Most appearances

The leading appearances among the 36,653 players whose career figures are complete and within what the fixture list allows. Only players whose every club spell has a recorded appearance count can be ranked here. A career total built from some spells and not others is a lower bound, and a lower bound cannot be placed against a complete total without inventing the missing part: a man with 240 recorded and two unrecorded spells may well have played more than one with 260. Players with a gap are left out of the order rather than ranked below where they might belong, and their own pages still carry everything that is known.

The list

Where two are level they share a rank, and the list runs past fifty when fiftieth place is shared, because splitting a tie would mean choosing between them on no stated basis.

Figures the fixture list rules out

17 player(s) are left out because a spell claims more appearances than there were matches to play. A club in these leagues plays at most 38 league matches a season, counted from the results on this site, so allowing three times that for cups and Europe gives a ceiling of 114 a year — and one record claimed five thousand appearances inside three years. The same source problem is why there is no list of leading scorers.

A career, not a league

Unlike the club lists, these figures are for a player’s whole club career as Wikidata records it, not only his matches in these five leagues — the appearance counts are attached to the club, not to the competition, so they cannot be split. A man is here because one of his clubs plays in one of these leagues; the number beside his name may include years elsewhere. His own page lists every club and every spell.

Where this came from

Fixtures and results from openfootball, released into the public domain (CC0). Players, clubs and career figures from Wikidata (CC0). Tables, totals and records on this page are worked out here from the results rather than copied from anywhere. No free source links players to individual matches, so these pages give results and career totals but never who scored in a given game.

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