top scorer in the division.
Welbeck currently leads the way, but the gaps are small enough that the picture could look very different come May.
