Albion Analytics: 500 appearances for Lewis Dunk

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Club captain made 500th Albion appearance in last week's match against Aston Villa.

Liam Tharme

Albion Analytics

2025-12-09T06:00+00:00

Lewis Dunk was presented with a special shirt to mark his 500th club appearance. 📷 by James Boardman.

Club captain Lewis Dunk made his 500th Brighton & Hove Albion appearance last week at home to Aston Villa.

The 34-year-old, now a six-time senior England international (who debuted in 2018 and was part of the team that made the European Championships final last summer), came through the academy teams at Brighton and made his debut at the very end of the 2009/10 campaign, back when Albion were a League One side.

Hitting that milestone makes him the most-capped player in Brighton’s post-war history, with only Tug Wilson (566 games between 1922 and 1936) appearing more for the club. For players at currently Premier League clubs, Seamus Coleman for Everton (433 appearances across 16yrs and 11 months) is the only longer-serving player than Dunk at Brighton.

“He deserves that number of appearances because he worked hard for it,” Brighton head coach Fabian Hurzeler said ahead of that Villa game. “He's my leader. He went through highs, he went through lows. But one thing is so impressive, he always stayed Lewis Dunk. He has never changed. He has always stuck to his principles.”

Lewis Dunk with Fabian Hurzeler after the 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace. 📷 by James Boardman.

It is a sign of his quality and coachability that Hurzeler is the fourth different permanent Brighton head coach in the Premier League to have Dunk at the heart of defence.

Chris Hughton gave more appearances to Dunk than any other player (180, all competitions) as Brighton earned promotion in 2016/17, a season where, among Championship centre-backs, he ranked fourth for tackles (71) and total passes (2,074), made the top ten for shots blocked (42) despite playing in a runners-up side, and ranked second for interceptions (131) and completed the most long passes (328).

His ability to blend both sides of the game — style of chested back-passes and line-breaking passes with emergency defending — has been a theme throughout the 500 games.

The unbreakable partnership between him and Shane Duffy in 2017/18 and 2018/19 ensured Brighton maintained their Premier League status, notably keeping 10 clean sheets in 2017-18, a season in which Duffy (59) and Dunk (58) led the league for shots blocked. Then 25, Dunk was a top-10 Premier League centre-back that term for clearances (9th), interceptions (5th) and defensive-third tackles (7th).

The style progression, first under Graham Potter and then Roberto De Zerbi — Dunk played the most games under Potter (110) and the second-most in the De Zerbi era (78, behind Pascal Gross) — saw a reinvention.

From Hughton’s final term of 2018/19 to Potter’s first in 2019-20, Dunk’s passes per game jumped from 43 to 64 and touches rose from 55 to 74 each match. In fact, he ranked ninth among all Premier League players for passes in the first Potter term, and a capacity to break lines would be honed under De Zerbi.

Dunk’s pass accuracy has consistently trended upwards as a Premier League player, from 77% in 2017-18 to 91.8% this season, and he made more than 100 progressive passes in each of 2018/19, 2022/23 and 2023/24 — to the extent that he now ranks inside the top 10% of centre-backs in Europe’s top-five leagues for the volume of passes made.

Take a look at ALL of Lewis Dunk's goals from the Amex era across his 500 appearances for the club!

That he statistically profiles similarly to William Saliba (Arsenal) and Ruben Dias (Manchester City) shows that his physicality is still a strength, and he has shown that availability issues last term — he only started 23 league matches, his fewest in a Premier League season — were only a blip, starting alongside Jan Paul van Hecke in 13 of the 14 domestic matches in 2025/26.

Since the start of 2018/19, Dunk ranks third among Premier League defenders for headed shots (121), and fourth for headed goals (11). Virgil Van Dijk, Gabriel and Kurt Zouma are the only centre-backs with more.

Dunk has said himself that a one-club player is a rarity in the modern era. Even less common is one who makes a Premier League debut at 25, an international one at almost 27, and then goes on to captain their boyhood club in the Europa League aged 31. It is the latest milestone in a long and sparkling career.