Before the season started, I wrote a story about how Manchester City striker Erling Haaland wouldn't win the Premier League Golden Boot.
His preseason odds for the award, via ESPN Bet, were minus-150, which comes out to a 60% implied probability of leading the league in goals. On the one hand, any one player being the odds-on favorite to score the most goals in a league as wealthy as the Premier League before a ball is even kicked seemed absurd. Soccer is too random, injuries are so common and there's just so much unpredictable stuff that changes our expectations over the course of a 38-game season.
At the same time, the odds also seemed absurd in the other direction, too. Were we really supposed to believe that there was a 40% chance that Haaland -- who scored 63 goals in his first two(!) Premier League seasons -- wouldn't score more than anyone else? I mean, didn't the Norway international just have the whole summer off while everyone else was grinding themselves into dust at the Euros and Copa America? And didn't he just turn 24, the age when center forwards typically enter their prime?
Four games in, it all looks pretty silly. Haaland has nine goals -- more than every other Premier League team, including Chelsea, who scored six goals vs. Wolves. No other player has scored more than three. And so, after fewer than 400 minutes of game time, Haaland's odds have already leapt all the way up to minus-800 -- or an implied probability of 89%.
Barring injury, Haaland is no longer competing against his peers. He's battling with history -- his own, and some of the greatest players of all time. (Chasing down Lionel Messi's record of 50 goals in a single season might be something in his sights, for example.) So, ahead of City's clash with Arsenal on Sunday, we have to ask: how many goals could he realistically score?
History vs. Haaland
Steve Nicol reacts to Erling Haaland's brace in Man City's 2-1 win over Brentford.
The website FBref contains goal data for all the Big Five leagues back to at least the 1995-96 season. The French Ligue 1 data goes back that far, while the English Premier League data extends to 1992-23 (the inaugural season after the rebrand), while the three other leagues, the German Bundesliga, Spanish LaLiga and Italian Serie A, go all the way back to 1988-89.
We'll call this soccer's "modern era." It's the period when most of the best players in the world had begun to play in Europe and typically for a team in one of these five leagues.
In 2022-23, Haaland broke the Premier League's goal-scoring record with 36. This was particularly notable because the first three years of the league featured 22 teams, and therefore 42 games instead of the current load of 38. Before Haaland, both Blackburn's Alan Shearer and Newcastle's Andy Cole scored 34 goals during the 22-team era. Under the current setup, the previous record holder was Liverpool's Mohamed Salah, who notched 32 goals in the 2017-18 season.
Although Haaland easily cleared Salah's record two seasons ago, he wasn't anywhere near the record across Europe's top leagues. In fact, in this modern era, a player has scored more goals than Haaland's Premier League-record tally 11 different times. The list:
• 1. Lionel Messi, Barcelona, 2011-12: 50
• 2. Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2014-15: 48
• T-3. Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2011-12: 46
• T-3. Lionel Messi, Barcelona, 2012-13: 45
• 5. Lionel Messi, Barcelona, 2014-15: 43
• 6. Robert Lewandowski, Bayern Munich, 2020-21: 41
• T-7. Cristiano Ronaldo, Real Madrid, 2010-11: 40
• T-7. Luis Suárez, Barcelona, 2015-16: 40
• T-9. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Paris Saint-Germain, 2015-16: 38
• T-9. Hugo Sanchez, Real Madrid, 1989-90: 38
• 11. Lionel Messi, Barcelona, 2016-17: 37
Before we move on, I'd just like to point out that in the 2011-12 season -- the one when Messi and Ronaldo combined for 96 goals in LaLiga -- the team that won the Champions League was Roberto Di Matteo's Chelsea, who finished sixth in the Premier League. This is why we love this sport.
Anyway, it's not just those 11 seasons, either. There are four other seasons that matched Haaland's total from 2022-23, too: Gonzalo Higuain for Napoli in 2015-16, Messi for Barcelona in 2018-19, Ciro Immobile for Lazio in 2019-20 and Harry Kane for Bayern last year.
To briefly continue to rain on Haaland's parade: What if we strip out penalty kicks? Then he doesn't even have the Premier League record. All 34 of Cole's goals were of the non-penalty variety while, in the 38-game era, both Salah and Luis Suarez in 2013-14 netted 31 times without spot kicks for Liverpool. Haaland scored 29 non-penalty goals in 2022-23.
Across Europe's top leagues, the record for the modern era for non-penalty goals is Messi's 42 in 2012-13, and that broke the previous record of 40 -- that Messi set the season before. Messi scored 30 or more non-penalty goals in a season eight times. No other player has more than three (Ronaldo), while two others, Lewandowski and Suarez, have done it twice.
But in the record books -- and for the Golden Boot -- penalties count just the same as a screamer from long-range or a deft chip over the keeper from a tight angle. And while Haaland's best season is still behind, and sometimes well behind, the best goal-scoring seasons we've ever seen, he does have one advantage over everyone else ahead of him on the list.
The average age of the players from the 11 seasons with more goals than Haaland's best is 28. Lewandowski and Sanchez were both 31 when they posted their career-best marks, while Ibrahimovic was 33. And so, provided he stays healthy, Haaland should have at least four more bites at the apple -- if not double that.
Interestingly, though, the name at the top of the list is also the youngest. When Messi set the modern record 50 goals, he was 24 -- the same age Haaland is right now.
How have similar young stars performed as they've aged into their primes?
Across our roughly defined modern era, Haaland has the second-most goals in a Big Five league before his age-24 season, i.e. whatever season when the player is 24 years old on Aug. 1. His 135 goals are behind only the 164 from his contemporary Kylian Mbappé, who's a year and a half older and won't really help us predict what to expect from Haaland.
