Own goals are more common than most supporters realise.
In the 2024-25 Premier League season alone, 33 were recorded across 380 matches, which works out to roughly one every ten games. Even at the highest level, with the best players in the world, the ball finds its way into the wrong net with remarkable regularity.
Most are forgettable. A deflection here, a miscontrolled clearance there. The ten that follow, however, are anything but forgettable.
Meikayla Moore: A Hat-Trick of Own Goals
Hat-tricks are celebrated in football. Meikayla Moore's particular hat-trick is remembered rather differently.
The New Zealand defender became the first player in the history of the sport to score three own goals in a single match, achieving the dubious distinction during the 2022 SheBelieves Cup against the United States.
The goals came in the fifth, sixth, and thirty-sixth minutes. By the end, the United States had added two more for a final score of 5-0.
The name of Constant "Stan" van den Buijs occasionally surfaces in conversations about own-goal records, but his situation is somewhat more complicated.
One of his supposed three was subsequently credited to an opposing player after van den Buijs deflected the ball off him and into the net, which slightly alters the achievement.
In Europe's top five leagues, 31 players share the record for two own goals in a single match. Jamie Carragher is among them, having scored twice against his own team during Liverpool's 1999 encounter with Manchester United.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksW4iJqEPPo
SO l'Emyrne: 149 Own Goals in One Afternoon
If Meikayla Moore's three accidental own goals represent an unfortunate record, what happened in Madagascar in October 2002 represents something in an entirely different category.
During a championship decider, defending champions SO l'Emyrne responded to what they considered unjust refereeing decisions in earlier matches by deliberately scoring 149 own goals against AS Adema. The protest made international headlines almost immediately.
The result: AS Adema won 149-0 and became the new champions. SO l'Emyrne had surrendered the title through an act of organised defiance.
Whether the protest achieved its intended effect on the refereeing authorities is less clear.
Terry Sealey: The Own Goal That Was Actually Genius
Not every own goal is a mistake. Terry Sealey's deliberate contribution to Barbados' cause in the 1994 Caribbean Cup stands as one of the most tactically inventive moments in the history of the sport.
The competition used a modified golden goal rule in extra time: the first goal scored after ninety minutes counted double.
Barbados needed to beat Grenada by two clear goals to progress. With the score at 2-1 in the final minutes, that margin was gone. Rather than accept elimination, Sealey deliberately put the ball into his own net to level the match at 2-2 and force extra time.
Grenada, now aware of the situation, responded by attacking both ends simultaneously, since any goal, in any net, might serve their purposes.
Barbados held their nerve, reached extra time, scored the golden goal, and were credited with a 4-2 victory. A goal against their own side had been the decisive tactical contribution of the match.
Chris Brass: The Nose-Breaking Own Goal
Some own goals are remarkable for their scale or their context. Chris Brass's effort, for Bury in 2006, is remarkable for more anatomical reasons.
Attempting to clear the ball from danger, the defender struck it with sufficient force that when it rebounded off his own face, the impact broke his nose.
The ball bounced from his face directly into the net. He broke his own nose and scored an own goal in the same action, which represents a fairly unique double misfortune even by the standards of this list.
Festus Baise: The Scorpion Kick, Reversed
René Higuita's scorpion kick against England at Wembley is one of football's most celebrated pieces of improvisation.
Leaping forward and clearing the ball by thrusting both legs behind him simultaneously, Higuita produced a moment that is still talked about decades later.
Festus Baise, playing in the Hong Kong First Division League in 2011, attempted something similar. The execution was genuinely impressive from an acrobatic standpoint.
The outcome was rather less successful. Rather than clearing the ball toward the opposition, the manoeuvre sent it past his own goalkeeper and into his own net.
The attempt looked spectacular. The direction was wrong. The result was unfortunate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXb8RjGLcZk
Santiago Vergini: The Perfect Volley, Wrong End
Sunderland's 8-0 defeat to Southampton in the Premier League in 2014 was their heaviest top-flight loss in the modern era, and three of the eight goals were scored by their own players.
The most memorable of the three came from right-back Santiago Vergini in the twelfth minute.
From inside his own penalty area, Vergini connected with a volley of genuine quality, the kind of strike that, directed at the correct goal, would have been celebrated.
It curved into the bottom corner with pace and precision. Three more Sunderland players had touches on the scoresheet by the end of the afternoon, all of them in the wrong column.
Brice Maubleu: Physics Lesson from a Goalkeeper
During the 2019-20 season in France's Ligue 2, Grenoble goalkeeper Brice Maubleu attempted to restart play quickly by throwing the ball out from his hands.
He applied more force than the situation required. The throw sent the ball backwards rather than forward, and it rolled into his own net.
The physics are straightforward: too much power in a throw can generate a recoil that redirects the motion of the body.
The application of those physics in a professional football match, with a goalkeeper putting the ball into his own goal from point-blank range, is rather less common.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQtn5o_RD-I
Assaf Mendes: Beaten by the Wind
Maccabi Haifa goalkeeper Assaf Mendes launched what he intended to be a straightforward clearance during a match against Dynamo Kyiv. The wind had other ideas.
The conditions were strong enough to halt the ball's forward momentum entirely and reverse its direction. Mendes could only watch as his clearance looped back over his head and settled into the net behind him.
It was one of five goals he conceded that day, though the match was a friendly, which limited the practical consequences of the result.
The own goal contributed nothing to the scoreline in any meaningful sense. It remains memorable purely for the helplessness it produced.
Adrien Gulfo: The Bicycle Kick Own Goal
Adrien Gulfo was competing in Switzerland's sixth tier of football when he attempted a bicycle kick clearance that redirected the ball into his own net.
The video of the moment has accumulated approximately four million views on YouTube, making him considerably more famous than most sixth-tier footballers anywhere in the world.
The story resolves reasonably well. His team drew the match 3-3, won the subsequent penalty shootout, and progressed to the next round of the Swiss Cup.
The own goal, spectacular and entirely accidental, did not ultimately cost them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKSSV8BRqpw
Pat Kruse: Six Seconds
In January 1977, Torquay United centre-half Pat Kruse established a record that still stands: the fastest own goal in senior football history, scored just six seconds after kick-off against Cambridge United.
The circumstances involved a delayed start due to an icy pitch, a long ball forward from Cambridge at the restart, and a miscommunication between Kruse and his goalkeeper Terry Lee.
Lee had moved off his line but was unable to communicate this clearly. Kruse, assuming the goalkeeper was in position, headed the ball back toward goal. It sailed over Lee and into the net.
Several players have come close to the record in subsequent years. Marcos Tavares scored an own goal after eight seconds in a Slovenian league match in 2017.
Peter Lorimer and John Hewitt both managed nine seconds in different competitions in 1982. Leon Goretzka scored after thirteen seconds in a Bundesliga match for Bayern Munich.
In international football, the fastest World Cup own goal belongs to Sead Kolashinac of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who put the ball into his own net two minutes and eight seconds into a match against Argentina.
Kruse's six-second record, set in the fourth tier of English football on a frozen January afternoon, has endured for nearly half a century.
An Inescapable Part of the Game
Own goals are not a flaw in football. They are a consequence of the pressure, pace, and complexity of the sport, evidence that even the most technically accomplished players operate under conditions where error is always possible.
Some of the moments above are genuinely funny. A few are oddly impressive. One involved a broken nose. Another involved 149 consecutive deliberate contributions to the opposition's tally.
What they share is the quality that makes football endlessly compelling: the sense that absolutely anything can happen at any moment, to any player, regardless of how straightforward the situation appears. That includes putting the ball in the wrong net.