Ian Wright enjoyed success with London clubs Crystal Palace and Arsenal as a forward, spending six years with the former and seven years with the latter. With Arsenal he lifted the Premier League title, both the major domestic cup competitions, and the European Cup Winners Cup. Known for his speed, agility, finishing and aggression, he played 581 league games, scoring 287 goals for seven clubs in Scotland and England, while also earning 33 caps for the England national team, and scoring nine international goals.
Ian Wright signed for Arsenal in September 1991 for £2.5m, which at the time was a club record fee. He scored on his debut against Leicester City in a League Cup tie, produced a hat-trick on his league debut against Southampton, and in the final match of the season, scored another hat-trick against the Saints to take his total to 31 goals in all competitions. Wright's 29 league goals (24 for Arsenal, 5 for Palace) were enough to make him the league's top scorer. As of 2016–17, only Wright and Teddy Sheringham have led the top-flight scoring charts having scored for two clubs during the season in question.
Wright scored 185 goals from 288 appearances (279 starts) for Arsenal, and scored eleven hat-tricks for them, a total surpassed only by Jimmy Brain and Jack Lambert. As of the 2016–17 season, he is Arsenal's second highest goalscorer of all time, behind Thierry Henry who broke his record in 2005. Ian Wright placed fourth in a 2008 poll of fans conducted on the club's website to select the 50 Gunners Greatest Players.
Four of Wright's nine international goals were scored under Glenn Hoddle's management, including the winner in a 2–1 friendly win against South Africa at Old Trafford in May 1997, and the opener a month later in a 2–0 victory over Italy in the Tournoi de France. England won the four-team tournament, staged as a warm-up event to the 1998 World Cup in France, which also included world champions Brazil as well as the hosts.
Ian Wright went on to help England qualify for the 1998 World Cup by scoring two goals in the 4–0 qualifying campaign victory against Moldova at Wembley in September 1997, before producing arguably his best performance for his country in the vital 0–0 draw in Italy, a month later, which secured his country's passage through to the finals. He missed out on the finals through injury.
Since his retirement from football, Wright appeared as a pundit on BBC Sport's International Match of the Day and has been a pundit for the 2002 and 2006 World Cups and Euro 2004.
Wright presented Football Behind Bars, a reality TV series aired on Sky1 about his programme to socialise young men incarcerated at Portland Young Offenders Institution in Dorset by organising them in a football academy. The program was an experiment with the prison authority with an eye to expanding it to other prisons if it was successful. The series ran 6 episodes, aired weekly from 7 September to 12 October 2009.
Ian Wright has appeared in TV commercials for the chicken sauce, Chicken Tonight, Nescafé and Ladbrokes along with Chris Kamara, Ally McCoist and former Arsenal teammate Lee Dixon. Ian Wright appeared in an advertisement for the Wii console where he was seen playing Mario Strikers Charged and Wii Sports with his son Shaun. In his playing career, Wright was sponsored by the sportswear company Nike, and appeared in Nike commercials.