But beyond those two, there are six players who scored at least 100 top-level goals before their age-24 season:
- Raúl, Real Madrid: 125
- Lionel Messi, Barcelona: 119
- Michael Owen, Liverpool: 118
- Robbie Fowler, Liverpool: 106
- Wayne Rooney, Everton and Manchester United: 106
- Fernando Torres, Atletico Madrid and Liverpool: 100
Shockingly, despite a lengthy career with Real Madrid, Raúl never even scored 20 goals in a season from age 24 on. His best was the 18 he scored as a 30-year-old in 2007-08. Messi, as we've already been over, is the only player to ever score 50 in a season. Owen, meanwhile, was one of the best teenagers in the history of the sport -- 18 goals and 10 assists in the Premier League as a 17-year-old -- but injuries meant he only scored 45 goals from age 24 on, the most (13) coming in his age-24 season right after moving to Real Madrid in the summer of 2004.
It was a similar story to Owen for Fowler -- albeit for different reasons. He only scored 57 goals in the Premier League from age 24 on, with his high mark (12) coming for Leeds United in 2001-02. While Rooney's career didn't have much of a shelf life beyond his prime years, he was still productive in those prime years. His best goal-scoring season, 27, came at age 25. And then Torres, too, really fell off right when he was supposed to be entering his prime -- mostly due to injuries. His best 24-and-older season was the 18 goals he scored in his age-25 season for Liverpool in 2009-10.
If we just take the average of the best 24-and-older seasons from those players and use that as a projection for Haaland, then we'd think that his average-best season from here on out would produce 23 goals. That's great -- for most players. No one else in the Premier League scored that many goals last season! But Haaland is averaging 31 goals over his first two Premier League campaigns and he's on pace to blow that number out of the water this year.
I think training methods have significantly improved in the modern era, and we're seeing way more players dominate well into their 30s than we did when Fowler, Owen, Raúl and even Torres and Rooney were coming up. I'd put my money on Haaland continuing to score a ton of goals when he enters his third decade. But while it does seem like we're set for a decade of Mbappé and Haaland dominating the sport, there's at least some history that suggests that players who score a ton of goals at a young age don't age all that well.
Pep Guardiola believes that Erling Haaland can achieve similar numbers to that of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
How far can Haaland go?
If we look at all the players who scored more non-penalty goals than Haaland's best season, then something interesting, if not unsurprising, pops up: they're significantly younger than the players who scored more total goals than Haaland's best season.
The average age for the players in these 23 seasons is 26.8; 70% of them were younger than 30, while eight were 25 and under. Ronaldo is there once, and Messi is there three times. Salah's then-record-breaking season came at age 25. Cole's 34 goals and no penalties season came at age 21. Mbappé scored 32 non-penalty goals for PSG at 19, while Ronaldo Nazário scored 30 in his one season with Barcelona at the same age.
We know that players are at their best between the ages of 24 and 28, generally, and that non-penalty goals are a much better representation of ability than penalty goals. So, the players who have scored a lot of non-penalty goals have tended to be a bit younger. At the same time, older players are typically the ones tasked with taking penalties; they've either established seniority within the team or they've played enough to be trusted by a manager to convert their spot kicks.
So, the key for a truly supernova goal-scoring season -- say, one where you score 50 goals -- is to be both in your physical prime, but also to have been so good at such a young age that you're also chosen to take your team's penalties. That's right where Messi was in 2011-12, and it's where Haaland is right now. The result, through just four matches:
No Premier League player had ever scored nine goals through four matches until Haaland did it last weekend. And at least within Stats Perform's database, which extends back until 2010, no other player in any of the other Big Five leagues has done it. In Sanchez's 1989-90 season for Real Madrid, he only had three goals from his first four. So, Haaland is currently scoring at a higher clip than all of the 11 best goal-scoring seasons of the modern era were at this point in the season.
As for expected goals (xG), Haaland has the best start in the Premier League era for which the data is available, but it's just the ninth-best haul across the Big Five leagues:
The first season is Ronaldo in 2011-12 for Real Madrid. Then it's Lewandowski in 2021-22 for Bayern, Messi in 2013-24 for Barcelona, Lewandowski in 2020-21, Ronaldo in 2015-16, Lewandowski in 2016-17, Thomas Müller for Bayern in 2015-16, André Silva(!) for Eintracht Frankfurt in 2020-21 and then Radamel Falcao for Atletico Madrid in 2012-13.
On average, those players ended their seasons with 32 goals -- and that's slightly underselling things because more than half of the seasons come from the Bundesliga, where there are only 18 teams and four fewer games. If we bump that up by a goal or so, it aligns really nicely with where the betting markets put Haaland's current over-under total for the season: 34 goals.
But we want to dream a little bigger than that, don't we?
When Messi scored 50 goals, he'd scored eight goals and generated 4.66 xG through four games. Through four games, Haaland has more goals and more xG.
It's absurd to predict anyone to score 50 goals in a season because, well, it's only happened once and the only player to do it is also the greatest soccer player of all time. But it's not like anyone expected Messi to do it, either.
In the two seasons before he scored 50 goals, he scored 65 goals combined. And over the past two seasons, Haaland has scored 63 goals, combined. When you adjust it for minutes played (Haaland was injured for a chunk of last season), their goal-scoring rates are nearly identical. And, again, they're also the same age.
Haaland probably isn't going to score 50 goals this year, but if he were going to do it? The first four games of that season would look almost exactly like the first four games of this season.