Papiss Cissé: the season that rewrote a Bundesliga record

The record-breaking season

Cissé arrived at SC Freiburg in December 2009 for a modest €1.62 million after several years shuttling between Metz and loan spells at Cherbourg and Châteauroux. His first partial season brought six goals in 16 games, promising, but nothing extraordinary. Then came 2010–11, his first full campaign in German football, and it turned him into a genuine phenomenon.

Cissé finished the season with 22 goals, second only to Bayern Munich's Mario Gómez in the entire Bundesliga. It broke Freiburg's own club scoring record, and it broke a league record too: the most goals scored by an African player in a single Bundesliga season, surpassing the 20 that Tony Yeboah had managed for Eintracht Frankfurt back in 1992–93. He also picked up an award that season for being the league's most efficient striker. For a player who had spent his early career in France's lower divisions and on loan, it was a transformation.

A dream start at Newcastle

That form was enough to convince Newcastle United to part with an estimated £9.3 million in January 2012, handing Cissé the number 9 shirt once worn by Alan Shearer. He did not disappoint immediately. He scored a winner on his debut against Aston Villa, then went on an extraordinary run, nine goals in eight matches at one point, making him statistically Newcastle's most prolific goalscorer per game in the club's history, ahead of Hughie Gallacher. A stunning 37-yard curler against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge was later voted the BBC's Goal of the Season. Newcastle finished fifth that year, with Cissé central to the surge.

What came after

The following seasons never matched that opening burst. His scoring dropped off through 2012–13 and 2013–14, and in April 2014 he broke his kneecap against Swansea City, needing surgery and missing the rest of the campaign. He returned in 2014–15 and had spells of real sharpness, braces against Hull, Swansea and even Chelsea, but the season was also marked by disciplinary trouble: a three-match ban for elbowing Séamus Coleman, and a separate seven-match ban following a spitting incident with Jonny Evans, among the heaviest sanctions of his career.

His Newcastle career wound down over 2015–16, and in 2016 he left for Shandong Luneng in China. From there his path took him to Alanyaspor in Turkey, where in 2019 he survived a coach crash that killed teammate Josef Šural, then to Fenerbahçe, and on to Amiens in France's Ligue 2, who released him in 2023. By November that year he was training with non-league Macclesfield as a free agent. In March 2025 he returned to playing football with UAE side Al Qabila FC. Today he also plays amateur football for Wythenshawe Vets Over-35s in the Cheshire Veterans Football League, a long way, in level and geography, from the season that once made him the most dangerous African striker in Germany.

The legacy of one season

Cissé's 22 goals for Freiburg in 2010–11 remain the season that defined him: it built his transfer to the Premier League, produced one of the era's most memorable individual goals at Stamford Bridge, and gave Newcastle fans a brief, thrilling glimpse of a forward at the very top of his powers. What followed was a career of flashes rather than sustained brilliance, ending, for now, in veterans' football on a Sunday pitch in Cheshire.