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It could be a long-range screamer, a scrappy six-yard tap-in, a silky team goal, a bullet header or one that nobody remembers a week later. Whatever shape it takes, the goal is what football runs on. Every fan can recall a favourite, often down to the angle of the camera and the noise of the crowd.
Take away the commentary, the replays and the handy close-up, though, and it gets much harder. Below are 20 Premier League goals as short looping GIFs. Name the scorer of each.
Thirty-odd years of goals
The Premier League kicked off in August 1992, and in the decades since it has produced thousands of goals across hundreds of clubs, grounds and kits. Alan Shearer's 260 goals set the scoring record and stood as the benchmark for every striker who came after him. Only a handful of players have passed 200, but many hundreds of players, from record-breakers to one-game wonders, have scored at least once in the competition. That is a very deep pool to fish in, and the quiz goes looking in its murkier corners as well as the obvious ones.
A quiz like this relies on the goals that lodge themselves in the memory for odd reasons: the shirt, the celebration, the goalkeeper's despairing dive, the ground. Some of the clips below are famous. Others are deliberately the kind of goal that won three points on a wet Tuesday and was never shown again.
A few will take seconds. Some will take all evening.
Why GIFs changed how goals are remembered
The GIF format dates from 1987, long before anyone thought of using it for football. It only became the standard way of sharing goals once social media arrived, when a few seconds of looping footage could travel around the world before the match had even finished. Supporters who had grown up waiting for the Sunday highlights suddenly saw every goal within minutes, replayed endlessly with no sound at all.
The loss of sound turns out to matter. Without a commentator shouting the name, the eye has to do the work: the run, the body shape, the boots, the way a player strikes the ball. Still photography does something different again; a single frame, such as the football photograph credited to Flickr / Ronnie Macdonald, freezes the moment but keeps the movement to the imagination.
Goals that slip out of the collective memory deserve their own attention, as Son Heung-min and the forgotten wonder goals argues, and so do the ones overshadowed on the day, the subject of the other goal.
Who is in the clips
The 20 scorers played for a spread of clubs, from Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and both Manchester sides to Tottenham Hotspur, Newcastle United and Aston Villa. Some are all-time greats. Some had a single moment and are remembered for little else. The GIFs give away the kit and sometimes the ground, which narrows it down, but not by as much as might be expected.
For faces rather than finishes, the Premier League imports sticker quiz and the stars of English football quiz test the same knowledge from a different angle.
How to play
Type your answer in the box under each GIF. There is no sign-up and no button to press: when the name is right, the box turns green and the score counter at the top goes up by one.
Use the scorer's full name, first name and surname, in the way the club quizzes expect "Queens Park Rangers" rather than "QPR". Spelling counts. If a clip moves too fast, let it loop a few times and watch the scorer rather than the ball.