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Danny Ings: one golden season, then the long goodbye
For one Premier League season, Danny Ings looked like one of the best out-and-out finishers in England. The campaign that followed took him to two more top-flight clubs, a European trophy and, eventually, out of the division altogether.
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The season that announced him
Ings had always had talent, Burnley fans had seen it when he won the Championship Player of the Year award in 2013-14 as his goals helped the club up to the Premier League, but injuries at Liverpool had threatened to define his career as one of what might have been. A loan move to Southampton in 2018, made permanent the following summer, changed that.
In 2019-20, Ings scored 20 Premier League goals by mid-July, becoming only the third player in Southampton's history to reach that mark, after Matt Le Tissier and James Beattie. By the end of the season he had 22 in the league and 25 in all competitions, finishing joint-second in the race for the Golden Boot, a single goal behind Jamie Vardy. He was voted Southampton's Fans' Player of the Season. In January 2021 he reached 50 Premier League goals for his career with a strike against his former club Liverpool, a tidy piece of symmetry given how little first-team football he had managed there.
Villa, West Ham, and a fading peak
That form earned him a £25 million move to Aston Villa in the summer of 2021. He scored on his debut and produced a bicycle-kick goal against Newcastle that was later voted Villa's goal of the season, but he never came close to reproducing his Southampton numbers in claret and blue. In January 2023 he moved again, to West Ham United for an initial £12 million, where he scored twice on his bow against Nottingham Forest and was part of the squad that won the UEFA Europa Conference League that season. Even so, his appearances tailed off, and in May 2025 West Ham confirmed he would leave at the end of his contract.
Out of the top flight
What followed took Ings a long way from the striker who had chased Vardy for the Golden Boot. In August 2025 he dropped into the Championship with Sheffield United, only for the club to announce in May 2026 that he would leave once that deal expired too. The following September he signed as a free agent for League One side Wycombe Wanderers, scoring a 90th-minute equaliser against Reading on his debut.
For his country, the gap between his England caps told a similar story of fits and starts: he made his senior debut in 2015, then did not win a second cap until 2020, scoring his only international goal, another overhead kick, against Wales at Wembley later that year. It remained his final appearance for England.
A career remembered for a peak, not a decline
Away from the pitch, Ings has been known for charitable work, including a disability sport project he set up in 2014 after being inspired by a young Burnley fan. That, alongside the Southampton season that nearly won him a Golden Boot, is the part of his story worth holding onto: a player who, for one extraordinary year, finished among the best strikers in the country, even as the seasons either side of it pulled him in a very different direction.
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