Is No 10 still the best, or No 41? The myths and maths of Premier League shirt numbers

How much is a shirt number worth? It costs £8 if you want two digits added to the back of Arsenal's 2026-27 home shirt, whereas Manchester City add on £16 for customisation, whether you want a name as well as a number or not.

That is cheap compared to what baseball players decide among themselves. Juan Soto bought Brett Baty a $92,000 (£69,000) car in exchange for getting his preferred number (22) when he joined the New York Mets last year.

But that's baseball, where they allow players to wear '0'. There's a lot of choice in football, even if nobody has worn zero.

According to Transfermarkt's data, every number from one to 99 has been used at some point by at least one of the current Premier League clubs. Not until we go above 45 do we find a number that has been omitted by any of them.

And it highlights how random these things can be once you reach the upper reaches of what is permitted, as Brentford and Manchester City have never had a No 46 but have issued a No 99 and No 98 respectively. The weirdest anomaly is Chelsea not having had a player wear higher than No 81 when it seemed like they were making that many signings every summer.

Or maybe the strangest state of affairs is at Everton, who are on to their second No 10 of the 2026-27 season when they haven't got a No 7 or a No 9. Fixed squad numbers are a relatively recent development within the history of football.

Numbered shirts were first introduced in 1911, with the starting players normally wearing No 1 to No 11 until the 1990s. Iconic footballers have always gravitated towards the key numbers; Kenny Dalglish wore No 7 for Liverpool, bestowing immense value upon that shirt.

But if he was unavailable, then someone else would wear it. These days, numbers may be more important to a given player than the club they represent.

They become part of their brand. Chart showing the shirt numbers with more than 1,000 Premier League goals since 1993 Opta have data on Premier League goals scored by different shirts since 1993, when the competition introduced squad numbers.