TThe most remarkable thing, seeing them all back, is how simple it looks. Elemental entrances to the distant place. Endings slotted into an empty net with the goalkeeper sprawled several meters away like a casualty on the battlefield. Two-yard headers from the shoulders of more beta and punchier males. Penalties dispatched with all the security of a bow and arrow. These are the goals that will make the legend – the stuff, the meat and potatoes, the boring stuff that Premier League goalscoring records are made of.
And when we say simple, we must not work under any illusion that what Erling Haaland does is easy. On the contrary: this is the culmination of perhaps the most daring and complex project ever undertaken in English football. A club bought and equipped with the sole purpose of assembling and training a team whose sole purpose is to deliver the ball into dangerous attacking areas, over and over and over again.
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To this end, the property of the city of Abu Dhabi has been prepared to stop at practically nothing. Transfer records have been written and rewritten. The best coach in the world has been hired and given almost everything he wants. There was a slight misconception last summer that the signing of Haaland somehow represented a break with Pep Guardiola’s classic method. And yet we go back to Guardiola’s previous teams and there is a common evolutionary theme: a machine that is being slowly assembled, a process that is being fine-tuned, perfected and finally honed to a single spectacular point.
At Barcelona, the goals were initially shared between the front three of Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi. In Guardiola’s last season, 2011-12, the team had been completely rebuilt around Messi, who scored 50 La Liga goals (next highest was Alexis Sanchez with 12). Robert Lewandowski’s goalscoring form at Bayern Munich only appeared in Guardiola’s final season. Guardiola’s move to City has followed a similar pattern: only once the components are in place has he felt ready to entrust the goal-scoring responsibilities to a single generational talent. Remarkably, it 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 cannot be seen as a deviation 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 no longer makes his late diagonal runs into the six-yard box. Phil Foden, perhaps the least disciplined of City’s forwards, has found himself sidelined this season. Everything is curated and modulated with a single purpose: to present Haaland with the ball as close to the goal as possible.
But let’s go to Haaland himself. What do we make of this strange goal orc, the genetic product of a meeting between 90s midfielder Alf Inge Haaland and a copy of Tekken 3 on Playstation? There is, perhaps, a tedium built into the existence of the career goalscorer, this largely unglamorous pursuit of raw volume: easy goals, ugly goals, pointless goals, the goals no one remembers. How many of Alan Shearer’s 260 Premier League goals were actually memorable? What are the moments that move the soul? Put more simply: Is there more to this Norse elven phenomenon than cold numbers?
Erling Haaland of Manchester City shoots the ball past West Ham goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski for his record goal. Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images
There is clearly an element of theater to Haaland in full flow: the visceral and often thrilling spectacle of a big man simply shrugging off other big men and hitting the ball into the net. Still, there is a curious and mesmerizing consistency in how he scores his goals. All but one have come from the penalty area. The vast majority of his goals have come with his left foot, and the vast majority have gone to the goalkeeper’s right. Perhaps that helps explain his relative goal drought midway through the season, a drought that at its peak stretched across three games.
There’s an intellect at work here, too, a mind that sees angles and spaces before they develop, that sniffs out weaknesses in the defense, that learns on the job. The Haaland we’ve seen in the second half of the season has been a subtly different animal to the one we saw in the first: more comfortable going deep to receive the ball and start counter-attacks, happier getting involved in the game concentration, sharper out of possession. . There are still improvements to come, new tricks to learn.
But eventually it comes back to goals and to measure Haaland’s true importance this season, let’s consider an alternate universe without him. Let’s say instead of Haaland, City sign a striker in a very 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 plot purposes, “Wout Weghorst.”
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Swap Haaland for Weghorst, and leave the rest unchanged, and City will be out of the title race by Christmas. They are 12th when the season stops for the World Cup in Qatar, 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 in doubt long before the late spring rally that helps them regain seventh place and a place in the Europa Conference League.
Pep Guardiola has reshaped his team around Erling Haaland, a striker who has never played in the Premier League before. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
So for all the sense of certainty, Haaland was a lavish gamble that paid off. There’s a kind of daring in reshaping your entire team around a striker who’s never played in the Premier League, who’s never been top scorer in any of the domestic leagues he’s played in. It might not work. Maybe Haaland gets injured in August and is out for months.
That it turned out like this is a testament not only to Haaland, but to the clarity of the vision that placed him at the center: the machine within the machine within the machine. Haaland was once just a small boy from Bryne and City were once a punchline club floundering through divisions and Abu Dhabi was just a pile of stones in the desert. Everything seems so simple now. But step away and there’s a sense of awesomeness at work.
