Who is the greatest goalscorer in US domestic league history? And, of course, Landon Donovan (MLS) came to mind. But thinking further I realized that Giorgio Chinaglia has the most domestic league goals ever. He scored 193 goals in the NASL, all of them with the NY Cosmos. He is the all-time scoring leader in NASL, and he surpassed Donovan's 145 MLS goals. Bravo, Giorgio. RIP.
How many of those goals were the decisive "run up and shoot" end of game PKs that the very non-Traditional NASL 1.0 used?
Wait, what? You mean shootout goals? Players did not get credit for goals for connecting on shootout goals. (NHL players do not get credit for goals in their shootouts, either.) Scores (like in MLS 1.0) were reported as 3-2 (SO), but individual goals scored within the shootout itself were not added to a player's "true" goal total for purposes of league leadership. In fact, they weren't even kept/published at the league level prior to 1981. Some teams kept them, but the league either did not or did not publish them. (FWIW, Chinaglia's shootout record was 5 out of 16. Not a strong suit.)
I would love to have seen how many he would have scored without that 35 yard offside line. Having watched him for years I would guess....quite a bit less....criminal douche Giorgio that is.
Oddly enough, NASL goal-scoring didn't really change that much when they eliminated the 35-yard line. League-wide, it ticked up by about a tenth of a goal a game compared to the three seasons before FIFA told the league to knock it off: Seasons.....Games...Goals...Goals/Game 1979-1981...1080....3850.....3.56 1982-1984....512....1873.....3.66 That said, obviously not all things were equal: the league was shrinking, consolidating the best defenders among fewer teams (and defenders usually have an advantage over those who create), there were fewer true goal-scorers like we had in the mid-to-late 1970s. Chinaglia was a douche, to be sure, but I'm not sure he would have scored appreciably fewer goals without the 35, whose powers were slightly over-rated. He did go from 29 goals in 1981 (with the line) to 20 in 1982 (without it), but that was their last hurrah. He didn't have the same supporting cast and the league, of course, was very different by that point. It's possible. Not knowable, really.