With one sweep of his ominous left boot, Erling Haaland notched up the 34th Premier League goal of his debut season, which just so happened to be his 50th for Manchester City across all competitions this term.
Haaland had already surpassed the record tally of 32 goals previously set by Mohamed Salah (2017/18) in a 38-game Premier League season with his stoppage-time swipe against Arsenal in midweek. The flaxen-haired Norwegian needed less than three minutes to rifle a low penalty past Fulham’s Bernd Leno in Manchester City’s next match on Sunday afternoon.
Figures had already been hastily scrawled over by Haaland before he even officially joined Manchester City last summer. While completing his medical as part of a £51m transfer from Borussia Dortmund, the 22-year-old was measured at a height of 195.2m. “Oh wow, I’ve grown,” Haaland gasped while reclining on a bed in the treatment room, “almost one centimetre!”
Andrew Cole (although, he was known as Andy at the time) and Alan Shearer had the benefit of a 42-game league season to rack up 34 goals. Cole plundered his gluttonous haul in 1993/94 for Kevin Keegan’s Newcastle United – and, as has often been lost in the fog of time, finished as the Premier League’s outright leading assist provider in the same season.
One year later, Shearer hit the same tally as Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League title. It was the only league season of his career in which Shearer played every available league game, missing a grand total of eight minutes all year. Not only has the division’s subsequent restructuring provided Haaland with fewer games to match Shearer’s joint record, but a couple of niggling injuries have limited Haaland to 30 appearances this season.
Across the three-decade-long history of the Premier League, 25 teams scored fewer than 34 goals across their first 30 appearances in the competition. When a single player’s goalscoring output is being measured against entire clubs, he has surely outstripped the modern confines of the Premier League era.
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Yet, even when taking into consideration the entire history of English top-flight football, Haaland can only be bettered by less than a handful.
By taking his tally to half a century across all competitions, Haaland became the first player in 92 years to score 50 goals in a single season for a club at the top of the English pyramid.
Aston Villa’s Tom ‘Pongo’ Waring notched up exactly 50 during the 1930/31 campaign. Waring was plying his trade during a historic stretch of scoring form for English goalscorers. Just the year before, West Ham’s legendary Vic Watson also hit 50 goals across all competitions and, of course, in 1928, Dixie Dean cemented his status in the annals of English football with a scarcely believable 63 strikes.
Dean’s unholy tally included 60 goals in the English top flight alone, a record that even Haaland’s prodigious goal-gobbling would struggle to catch. In fact, before the formation of the Premier League, no fewer than 36 players scored 35 or more league goals in a single season of football.
Manchester City and Haaland have six league matches left to play in their bid for the top-flight crown. Guardiola’s side also have an FA Cup final to contest against Manchester United and at least two more Champions League games against Real Madrid in the competition’s semi-finals, giving Haaland a minimum of nine more matches to bolster his tally and get as close to Dean’s 63 as he can.
On this edition of Talking Transfers, part of the 90min podcast network, Scott Saunders, Graeme Bailey & Toby Cudworth discuss Chelsea’s likely appointment of Mauricio Pochettino, the carnage at Tottenham and Harry Kane’s next steps, David de Gea and Harry Maguire’s Man Utd futures, Lionel Messi’s impending Barcelona return & more!
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