Micky van de Ven ran the length of the pitch to score one of
the great Champions League goals this week, but where does it rank
among the competition’s longest such runs?
On Tuesday night at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, something
extraordinary happened.
No, we’re not just talking about Tottenham
winning a match at home, although they did record their biggest
margin of victory under Thomas Frank, scored all four goals in open
play and did so despite the fact they’d had a man sent off
with the score at 2-0 and more than a third of the game
remaining.
“It was a game we completely controlled from minute one,” Frank
said afterwards, which isn’t something he has been able to say very
much at his new club.
But Spurs doubling their lead with 10 men to win a Champions
League encounter with FC Copenhagen 4-0 on home soil, where
they have struggled for good results and performances of late,
wasn’t the most remarkable element of this game.
Instead, it was a single moment when the clock read 63:38. Spurs
were two goals to the good but a man down, and Copenhagen were
looking for a way back into the game. João
Palhinha nudged former Southampton forward Mohamed Elyounoussi
off the ball and laid it off a single yard to centre-back Micky van
de Ven on the edge of his own penalty area.
Everything about the game at that point screamed for Van de Ven
to play it safe. His team had a two-goal lead that could easily be
made to feel quite brittle given they were also a man down, and
Spurs needed to prioritise protecting their lead. A simple pass to
left-back Destiny
Udogie (top right of the below image) was very much on.
But Van de Ven got his head down and charged forward, fully
confident in his ability to run his way out of trouble. He recorded
the highest top speed of any player in the Premier League last
season (37.1 km/h), and he is also pretty strong. Once he gets
going, he can be difficult to stop, as Copenhagen would soon find
out.
A few seconds later, he was well clear of danger, but he was
surrounded by five opponents and he had only one teammate – striker
Randal Kolo Muani – ahead of him.
Then, with a quick shift of his feet, he skipped past the one
remaining obstacle between him and the Copenhagen goalkeeper, and
he was away.
By this point, the crowd had realised a goal was possible.
Everyone was on their feet, and Van de Ven still had half the pitch
to run into.
It’s important to note the role of Kolo Muani, who didn’t even
get close to touching the ball at any point, but without him, the
goal may well not have happened.
That’s because Copenhagen centre-back Pantelis Hatzidiakos
wasn’t able to engage Van de Ven as he would have left Kolo Muani a
clear run at goal. Udogie (top left of the below image), meanwhile,
had his hands on his head in disbelief at what he was
witnessing.
Hatzidiakos may have known about what Van de Ven has done
before, so he could have foreseen the Netherlands international
looking for a pass.
In August and September 2024,
Van de Ven recorded two of the top five longest assist-ending
carries on record (since 2015-16) in a Premier League game. On
those occasions, he ran 60.4 metres to set up Son Heung-min against
Everton and 56.1m to tee up Brennan
Johnson against Manchester United.
Whatever the reason, Hatzidiakos hesitated, and by the time he’d
changed his mind, it was too late. Elyounoussi had tracked Van de
Ven all the way, desperate to make up for giving the ball away, but
despite doing pretty well to keep up, he couldn’t stop him.
Van de Ven charged into the Copenhagen box and finished like a
seasoned centre-forward (he is Tottenham’s top scorer this season,
so maybe that was to be expected) to score one of the great
Champions League goals.
UK readers can relive the goal below:
In the 10 seconds between taking his first touch and scoring,
Van de Ven ran 67.7m with the ball. It is the longest goal-ending
carry by any player in Opta’s record books in a Champions League
game (since 2015-16), overtaking Vinícius Júnior’s 64.9m run to
score for Real Madrid against Borussia Dortmund in October
2024.
Comparisons have naturally been made with an astoundingly
similar goal scored at the same ground, in the same goal, almost
six years ago by the now-departed Spurs legend Son. The two players
picked up the ball in incredibly similar positions before running
the length of the pitch to score.
Son’s goal, scored against Burnley on 7 December 2019 and the
winner of that year’s Puskás Award, required a run of 72.3m with
the ball before he scored.
That is almost five metres longer than Van de Ven’s goal, in
part because it was a more winding run – and Van de Ven’s was more
direct – but also because Son ran closer to goal before
finishing.
Son’s remains the third-longest carry ending in a goal recorded
(since 2015-16) in a Premier League game.
The longest goal-ending carry ever recorded in the Premier
League was scored by former Spurs man Andros Townsend for Crystal
Palace against West Brom, when he ran an incredible 78.9m with the
ball before scoring in March 2017. Townsend didn’t even have the
energy to celebrate his goal, instead just collapsing to the
floor.
Van de Ven has written his name into the Champions League
history books, but given he has previous when it comes to running
the length of the pitch with the ball, this might not be the last
time we see him do something like this.
The
Longest Goal-Ending Carries in the Champions League
*since 2015-16; data as of 5 November 2025
Micky van de Ven – 67.7m, Tottenham vs FC
Copenhagen, November 2025
Vinícius Júnior – 64.9m, Real Madrid vs
Borussia Dortmund, October 2024
Rafael Leão – 62.6m, Milan vs Dinamo
Zagreb, October 2022
Karim Adeyemi – 62.1m, Borussia Dortmund vs
Chelsea, February 2023
Marco Asensio – 60.8m, Real Madrid vs
Bayern Munich, April 2017
Loïs Openda – 57.8m, RB Leipzig vs
Manchester City, November 2023
Brais Méndez – 55.4m, Real Sociedad vs
Red Bull Salzburg, October 2023
Davide Zappacosta – 55.3m, Chelsea vs
Qarabag, September 2017
Ousmane Dembélé – 51.5m, Barcelona vs
Tottenham, December 2018
José Izquierdo – 47.1m, Club Brugge vs
Leicester, November 2016
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