What's the best date for a footballer to be born on – and is it February 5?

New York Times

10-02-2025

Last Wednesday was an important moment for the admittedly small group of people who send birthday cards to each of Cristiano Ronaldo, Carlos Tevez, Neymar and Jordan Rhodes.
Those four men, with 230 international goals between them, turned 40, 41, 33 and 35 respectively on February 5, cementing the 36th day of the year's stellar reputation for producing elite footballers, led of course by Ronaldo, now operating as a professional into his fifth decade.
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It's not just them, either. From the Premier League alone you can add Giovanni van Bronckhorst, Micky Hazard, Billy Sharp, Socceroos sensation John Aloisi, star-of-1999 Jesper Blomqvist, 2013 international-affiliation-tug-of-war-champion Adnan Januzaj, Vedran Corluka, former SC Telstar loanee Ryan Seager and 1990s England international-turned-EFL-expert Andy Hinchcliffe. Some people enjoy constructing five-a-side teams from players born on their own birthday; with the February 5 cohort, you can build a squad that could challenge for trophies on four fronts. Probably.
But is February 5 really the GOAT date? Let's look at the history of the Premier League and Champions League to find out.
If we delve into goals per game and assists per game across Premier League history then February 5 does indeed come out as an above-average day to be born. And yes, that is helped by Cristiano Ronaldo (103 goals and 37 assists in 236 appearances), but almost as much by Carlos Tevez (84 goals and 36 assists in 202 games). Really, though, as we will discover, it's not just the headline acts that give a birthdate strength, but strong performances from lesser or long-forgotten names too.
So helping out in the Feb 5 trenches we have 2000s loan star Manuel Fernandes supplying two goals and three assists in 31 games at Portsmouth and Everton, and who can forget that Chiquinho — still technically a Wolves player — has three assists in only nine Premier League games. Oh, you had.
February's other landmark date, one so cool it's only used quadrennially, is the 29th, and despite Darren Ambrose and Ferran Torres chipping in with 20 goals and eight assists between them, it doesn't stand out particularly. Maybe Jesper Lindstrom and Abdukodir Khusanov can do their bit to help it leapfrog some of the other more workmanlike dates soon.
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May 24 stands out as the most assist-y day to be born for Premier League players — but not because of anyone you might necessarily think of when pondering the competition's finest creators. Instead, it's led by Eric Cantona (56 assists), Vladimir Smicer (24), Yannick Bolasie (17) and Adel Taraabt (eight). Good, solid May 24 representatives one and all.
It's a similar story with goals, where July 1 comes out on top. Anyone who enjoyed football in the 2000s will at some point have told someone else that Ruud van Nistelrooy and Patrick Kluivert share a birthday, and guess what — this is it. Their combined total of 101 goals in 175 games (with, yes, the current Leicester City manager doing most of the heavy lifting), plus 16 goals from Alejandro Garnacho is what makes July 1 the official 'date of goals — primarily if you are Dutch and/or played for Manchester United'. It's not catchy, but it's undoubtedly true.
At the other end of the scale is poor July 18, a date with such low goals and assists per game numbers that you fear it is riddled with goalkeepers. Lo and behold we find both Sasa Ilic and 1990s nepo baby Jonathan Gould here. Claudio Yacob — very much not a goalkeeper — didn't help much either, chipping in with just one goal and one assist during six seasons with West Bromwich Albion in the 2010s.
Receiving a birthday card: good. Receiving a red card: bad. And scoring an own goal really isn't much better. All of which makes September 21 perhaps the unluckiest date for a Premier League player to be born.
If you're hoping to find calamity big guns here then you won't be disappointed. Richard Dunne, the undisputed grand master of the own goal, was born on September 21, 1979, and ended his top-flight career with 10 of them (although he did score 11 at the right end, giving him a narrowly impressive goal difference of +1). He is aided here by 1989's Ben Mee, who has five own goals (firmly countered by a solid 14 in the correct net). Dunne also racked up eight red cards in the Premier League, with another son-of-a-famous-player, Andy Todd, adding four red cards to the September 21 roll call of shame.
July 9 deserves a mention purely in terms of red cards, with 18, yet none of the Premier League's iconic dismissal merchants were born on that day. Instead, it's a group effort with Ashley Young leading the way on five. All of which brings us to...
February 5 may have the glamour and July 1 screams goals, but humble old March 6 is the most common birthdate for a Premier League player.
There are no superstars here, just 30 solid pros, from Tim Howard down to Garry Monk, via Daniel de Ridder and Philipp Wollscheid. If your child is born on March 6 then they almost certainly won't win the Ballon d'Or — but they may play 45 times for Stoke City, and it is important to have dreams.
January 1 also comes out well here, one of the glamour dates of any calendar has provided 24 players, including Mickey Evans, who remains the Premier League's top-scoring player whose goals all came in a single month (April). October 6 also provides 24 names, including the only Elvis to feature in the Premier League (Elvis Hammond) as well as Juventus' new superstar Lloyd Kelly.
As we continue to muse about the importance of February 5 in football terms we cannot ignore the Champions League, particularly given Ronaldo is the competition's highest scorer. The Messi/Ronaldo era's impact on goalscoring is clear in the chart below, which confirms that, yes, February 5 is the top-scoring birthday in the modern European Cup and a significant proportion of that is down to a certain Portuguese player.
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Then again, even Ronaldo's impact on a date pales into insignificance when you discover how much Robert Lewandowski dominates the August 21 goals: 103 of the 114 goals scored by players born on that date have come from the Pole, with the next highest scorers being Kalifa Coulibaly, Ramiz Mamedov and Scott McDonald, with two each.
And Ronaldo's influence is even felt when you isolate each date for total appearances, with February 5 second only to January 8. Compared to the former, the latter date has a much wider spread, with Koke the only player on more than 100 appearances. It also includes the Brazilian player known as 'Pitbull', formerly of Porto, who presumably ages in human rather than dog years.
So where does all this information leave us? Clearly, in news that will disappoint some but surprise few, there is no definitive way of ranking birthdates. Everyone will always favour their own (Darren Anderton, Antonio Rudiger and Emmanuel Riviere, I love you all), and I'm sure there are Manchester City fans who enjoy the fact that Kyle Walker, John Stones and Phil Foden were all born on May 28, but what if there was some other way of at least demonstrating February 5's pre-eminence?
Thankfully, there is.
Not only is it a date laden with star names and Ludovic Sylvestre, but it can also claim the highest-scoring single day in a 20-team Premier League season. February 5, 2011, saw a bumper 41 goals in only eight games, including the only time a Premier League side (Arsenal) has ever thrown away a four-goal lead (doing so at Newcastle). Clearly, this is a date that exists bang on the ley line of footballing destiny.
In a few years, we will come to know a football player who was born on 05/02/2011 — what seems certain is they will become the greatest player the sport has ever known.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)