Front twos have become rather a thing of the past in football, as managers tend to forgo a second striker in favour of an extra midfielder.
But for large periods throughout the history of the game, strike partnerships were all the rage – and some of them have been truly devastating.
Taking in club and international duos alike, these are the greatest attacking pairings of all time. Just click any of the arrows on the right to start the countdown!
We kick things off with a classic little and large partnership – and you’d struggle to find a duo who personify that contrast better than Jermain Defoe and Peter Crouch.
Standing at five-foot-six and six-foot-seven respectively, Defoe and Crouch – who were also England teammates – scored 37 goals between them for Tottenham during the 2009/10 season, helping Spurs to fourth place in the Premier League under Harry Redknapp.
The duo had previously teamed up at Portsmouth.
As one of the fathers of ‘Total Football’, Johan Cruyff was a supremely versatile footballer – and one of the areas where he excelled was up front.
During the 1968/69 season, the three-time Ballon d’Or winner lined up alongside Swede Inge Danielsson as Ajax made it to their first European Cup final. Both finished among the top scorers in the competition, Cruyff registering six times and Danielsson four.
At Italia ’90, their last tournament before reunification with the East, West Germany lifted the World Cup.
Lothar Matthaus actually finished as their top scorer with four goals, but front two Jurgen Klinsmann and Rudi Voller were on target three times apiece, the former opening the scoring in the last-16 win over the Netherlands and making FIFA’s All-star team.
Klaas-Jan Huntelaar enjoyed the best league goalscoring season of his career in 2007/08, finding the net 33 times in 34 Eredivisie games for Ajax – and he did it with some help from an emerging Luis Suarez.
Ajax didn’t win a trophy that campaign, but Huntelaar did, finishing as Eredivisie top scorer for the second time and registering 36 times in all competitions. Suarez, meanwhile, bagged 17 league goals and 22 overall.
In 2009/10, Jose Mourinho’s Inter won the treble, and they were spearheaded by a strike force of Diego Milito and Samuel Eto’o – who were both in their first season with the Italian giants.
Milito completed a 30-goal season by bagging a brace as the Nerazzurri beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, while Eto’o struck 16 times.
Roles were reversed the following campaign: hampered by injury, Milito got on the scoresheet only eight times; Eto’o notched a career best 37 goals.
Alan Shearer and Les Ferdinand led the line for Kevin Keegan’s great Newcastle side affectionately known as ‘the Entertainers’.
Joining his hometown club from Blackburn in the summer of 1996, Shearer won his third straight Premier League Golden Boot by racking up 25 goals in 1996/97 – with Ferdinand striking 16 times in what would be his second and final season with the Magpies, who finished as top-flight runners-up behind Manchester United.
In 1999/2000, Sunderland enjoyed their best season for almost half a century, finishing seventh in the Premier League – thanks in no small part to the free-scoring little and large duo of Kevin Phillips and Niall Quinn.
Thriving as he played off the towering Quinn, Phillips’ 30 league goals saw him scoop the Prem Golden Boot – plus the European Golden Shoe as the continent’s leading league scorer that term.
Quinn had a great campaign himself, though, finding the net 14 times for Peter Reid’s Black Cats.
The early 00s were heady days for Deportivo La Coruna, the provincial club who stunned Spain by winning the 1999/2000 LaLiga title.
Dutchman Roy Makaay’s 22 goals were key to that success, and he later struck up a prolific partnership with Spaniard Diego Tristan.
Both players claimed the Pichichi Trophy as LaLiga top scorer, Tristan in 2001/02 – when Depor lifted the Copa del Rey – and Makaay the following season (when he also scooped the European Golden Shoe).
Undoubtedly two of Italy’s finest players of the 90s, Roberto Baggio and Gianluca Vialli led the line for Juventus en route to 1992/93 UEFA Cup glory – the former scoring twice in the first leg of the final against Borussia Dortmund.
The pair were part of an enviable crop of attacking talent which also included Fabrizo Ravanelli and a young Alessandro Del Piero – with Ravanelli partnering Vialli as Juve won the 1994/95 Coppa Italia and reached the final of that season’s UEFA Cup.
Liverpool finally won their first Premier League title in 2019/20 under Jurgen Klopp; they should have won it six years earlier under Brendan Rodgers, only to… er… let it slip in spectacular style late in the season.
Nonetheless, the Reds became just the third team to hit the 100-goal mark in a Prem campaign (champions Manchester City were the second), with Luis Suarez (a Golden Boot-winning 31) and Daniel Sturridge (21) accounting for just over half of their total of 101.
That was to be the end of a great partnership: Suarez left for Barcelona that summer.
