Look Out, Messi: Erling Haaland Is Coming For Your 50-Goal Club

After Erling Haaland scored twice in his first league game after the World Cup break, a British newspaper describe it as “head and shoulders above the rest.” It is a reference to Norway’s striking long blonde hair and a popular shampoo brand. Since signing with Manchester City last summer, there is no better way to capture how much Haaland has dominated English football.

While the English Premier League champions have yet to win their third consecutive league title – City’s impressive team trails this season, Arsenal, by five points with 18 games left to play – it’s Haaland, in each level, more than justifies the fear. The opposition manager thought when a player with his combination of size (he is 6-foot-3), speed and skill arrived from the German team Borussia Dortmund. Entering the new era, the first question is how big will the scale of the future evaluation be. Some say he will break Andy Cole and Alan Shearer’s single-season EPL record of 34. Others go further and predict 40.

Few, if any, went on record saying he would reach 50. But after 19 games, Haaland has already scored 25 goals. Among the EPL records that have been broken include: fastest player to score 10 goals (six games); Fastest player to score three hat tricks (eight games); The fastest player to 20 goals (13 games) and the only player to score 20 times before January, despite this season having six weeks off for the World Cup. With 18 games to go, he is currently on pace for an unheard-of-before-in-English-football 49 if he plays all of City’s remaining matches and maintains the record. -your game of evaluation.

Whenever Haaland touches the ball – or even near it – defenders across the league are on high alert for potential embarrassment. Surrounded by some of the most gifted players in the world – Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden, to name a trio – the 50 goal mark is not out of the question this season.

And it’s not just English records that Haaland has in his way of destruction, either. Looking at the best single-season totals ever in Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and France’s Ligue 1, Haaland quickly topped the combined record books of Europe’s top five leagues. If the Norwegian continues at his current strike rate, Lionel Messi’s 50-goal La Liga campaign alone for Barcelona in the 2011-12 season will stand on his way to the most in the history of the top five leagues.

What makes Haaland’s first EPL campaign even more remarkable, though, is that he did it at just 22 years of age. Messi was 24 when he scored 50 and has already spent the past seven seasons building a relationship with Barcelona’s first team. When Cristiano Ronaldo scored 48 times for Real Madrid three seasons later, he was 29 years old and well into his prime. Then there’s the fact that Haaland is doing this in a league considered the richest – the EPL is predicted to generate €7.1 billion this season, almost double that of second-place La Liga, according to Statista – and that’s good. most in the world – English. teams have performed best in the UEFA Champions League and Europa League over the past three seasons, according to the UEFA National Qualifiers.

Like Messi and Ronaldo before him, Haaland will forever be compared to one era star: Kylian Mbappé. The French wonder burst onto the scene in the 2016-17 season, when he helped Monaco win their first league title in nearly two years with 15 goals as a 17-year-old. PSG then sold out £166 million to making him the most expensive teenager ever, and the second most expensive footballer in the world. So far in his already iconic career, Mbappé has won five Ligue 1 titles, three French Cups and the 2018 FIFA World Cup with France. After his hat-trick in the 2022 FIFA World Cup final last month, the 24-year-old is widely regarded as the best in the world.

Haaland’s trophy cabinet is pretty empty by comparison – Haaland won the Austrian Bundesliga and Austrian Cup with RB Salzburg, and the German Cup with Dortmund. But in terms of individual scoring ability, Haaland is the most clinical in front of goal to start his career, compared with any of his three teammates.

As Haaland continues to hit the record books, it is fitting that the man who led him to the top of the game is the same manager who led Messi to the top. Pep Guardiola is a serial winner – the Spaniard won 14 trophies with Barcelona, ​​seven with Bayern Munich, and in Manchester he has 11 and counting. Also, Guardiola has brought countless players with strong potential and made them famous. At Barcelona, ​​apart from Messi, Pep helped the likes of Andres Iniesta and current Barcelona manager Xavi Hernandez take their games to the next level. At Bayern, he did the same with Robert Lewandowski. And now at City, De Bruyne, Rodri and João Cancelo have become arguably the best in the world in their position.

But with Haaland, Guardiola has arguably his most improved player at such a young age. As a further measure of his greatness, Haaland took just 20 games to score 25 goals under Guardiola – the fastest to do so, in eight games less than Messi. Perhaps the scariest factor of all is how the great Haaland could end up under Pep when he became even more brilliant.

Haaland’s rise has no end in sight. His country’s lack of international success could end up being Haaland’s kryptonite in the GOAT debate. A world witness as Messi winning the World Cup with Argentina could have elevated his position above Ronaldo, Pelé and Diego Maradona. But Norway, on the other hand, has qualified for only three of the 22 FIFA World Cups – the most recent in 1998 before Haaland was even born – and has played one of the 16 UEFA European Championships. That said, if Haaland can lead his country to the final stages of a major tournament, it could be his greatest achievement – apart from his current assault on the Premier League record books.

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