Chris Wondolowski’s strong start to 2016 continued on Saturday, as the San Jose forward scored his league-leading sixth goal of the year in the Earthquakes’ 3-1 loss at Portland.
The strike took Wondolowski to 115 career MLS goals, 18 behind former D.C. United forward Jaime Moreno for third all-time and 29 back of Landon Donovan for the league record.
Barring injury, Wondolowski, who turned 33 in January, seems likely to break that mark.
But when?
Our Ben Baer took a stab at the numbers and came up with a decent guess.
Since the start of the 2010 season, Wondolowski has been bagging goals at the rate of 0.63 per 90 minutes. If he can keep going at that clip, he’d need to play about 4,300 minutes to score 30 more goals and get the record.
He’s averaged 2,572 minutes per season since 2010 and has played 630 minutes in seven games so far in 2016. If he can maintain his present pace for both minutes and scoring, he’d be on schedule to break the mark after about 2,400 minutes played in 2017. We can’t pin down an exact date, but that’d likely be sometime towards the end of the season, possibly in early October.
It’s worth repeating that the October 2017 projection is based on the assumption that Wondolowski can stay on the field and maintain his really, really excellent 0.63 goals per 90 minutes mark.
That won’t be easy, especially for a player who will be approaching 35 next fall. But Wondo has made a career out of doing things people didn't think he could do.