Romario found the net five times and strike partner Bebeto three as Brazil won the 1994 World Cup – where Bebeto famously whipped out his ‘rock the baby’ celebration, with Romario joining in.
Fierce rivals at club level in Spain – where Romario was playing for Barcelona at the time and Bebeto for Deportivo La Coruna – the pair put aside their differences and ultimately became good friends. We love a happy ending.
Alessandro Del Piero had a fair few world-class striker partners over the course of his career, and one of those was David Trezeguet.
The pair were together at Juventus from 2000 to 2010, enjoying most of their success towards the beginning of that period – most notably helping fire Juve to successive Serie A titles in 2001/02 and 2002/03, with Trezeguet finishing as the league’s top scorer in the former.
Del Piero and Trezeguet stayed with the Bianconeri following their demotion to Serie B in 2006, scoring 20 and 15 goals respectively to help them straight back to the top flight.
For decades, Wolfsburg was more famous as the home of the Volkswagen factory than it was for its football club – but that all changed in 2008/09, as the Wolves won their maiden Bundesliga title.
Brazilian Grafite and Bosnia and Herzegovina great Edin Dzeko formed an imposing and prolific strike force, scoring 28 and 26 league goals respectively as Felix Magath’s side were crowned champions ahead of Bayern Munich.
Shoutout also to Dzeko’s international teammate Zvjezdan Misimovic, who provided a record 20 assists.
Wayne Rooney only played alongside Carlos Tevez at Manchester United for two seasons, but the ex-England captain has cited the clinical Argentine as the player he most enjoyed sharing the pitch with.
Rooney and Tevez were at their most potent during the 2007/08 campaign, combining for 37 goals in all competitions as United won the Premier League title and Champions League.
Porto pulled off a treble in 2010/11, doing the domestic double and winning the Europa League, and they were fired to glory by the unstoppable attacking combination of Radamel Falcao and Hulk.
Falcao amassed 39 goals – an incredible 18 of them in Europe, including the winner in an all-Portuguese final against Braga – while Hulk scored 35, notching a league-high 23.
Back to great little and large partnerships of the Premier League era now, and to legendary Liverpool duo Michael Owen and Emile Heskey.
The tireless Heskey was the perfect foil for his England teammate – who marked himself out as one of the best players in the world around the turn of the century.
Their most productive season was 2000/01, when Owen scored 24 goals in all competitions and Heskey 22 as Gerard Houllier’s Reds did a treble of FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup.
Diego Forlan and Sergio Aguero spent four years together at Atletico Madrid, peaking in the 2008/09 season – when they made the net bulge 56 times between them in all competitions, with Forlan’s 32 LaLiga goals earning him the European Golden Shoe.
They then racked up a combined total of 47 goals in 2009/10, helping Diego Simeone’s Atleti to Europa League glory – Forlan bagging a brace in the final against Fulham.
Two of the most natural goalscorers in the history of the game, Raul and Ronaldo fired Real Madrid to the 2002/03 LaLiga title with 16 and 23 goals apiece.
The relatively short-lived strike force (Ronaldo left for Milan after four-and-a-half years at the Bernabeu) was a continuation of Raul’s prolific partnership with Fernando Morientes.
The highly effective ‘SAS’ partnership of Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton fired Blackburn to the 1994/95 Premier League title, the club’s first top-flight crown in 81 years.
Supplied by the crosses of Stuart Ripley and Jason Wilcox, Shearer won his first of three successive Golden Boots by netting 34 times in 42 appearances and Sutton chipped in with 15 goals of his own.
Two of the greatest strikers in Serie A history, Andriy Shevchenko and Pippo Inzaghi struck up a formidable partnership at Milan during the early 00s.
They were at their most fruitful under Carlo Ancelotti, combining for 40 goals (Inzaghi 30, Shevchenko 10) in 2002/03 – when the Rossoneri won the Champions League – and 45 in 2005/06.
Pele didn’t really need a strike partner – as demonstrated by his pure gift for destroying the opposition with his own brilliance – but when he had one, both players were all the better for it.
En route to winning his third and final World Cup in 1970, ‘O Rei’ formed a devastating attacking duo with Tostao.
Tostao bagged a brace as Brazil defeated Peru 4-2 in the quarter-finals, while Pele’s six goals at the tournament included the opener in the 4-1 final victory over Italy.
Thirty-two years after Pele and Tostao helped Brazil conquer the world, another all-time great front two tore it up on football’s ultimate stage: Ronaldo and Rivaldo.
Both Ballon d’Or winners (and Ronaldo won the award for a second time that year), the pair were supported by Ronaldinho (who would also scoop the Ballon d’Or later in his career) in the elite ‘Three Rs’ attacking triangle.
