Erling Haaland is not in crisis. Let’s not be silly here.
He’s the odds-on favourite to win the domestic double and the Premier League Golden Boot for the second season in a row, a feat not even Thierry Henry managed to pull off. If Antonio Rudiger’s final shootout penalty for Real Madrid this week had hit the post one more inch to the left, Manchester City might still be favoured to make it back-to-back trebles.
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If this season is a crisis, it’s the kind anyone else would kill to have.
But as long as we’re being honest, our big blond destroyer of worlds hasn’t exactly lived up to his billing lately, has he?
Over the last six weeks, Haaland has just one non-penalty goal and zero assists in seven matches. He was a ghost against Liverpool and Arsenal in games that could have put the Premier League away. Across both legs of the Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid, he scored no goals from six shots — two on target — while completing a grand total of 11 passes.
Here we are in the critical stretch of spring when seasons are won and lost, and City’s leading scorer might as well have wandered out of the stadium to admire the daffodils.
The main problem is simple: his shots just aren’t going in like they used to.
The reason Haaland is one of the world’s best strikers is that he finds great chances.
In each of his five seasons of top-five league and Champions League play, he’s maintained a steady average somewhere in the neighbourhood of 0.76 non-penalty expected goals per 90 minutes played. That’s outrageously good, second only to Robert Lewandowski in that stretch.
What elevated him from merely world-class into the rarefied air of all-time greats, though, is that for most of his young career, Haaland has also managed to finish those chances at a ludicrous rate. When he left Borussia Dortmund for Manchester City at the age of 20, he had scored 74 goals from 54.5 expected goals in elite competitions, or 36 per cent more than an average shooter would be expected to score from the same chances.
(Side note: “finishing” is not exactly the same thing as “the ratio of a player’s goals divided by expected goals”, but since that’s a mathy mouthful we’ll use the football term as shorthand.)
As long as Haaland could keep taking better shots than just about anyone and finishing them better than anyone, not even Lionel Messi’s scoring records appeared safe.
At the time of the transfer, I wrote a case against Haaland to Manchester City, worrying in part that nobody’s finishing could stay that hot for long. Sure, Haaland was obviously better than the average shooter, but probably not 36 per cent better. If we wanted to know how many goals Haaland would score in the future, we should pay less attention to his past scoring rate than to the quality of his chances.
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During his first season with Manchester City, that prediction turned out to be hilariously wrong. He crushed his expected goals in the Premier League and Champions League — only by 25 per cent this time, sure, but that was more than enough to shatter records and win every trophy in sight.
Finishing is notoriously fickle, though, and this season, for the first time in his life, Haaland is having an off year.
He’s still finding excellent shots — his 0.77 non-penalty expected goals per 90 minutes in the Premier League and Champions League puts this season right in line with his career average — but so far this season he has scored 20 per cent fewer goals than expected, enough to demote him from “second coming of Gerd Muller” to “Norwegian Alexander Isak”.
For the most part, that’s probably bad luck. If Haaland’s looping header against Real Madrid this week had grazed the underside of the crossbar instead of bouncing off it, for example, nobody would be writing articles about a scoring slump. Sometimes the shots just don’t go in.
His two seasons in Manchester have given us a lot more information on just how good a finisher Haaland really is.
He’s one of just 49 players to have taken at least 500 shots in Europe’s top seven domestic leagues plus the Champions League and Europa League since 2017-18. After we adjust shooters’ finishing numbers using a technique outlined by City Football Group’s own director of football data Laurie Shaw, Haaland is — surprise! — still very good at putting balls in the net.
This method estimates Haaland’s “true” finishing rate to be about 15 per cent higher than his expected goals. Maybe he isn’t quite Messi after all, but he’s probably not going to keep finishing like Timo Werner, either.
When I asked him to put a number on how unlikely Haaland’s off year has been, the data scientist Tony El Habr compared his 131 shots this season against random samples of the same size taken from Haaland’s entire career. Only two per cent of the samples came back with him scoring 20 per cent fewer goals than expected. Either Haaland suddenly forgot how to score, in other words, or this season has been a horrific run of bad bounces.
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If there’s any real cause for concern, it’s that Haaland is taking different kinds of shots than he used to.
Back when he was finishing at an impossible clip for Red Bull Salzburg and Dortmund, Haaland’s favourite chances came from galloping past defenders in transition and letting loose with his cannon of a left foot. In Manchester City’s comparatively glacial game, that kind of breakaway is hard to come by. These days Haaland’s trademark finish is fading to the back post in a packed penalty area so he can head home a short, floated cross.
In that old column arguing against Haaland to City, I worried that a striker who had up to that point taken just 10 per cent of his shots with his head might not help much against the low blocks City routinely face. I was mostly wrong about that, too: as it turns out, Haaland has had no problem changing his game to get up for headers.
This season, he’s taken 29 per cent of his shots with his head, just shy of Dominic Solanke’s 30 per cent for Bournemouth.
The catch here is that, even though he still kicks the stuffing out of statistical models with his feet, he scores about 10 per cent fewer goals than expected from shots with his head. To some extent, turning Haaland into a different kind of finisher may have robbed him of his xG-defying superpower.
All this talk about finishing is mostly a sideshow. As long as Haaland keeps finding chances at the rate he always has, he’ll keep scoring goals, and as long as he keeps scoring, City will keep being a very good football team. The point here is only that we shouldn’t always expect him to score quite as many of those chances as he did last season. Sometimes the shots won’t go in. Sometimes he’ll look almost — gasp — human.
The problem for Manchester City is that they’ve been counting on Haaland’s finishing to paper over cracks in the team’s performance.
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In Haaland’s first season, City’s non-penalty expected goal difference fell by more than half a goal per game. This season it’s slipped even further. It’s not at all clear that trading full-backs and fluidity for a bunch of flat-footed giants has made the team better unless one of those giants is banging home goals at an impossible clip.
Erling Haaland is not in crisis. Neither are Manchester City. The lesson of this season, though, is they can’t count on all the shots going in forever.
(Top photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
