Alan Shearer on Premier League scoring record, his media role and a near-move to Cardiff
Alan Shearer discussed his standing as the Premier League's all-time top scorer, his broadcasting work and a brief return-to-management episode in The Football Interview with Kelly Somers, published on 31 October 2026. He said he would enjoy holding the record while he can and joked that Erling Haaland moving abroad would help preserve his tally.
Twenty years after retiring from football, Shearer reiterated he scored 260 Premier League goals across 14 years in the competition and noted Erling Haaland has netted 120 Premier League goals in four-and-a-bit seasons. He pointed out that Harry Kane had reached 213 goals before his 2023 move to Bayern Munich and added, "I'm sure it will be broken one day, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts." He also said, "If we can get Haaland out to Real Madrid or somewhere like that in the next couple of years then it should be alright."
Shearer recalled leaving home at 15 to join Southampton and living in digs, saying, "I wouldn't change anything - one of the best things I did was move away from home at 15." He described how, years later when his children reached 15, he thought, "how on earth did my parents let me leave home at that age?" and added, "There's no way I could have let my my two girls and my son walk away from their home at 15 years of age." He remembered boarding a train at Newcastle Central station and seeing his parents' tears, quoting himself: "I remember getting on the train at Newcastle Central station, looking at my mum and dad and the tears rolling down my mum's face when I was pulling out of the station and waving thinking, 'is this the last time I'm ever going to live back home?'"
Shearer described his move back towards home in 1992 to work with Sir Kenny Dalglish at Blackburn Rovers, where he won the Premier League title, before signing for Newcastle in 1996. He identified his 1996-97 season as his best at Newcastle when he scored 25 Premier League goals and noted he finished on the losing side in two FA Cup finals during a period when the club did not win further silverware.
On his connection with Newcastle, Shearer said he had grown up watching Kevin Keegan and recalled the atmosphere around him: "I saw the adulation that he [Keegan] had. He was like the pied piper in Newcastle, everyone followed him everywhere," and, "I was one of those little kids that went to the training ground, to the ground - and I wanted a piece of that." He spent 10 years at Newcastle and scored 206 goals in 405 appearances across all competitions.
Describing how he sometimes attends matches as a fan, Shearer said he can disguise himself to get from a friends' pub to the ground: "My friend owns a pub in Newcastle called Harry's and I get dropped off outside the pub and then I walk up from the ground," and, "I've got a cap on and I very rarely look up because it would take me forever to get from the pub to the ground. But I often do it. They've [friends] done that all their life and I'm able to do that now and I love it."
Shearer outlined his post-playing career, saying he is now a regular pundit on Match of the Day, co-commentates on England games and appears with Gary Lineker and Micah Richards on The Rest Is Football podcast. He recounted a brief managerial stint as interim Newcastle manager in 2009 for the remaining eight games of the season that ended with relegation and said, "Newcastle were were in desperate trouble and I could never say no - we were bottom of the league, fighting for our lives." He added, "I should have known that when I signed the contract on April Fool's Day that it wasn't going to work out!" and described having interviews and an offer from Cardiff before things changed: "I always felt that I was going to go into it again and I wanted to. I had a couple of interviews and got offered the job at Cardiff. And then things changed ... and I thought, 'what am I doing here?'"
Shearer said his punditry schedule requires long travel, explaining that for him travelling from Newcastle to Salford for Match of the Day is "probably 19-20 hour day," and added, "What people don't realise is that you're meant to be at your brightest and your liveliest when you go on live at 10:30, whereas if you're watching football all day on the settee, you're ready to nod off at that time." Watching so much Premier League football, he noted, means he is able to monitor his own goal-scoring record.