Ronaldo top-scored with eight goals – including both in the final against Germany – as Luiz Felipe Scolari’s side strode to glory in South Korea and Japan – while Rivaldo finished joint second in those stakes with five.
Hungary’s ‘Magical Magyars’ team of the 50s is regarded as one of the best never to win the World Cup, throwing away a 2-0 lead in the 1954 final to lose 3-2 to West Germany.
That side was captained by the immortal Ferenc Puskas – one of the most devastatingly prolific goalscorers the game has ever seen – who linked up superbly with Sandor Kocsis as one of the two central players in a fine front four.
Kocsis top-scored at the 1954 World Cup with 11 goals; Puskas netted four times, including the opener in the final.
A vintage little and large duo, Kevin Keegan and John Toshack led the line for both Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley’s Liverpool for much of the 70s.
Together, the Anglo-Welsh axis helped the Reds to three First Division titles, an FA Cup, two UEFA Cups and – most notably of all – the Merseyside giants’ very first European Cup.
Two all-time Italian attacking greats, Alessandro Del Piero and Pippo Inzaghi combined to stunning effect at Juventus in the late 90s.
‘Pinturicchio’ and ‘Superpippo’ were most in tune during the 1997/98 campaign – Inzaghi’s first at Juve – scoring 32 and 27 goals respectively in all competitions as Marcello Lipp’s men won the Serie A title and reached the final of the Champions League – in which Del Piero top-scored with 10 goals.
Two true legends in the history of Real Madrid, Raul and Fernando Morientes formed one of world football’s premier front twos of the late 90s and early 00s.
Double LaLiga winners and three-time European champions together, the Spanish compatriots were at their prolific peak during the 1998/99 campaign – when Raul netted 29 times and Morientes 25 (although, somehow, Real didn’t actually win any silverware that season).
Romario and Hristo Stoichkov were teammates for just 18 months, but that’s all they needed to forge one of the finest striker partnerships the game has ever known.
The Brazilian-Bulgarian axis fired Barcelona to 1993/94 LaLiga glory with 30 and 16 goals respectively, laying waste to opposition defence after opposition defence.
They took that sensational form into other competitions too, notably both getting on the scoresheet as Barca destroyed Manchester United 4-0 in the 1994/95 Champions League group stage.
Thierry Henry is almost universally accepted as Arsenal’s best ever player – and Gunners fans would put Dennis Bergkamp right up there in those stakes, too.
Two absolute geniuses in footballer form, Henry led the line, supported by Bergkamp – who he described as a “dream” partner – as Arsene Wenger’s side did the double in 2001/02 then famously became ‘Invincibles’ by winning the 2003/04 Premier League title unbeaten.
Liverpool’s greatest player of all time, Kenny Dalglish achieved iconic status at Anfield with a little help from another true legend of the British game, Ian Rush.
Together, the pair helped the Reds to 11 major trophies – including four First Division titles and two European Cups – between 1981 and 1986, Dalglish’s supreme skill complemented superbly by Rush’s lethal streak in front of goal.
The 1998/99 season was the greatest in Manchester United’s history as they won the treble under Sir Alex Ferguson – and they couldn’t have done it without the free-scoring strike force of Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke, the latter scooping that year’s Premier League Golden Boot.
Between them, over the course of 1998/99 and the following campaign, Cole and Yorke banged in a whooping 98 goals.
Both players left United in 2002, only to be immediately reunited at Blackburn – where they chalked up another 45 goals in two seasons.
Pele scored 77 goals in 92 caps for Brazil at an average of 0.83 per game; Vava scored 15 in 20 at a similarly impressive average of 0.75.
At the 1958 World Cup, the pair unstoppably spearheaded their nation’s victorious side, both bagging braces in the 5-2 final victory over Sweden.
The immortal pairing picked up where they left off four years later – and though Pele was ruled out injured after Brazil’s second game of the tournament, Vava scored in the final once more, this time the third in a 3-1 defeat of Czechoslovakia.
And coming at number one, we have a strike partnership who led the line with distinction for club and country: Marco van Basten and Ruud Gullit, unquestionably two of the greatest forwards of all time (of course, Gullit could turn in world-class performances in pretty much any position you asked him to play).
In 1988, captain Gullit broke the deadlock as the Netherlands beat the Soviet Union to claim their first major trophy at the Euros – with Van Basten sealing victory through a physics-defying volley that has gone down as one of the greatest goals ever scored.
A year later, the Ballon d’Or-winning pair (Gullit picked up the award in 1987, Van Basten each of the next two years) each struck twice as Milan thumped Steaua Bucharest 4-0 in one of the most dominant European Cup final performances ever seen.
It was a double act which deserved to go on well into the 90s – and it might well have done had Van Basten not been forced to retire so prematurely due to injury.
