A 51-Metre Lob: Brighton Midfielder Scores One of Premier League's Longest Goals
Most goals in a football match are scored from inside the penalty area, a few metres from the goalkeeper. Diego Gomez, a midfielder for Brighton, decided to try from somewhere near the halfway line instead — and it worked.
In Brighton’s home match against Crystal Palace on Sunday evening, Gomez collected the ball deep in his own half in the seventh minute. Spotting the Palace goalkeeper off his line, he struck a long, looping lob that sailed over the keeper and into the net, putting Brighton 2-0 up. The team went on to win 5-0 in the English Premier League, the top division of English football.
According to the Premier League’s official statistics, the shot travelled 51.3 metres from goal. That makes it the eighth-longest goal scored in the league since the 2006-07 season, when such distance records began being tracked. The list is topped by a famous 95.7-metre goal by goalkeeper Asmir Begovic in 2013 — a clearance that bounced over the opposing keeper — followed by long strikes from goalkeepers Tim Howard and Paul Robinson.
What made the goal stranger still was that someone had predicted it. Two days before the match, a Brighton supporter posted on social media that Sunday would be the perfect occasion for Gomez to score from the halfway line. After the ball went in, Gomez pinned the post to the top of his own profile, turning a lucky guess into part of the story.
For Brighton, the result was one of the most emphatic of their season. A 5-0 win over Crystal Palace is also a local derby victory — the two clubs are separated by roughly 70 kilometres along England’s south coast — so the margin will have pleased the home crowd as much as the scoreline.
Gomez, a young midfielder, is not a player known for spectacular long-range strikes. The goal will likely follow him for a while: clips of halfway-line lobs circulate for years, and Premier League distance records are a regular topic whenever a goalkeeper strays too far from his line.
The weekend produced plenty of other talking points across the league. Arsenal, away at Nottingham Forest, made three attacking substitutions around the 66th minute with the score still 0-0, bringing on Jurrien Timber, Mikel Merino and Viktor Gyokeres. Eberechi Eze, making his first league start of the season, was withdrawn at half-time after a quiet display with no shots and no key passes. Leeds United held Manchester United to a 1-1 draw at home, while Bournemouth beat Sunderland 2-0 for their first league win of the campaign.
None of those, though, will be replayed quite as often as Gomez’s lob. A goal from more than 50 metres is rare enough; one that a fan called in advance, and that the scorer then celebrated by pinning the prediction to his profile, is the kind of coincidence football fans love to argue about.