Saudi side Al Hilal have won 28 games in a row – but is it really a world record?
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Saudi Arabian football club Al Hilal have won 28 matches in a row — a 1-1 draw against Damac on September 21, 2023 was the last time they failed to claim victory.
Al Hilal, whose top scorer this season is former Newcastle United and Fulham forward Aleksandar Mitrovic, sent out a press release on Tuesday following their latest victory announcing they had broken the world record for the most games won in a row by a football club.
Their 28th consecutive victory, they said, took them past Welsh top-flight club The New Saints’ run of 27 wins in a row during the 2016-17 season.
Guinness World Records — the long-standing reference book and website that lists and collates world records in a variety of different fields — have approved Al Hilal’s winning streak as a world record.
So have the Saudi Arabian side really achieved something that no club in more than 150 years of competitive football has ever done before? Are there any other sides who claim to have been on longer winning streaks than this? Is it even the longest winning run in the sport right now?
The Athletic attempts to answer this and clear up any confusion.
First things first, Al Hilal have definitely won 28 matches in a row. These victories have been in three different competitions — the Saudi Pro League, the King Cup and the AFC Champions League.
Their 28th consecutive triumph came on Tuesday against fellow Saudi Arabian side Al Ittihad in the AFC Champions League.
Al Hilal are nine points clear of Cristiano Ronaldo’s Al Nassr at the top of the Saudi Pro League table. They are also in the semi-finals of both the King Cup and the Champions League.
Al Hilal face Damac, the last team they failed to beat, in the league on Saturday evening hoping to make it 29 on the spin.
But when it comes to their claim — widely reported by the world’s media this week — that they are now on the longest winning run in the history of football, things become a little less clear-cut.
Here is what Al Hilal said in the opening few lines of their press release: “Al Hilal manager Jorge Jesus has expressed his delight after the Roshn Saudi League club created world football history by winning their 28th consecutive match in all competitions. The Roshn Saudi League leaders’ 2-0 win over Al Ittihad in Jeddah in the AFC Champions League on Tuesday night overtook Welsh club The New Saints’ run of 27 wins achieved in season 2016-17. Prior to that, the record stood for 44 years after Dutch giants Ajax’s 26-game winning streak between 1971 and 1972.”
At this point, it is natural to think that surely — at some point — a team, somewhere, has won more games than this in a row. It might have been a third-division side in Costa Rica in the 1970s, but that still counts, right?
Well no, actually — at least according to Guinness World Records. For example, when Scottish fifth-tier side East Kilbride won 30 games in a row in 2016, Guinness World Records ruled that the run did not count as the club were not playing in their country’s top tier.
In some ways, this makes a lot of sense as it prevents a team playing in a pub league that wins dozens of games in a row unilaterally declaring themselves to be world-record holders.
And that explains why when The New Saints, who play in the Welsh top flight, won 27 games in a row later in 2016, Guinness World Records did indeed confirm it as a record — surpassing Ajax’s 26 consecutive wins in the early 1970s when Johan Cruyff was their talisman.
So, even though Al Hilal did not specify that their record was one held only amongst top-flight clubs, at this point it would seem reasonable to say: “Yep, fair play. It is a world record to all intents and purposes.”
Except — and you will notice there is a theme emerging here — it’s complicated. The Athletic has found two purported winning streaks by top-flight clubs which appear to surpass Al Hilal’s 28 games. And, remarkably, one of them is ongoing right now.
Hungarian club Ujpest, who are the third-most successful side in their country in terms of top-flight titles, were a dominant force in the years immediately following the Second World War. So much so that when they won the league in 1945-46, their record before the post-season play-offs read: played 26, won 26, drawn 0, lost 0. Ujpest had also won the league the season before, winning 18 games in a 22-match campaign.
The results of these matches are freely available on Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation (RSSSF) — which is an international football statistics organisation with an unrivalled database of global results from throughout the sport’s history.
