The most notable thing, watching them all back, is how simple it looks. Elementary tap-ins at the far post. Slotted finishes into an empty net with the goalkeeper sprawled several yards away like a battlefield casualty. Two-yard headers levered from the shoulders of punier, more beta males. Penalties dispatched with all the certainty of a bow and arrow. These are the goals that gild the legend: the ballast, the meat and potatoes, the dull matter of which Premier League record goal hauls are made.
And when we say simple, we should not labour under any delusions that what Erling Haaland does is easy. On the contrary: this is the culmination of perhaps the most audacious and complex project undertaken in English football. A club purchased and refitted with the sole aim of assembling and training a team whose sole aim is to deliver the ball into dangerous attacking areas, again and again and again and again.
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To this end, City’s Abu Dhabi’s ownership have been prepared to stop at virtually nothing. Transfer records have been written and rewritten. The world’s best coach has been hired and given pretty much whatever he wants. There was a slight misconception last summer that the signing of Haaland somehow represented a break with the classical Pep Guardiola method. And yet go back through Guardiola’s previous teams and there is a common evolutionary theme to them: a machine slowly being assembled, a process being refined, honed and finally sharpened to a single spectacular point.
At Barcelona, the goals were initially shared out among the front three of Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi. By Guardiola’s final season, in 2011-12, the team had been comprehensively rebuilt around Messi, who scored 50 league goals (the next highest was Alexis Sánchez on 12). Robert Lewandowski’s god-tier scoring form at Bayern Munich only surfaced in Guardiola’s final season. Guardiola’s time at City has followed a similar pattern: only once the constituent parts are in place has he felt ready to entrust the goalscoring responsibilities to a single generational talent. Remarkably, this will be the first time a City player has won the Golden Boot in Guardiola’s seven seasons in charge.
In this context the arrival of Haaland can be seen not as a departure from his vision, but the perfection of it. The roles are now strictly defined: Ilkay Gündogan is no longer a floating goal threat, Bernardo Silva now no longer makes his late diagonal runs into the six-yard box. Phil Foden, perhaps the least disciplined of City’s attackers, has found himself marginalised this season. Everything is curated and modulated to a single purpose: to present Haaland with the ball as close to goal as possible.
But let’s turn to Haaland himself. What are we to make of this strange goal orc, the genetic product of an encounter between 90s midfielder Alf Inge Haaland and a copy of Tekken 3 on Playstation? There is, perhaps, an in-built tedium to the existence of the career goalscorer, this largely unglamorous pursuit of brute volume: easy goals, ugly goals, pointless goals, the goals nobody recalls. How many of Alan Shearer’s 260 Premier League goals were genuinely memorable? What are the moments that stir the soul? Put more simply: is there any more to this elvish Norse phenomenon than cold numbers?
Clearly, there is an element of theatre to Haaland in full flow: the visceral and often thrilling spectacle of a large man simply shrugging off other large men and whacking the ball into a net. Even so, there is a curious and mesmeric consistency to how he scores his goals. All but one have come from inside the penalty area. The vast majority of his goals have come with his left foot, and the vast majority of those have gone to the goalkeeper’s right. Perhaps this helps to explain his relative goal drought in mid-season, a drought that at its most acute extended to all of three games.
There is an intellect at work here too, a mind that sees angles and spaces before they develop, that sniffs out the weaknesses in defence, that learns on the job. The Haaland we have seen in the second half of the season has been a subtly different animal to the one we saw in the first: more comfortable coming deep to receive the ball and start counterattacks, happier getting involved in buildup play, sharper out of possession. There are improvements still to come, new tricks to learn.
But ultimately it comes back to goals and to gauge the real importance of Haaland this season let’s consider an alternative universe without him. Let’s say that instead of Haaland, City sign a striker in a broadly similar target-man role, using his strength to win the ball and create chances for others while somehow managing to score zero goals. Let’s call this fictional character, for the purposes of argument, “Wout Weghorst”.
Swap Haaland for Weghorst – and leave everything else unchanged – and City are out of the title race by Christmas. They’re 12th by the time the season pauses for the Qatar World Cup, with even Champions League qualification a remote object on the horizon. They lose against Newcastle and Crystal Palace and Aston Villa, draw with Manchester United and Brighton and Fulham. Guardiola’s future is being called into question long before the late-spring rally that helps them recover to seventh place and a tilt at the Europa Conference League.
So for all the sense of certainty, Haaland was a lavish gamble that paid off. There is a kind of audacity to remodelling your entire team around a striker who had never played in the Premier League, who had never been top scorer in any of the domestic leagues he played in. Perhaps it doesn’t work. Perhaps Haaland gets injured in August and is out for months.
That it turned out this way is a testament not simply to Haaland but the clarity of the vision that placed him at its centre: the machine within the machine within the machine. Haaland was once just a rangy young kid from Bryne and City were once a punchline club bumbling around the divisions and Abu Dhabi was once just a pile of stones in the desert. It all looks so simple now. But zoom out and there’s a breathtaking chutzpah at work.
