Get a load of this guy. Back in May, I suggested that Manchester City might need to change their style to get the most out of their new striker, Erling Haaland.
"What would that mean? Less control and more transition. More possessions changing hands," I posited. "It would require City to be willing to concede more goals for the benefit of scoring more. It would mean faster forward passing, at the risk of losing the ball more often, for the reward of capitalizing on all the space that Haaland is better than anyone else in the world at running into."
Last season, City's matches featured 83 possessions per team -- 10 fewer than the league average, and 17 fewer than rivals Liverpool, whose 100 possessions per game were second most in the league behind Leeds United. They were the slowest team in the league, and then they got even slower.
Six games into this season, City's matches have featured 76 possessions per team. They're doing everything they can to prevent the kind of transitional moments in which Haaland flourished with Dortmund... and yet, Haaland has flourished anyway. Six Premier League games and 10 goals in, it's clear that Haaland works atop City's possession machine: they're able to dominate the ball using just 10 players in possession, and then Haaland finishes everything off.
It's a scary proposition because we already know that Haaland can exploit the higher lines City might begin to face as the league schedule gets tougher. (They're yet to play any of the league's seven best teams, per FiveThirtyEight's Soccer Power Index.) All of the tactical worlds in which we might have imagined Haaland struggling to score goals have already been destroyed.
So, how many goals might he score this season? Let's have some fun.
Projection 1: Past perfectly predicts the future
As mentioned already, Haaland has scored 10 goals through six games -- a record start for the Premier League era. Some serious elementary-level math tells me that 10 divided by six equals 1.66 with the six repeating, ad infinitum. So, if we take that rate -- rounded up to 1.67 goals per game -- and multiply it by the number of remaining matches (32), then we get 53.44. Round that down, then add it to the 10 he already has and we arrive at our first, admittedly absurd, prediction: 63 Premier League goals.
Last season, four Premier League teams (the eventual top four) scored more than 63 goals. The record across the Big Five leagues for goals in a single season is Lionel Messi's 50 for Barcelona in 2011-12.
Haaland likely isn't going to break Messi's record, but with what we've seen so far, coupled with the fact that Haaland is going to get a month-long break during the World Cup, we've already reached the point at which we can't definitely say that he won't score 50 goals, either.
Projection 2: The underlying numbers are not lying
It's unlikely that Haaland maintains this absurd level of performance for 38 games -- but even if he does, it's unlikely that he also continues to finish his chances at such a high clip. Per the most optimistic projection possible, we said he'd reach 63 goals. Through six matches, though, Haaland has 6.4 expected goals, per Stats Perform.
That's still, by far, the best mark in the league. (Fulham's Aleksandar Mitrovic is second with 4.3 xG.) But if Haaland continued getting the same shots and converting them at the same rate for the rest of the season, he would end up exceeding his expected goal total by 23 goals. That would smash Messi's record for shooting over-performance -- he scored some 17 goals more than expected in 2012-13, and he's the greatest finisher of all time.
So if we say that Haaland will regress to his xG rate over the rest of the season, that would be 1.1 xG per game, multiplied by 32, which gives us about 35 more goals. Add that to the ones he has already banked, and the new projection is a still-absurd, but much more reasonable, 45 goals.
Once again, it would also be stupid to ignore this possibility.
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The Premier League record for goals in a 38-game season is Mohamed Salah's 32 in 2017-18. Salah did that while also assisting 10 goals and playing a much bigger role in Liverpool's possession play. Salah averaged 32 pass attempts per game that year; Haaland is attempting just 15 passes per match. Haaland is focused purely on scoring goals in a way Salah wasn't, and he's also playing for a much better team than Salah was that season, when Liverpool just barely finished fourth.
Is that enough for a 13-goal gap? Well, through six matches, he's already six goals ahead of where Salah was at the same point in the season.
Projection 3: Playing time matters
Both of the previous projections are assuming that Haaland will play all 38 matches. Haaland has never played more than 28 games in a domestic season.
If he hits the 28-game mark for City, that means he has 22 more matches this Premier League season. If he continues to score at the exact same rate in those 22 games, he'll add about 37 more goals to his ledger, bringing the season-long total to 47. If he regresses to those xG numbers (1.1 per game), he'll score about 24 more goals, which would bring the full-season mark to 34, breaking Salah's record and tying him with Andy Cole and Alan Shearer, who both scored 34 goals back when the Premier League season was 42 matches long.
I think we can be a little more precise here, though. At Borussia Dortmund, Haaland played 72% of the available minutes in the Bundesliga. There are 2,880 Premier League minutes left to potentially play this season. Take 72% of that and you get 2,074 minutes. Currently, Haaland is:
- scoring a goal every 48.5 minutes
- generating an expected goal every 75.8 minutes
Production at those rates, with Haaland playing 72% of the remaining Premier League minutes, would lead to, on the high end, 43 more goals, and on the low end, 27 more goals. Put another way, if Haaland regresses to his career availability rate and to the conversion rate of the average European soccer player over the rest of the Premier League season, he will still smash the 38- and 42-game scoring records.
Projection 4: Just listen to the market
The best publicly available prediction system you'll find isn't some complicated algorithm or fancy-looking online projection table. No, it's at the place that takes all of that information into account, along with all kinds of softer factors the computers can't measure: the betting markets. At the Sporting Index sportsbook, they're taking bets on both sides of the number 33 for Erling Haaland's season-long goal total. They're essentially predicting that Haaland will score 33 goals this season.
That might seem low, given everything we've gone over, but that's not the right way to frame it. No, I look at it this way instead: The average outcome for this 22-year-old Norwegian behemoth in his first season in the Premier League is that he breaks the Premier League goal-scoring record.
So, why 33? It seems like that number is taking into account the likelihood of reduced playing time and a cooling-off of Haaland's finishing. It's also probably accounting for a reduced level of performance.
The average forward moving from the Bundesliga to the Premier League sees a drop-off in his xG by about 0.07 per 90 minutes, according to work by analyst Tony El Habr. Instead, Haaland's shot profile has improved with his move to England. He's averaging 1.19 xG per 90 minutes with City, after averaging 0.85 with Dortmund. He probably won't keep getting quite this many high-quality shots for the rest of the season, but even if Haaland ends with "just" 33 goals, that would still mean that he has scored 0.72 goals per game over the remainder of the season. It would also mean that he still has 23 more goals to go.
According to Sporting Index, Harry Kane is projected to finish second in the league with 21 goals -- total. Last season, Salah and Son Heung-min won the Golden Boot with 23 goals. Haaland's average expectation is that he scores that many goals from here on out.
At just 22, Haaland has already reached the point at which it's almost silly to compare him to his contemporaries -- and he's quickly approaching the point where he can't be compared to anyone in the past, either. He has scored 25 goals in his first 20 Champions League matches -- nine more than any player ever has. He already has scored more goals in the Premier League than Andriy Shevchenko did across his entire Chelsea career. For Norway, he has played 21 games and scored 20 goals -- just 13 back of the record set by Jorgen Juve, who both graduated from law school and worked as a sports journalist while he was playing professional soccer.
Haaland is already the best goal scorer we've ever seen at his age. But with each passing game, those last three words are becoming less and less necessary.