So, going by RSSSF, Ujpest won their last two games of the 1945 season (that campaign was played exclusively in one calendar year) and then, as mentioned above, all 26 matches of the 1945-46 regular league season. They then advanced to the play-off phase, where they won twice more before drawing with Ferencvaros — meaning that, according to this, they won 30 league games in a row.
But of course, clubs play in other competitions outside of their domestic league. So what about those extra matches that Ujpest will have featured in?
This winning run took place before the introduction of major European club competitions, but there was a tournament played at the time called the Mitropa Cup — which was contested by teams from the successor countries of Austria-Hungary (which dissolved in 1918). However, this competition didn’t take place from 1941 to 1950 due to the Second World War and the subsequent upheaval it caused.
Then there was the Magyar Kupa, Hungary’s main domestic cup competition. Yet again, for similar reasons to the Mitropa Cup, this tournament did not take place when Ujpest went on their winning run in the league. Furthermore, the Hungarian Super Cup — played between the winners of the league and the Magyar Kupa winners — was only introduced in 1992.
All of this means it appears that, in terms of competitive fixtures, the only games Ujpest played during this period were in the league.
So can we count it and declare Ujpest’s 30-game winning streak in the middle of the 1940s to have been longer than Al Hilal’s current run? The Athletic contacted Guinness World Records and a spokesperson for them said: “There isn’t the information available for us to conclusively support the Ujpest run. With football results of this age, we do not always have the information available to support the research we require to approve records. This is the case here.”
This might seem frustrating, but it is worth remembering that a complete record of all football matches ever played (even just those involving top-flight clubs) does not, and will never, exist. During the war years, teams played lots of ‘friendly’ fixtures, so it is possible that those continued into 1946 and that some were deemed competitive for reasons lost in the mists of time. Ujpest, who are from Hungary’s capital Budapest, may well have failed to win one of those games.
Yet is it possible that Al Hilal aren’t even on the longest winning run by a top-flight club in football right now?
FK Arkadag are a club from Turkmenistan in central Asia that were founded in 2023. They immediately entered the country’s top flight and won the title in their first season, as well as triumphing in the Turkmenistan Cup.
Arkadag, who were founded by the country’s former president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, won all 24 of their league games en route to that title last year and triumphed in seven cup matches, too. This season, they have won their opening two league fixtures. That takes them to a total of 33 victories in a row. This also means the club have won every competitive game they have ever played.
During the winter break between seasons, Arkadag played four friendlies — with two of them against Ukrainian clubs. They lost these two matches, but given their friendly status, they do not count as competitive fixtures and are irrelevant when it comes to totalling winning runs.
Are this obscure team that play in a little-reported league in a relatively unknown country therefore on the longest ongoing winning run by a top-flight club in world football and, possibly, in history?
The Athletic duly contacted Guinness World Records about Arkadag’s remarkable streak. “There’s relatively little detail available for the Turkmenistan league, less than we want for the kind of due diligence we carry out in our research for this and similar records,” they said. “This may also be indicative of a level of governance and competition under what we’d ordinarily look for as well. All this being considered, we’re confirming Al Hilal as the record holder.”
So, according to Guinness World Records, Al Hilal were correct to declare their streak as the longest (by a top-flight club) in football history.
The Athletic are aware that some readers might find the responses from Guinness World Records frustrating, but they are absolutely correct to point to an absence of information due to a lack of complete record-keeping being a huge barrier to them being able to definitively declare Ujpest or Arkadag’s winning streaks longer than Al Hilal’s.
And even if Arkadag’s winning run could be officially verified as the longest ever by a top-flight club, are the competitions they feature in really of the requisite level? Then again, some might say the same about Al Hilal, or The New Saints before them.
(Top photo: Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
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Will Jeanes is an editor at The Athletic. Follow Will on Twitter @will_jeanes
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It's beneath The Athletic to even be publishing this dross.
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Kind of not the flex they think it is.
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It’s a bit of a hollow victory when you have unlimited funds in a Micky Mouse league
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