Which Manchester United player has the longest goalscoring run?

Wayne Rooney holds the record for most goals for United (253, in case you’ve forgotten) and was often regarded as a streaky striker, producing purple patches of form where the ball kept on hitting the back of the net. But even Wazza couldn’t match the scoring runs of his predecessor in our no.10 shirt: Ruud van Nistelrooy. 

The Dutchman still holds United’s club record for goals in consecutive Premier League games, a 10-game marker that stood for the whole division until Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy surpassed it in November 2015 when he netted against United to register in an 11th straight league game. In the Old Trafford annals, however, van Nistelrooy’s endeavours are yet to be beaten.

The former PSV Eindhoven star hit a hat-trick in a 3-0 Old Trafford victory over Fulham on 22 March 2003, and thus began a sequence that took successive scoring to new levels amongst Reds marksmen. A double in a 4-0 win over Liverpool quickly followed, before further strikes in April against Arsenal, Newcastle, Blackburn Rovers, and Tottenham Hotspur.

Sandwiched in-between were UEFA Champions League goals home and away against Real Madrid, so, by the end of the 2002/03 season, having also notched against Charlton Athletic and Everton, he’d scored in each of United’s last 10 games in all competitions (bagging 15 goals in total). Failing to score in August’s Community Shield ended that particular all competitions run, but two further goals in the opening two league games of 2003/04 stretched the feat in the Premier League to 10 – a sequence in which he also scored 15 times.