REVEALED: Erling Haaland has still actually scored zero proper goals for Manchester City
It’s the international break, Erling Haaland has already helped himself to seven Premier League goals in three games this season against the might of Chelsea, Ipswich and West Ham, and we’ve got absolutely nothing better to do with our time.
Therefore we are about to set out to prove that – just like Harry Kane’s so-called England so-called goals – Erling Haaland has actually scored zero proper goals that are real and count for Manchester City.
Any complaints about this will be punished severely. If you don’t behave yourselves, we’ll make this a full series and it’s only a matter of time before it’s your favourite player having all their goals taken off them. Certainly wouldn’t want to be a Dixie Dean or Pele fan right now, is all we’re saying.
Anyway. Here goes. Here’s the proof, if proof be need be, of Haaland’s embarrassing fraudulence despite what on the surface appear to be quite good numbers.
Starting total: 97 Manchester City goals
The 15 penalties
Let’s start with the lowest-hanging of all the fraudulent goalscoring fruits. Penalties. A free shot at goal from 12 yards? Statistically worth 0.80 of a goal even if you’re not a terrifying Norwegian robot sent from the future/Leeds to destroy us all? Genuinely embarrassing that anyone who considers themselves an elite goalscorer will dirty themselves by accepting such cheap, tawdry goalscoring options at all.
New Haaland City goal tally: 82 goals
The 17 flabby stat-padding hat-trick goals
If there’s one thing more fraudulent than scoring penalties like Perling Paaland loves to do, then it’s scoring greedy and meaningless hat-tricks against long-beaten teams. Four of Haaland’s City hat-tricks have been such examples of fraudulence. Some would argue that having to eliminate multiple hat-tricks from someone’s record at all is actually an indicator that the player might be quite good, but these people are idiots.
Haaland has scored three goals in 6-0 wins against Nottingham Forest and Burnley and also in a 5-1 paddling of Fulham. None of those goals are worth a thing. Worse, he got FIVE against Leipzig in a game that even without him would have ended in a routine 2-0 win for Pep Guardiola’s team. We’ve already chalked one of those five off for being a grubby little penalty, but it’s still four more struck from the total.
There was no need for him to score four goals against Wolves, was there? Sure if you take all four of those goals away it actually ends in a 1-1 draw which is arguably not as good as a win, but we can definitely take two of them away, can’t we? No harm in that. And does it matter here now that we’ve actually already taken the other two off for being penalties. No, it does not. Shut up, it doesn’t.
The third goals in each of his recent hat-tricks against Ipswich and West Ham are also clearly unnecessary and amount to just showing off. So they can go too.
New Haaland City goal tally: 65 goals
The 25 other assorted flabby and unnecessary goals
It’s not just unnecessary hat-tricks that greedy guts Haaland likes to score, though. No, he’ll help himself to one or two meaningless goals here and there if the chance arises. Two in a 4-0 win over Sevilla, another couple in a 5-0 against Copenhagen and a brace in a 4-1 against Southampton. None of these are goals that need to exist. And now they don’t.
Throw in further single goals in a 3-0 win over Wolves, a 4-0 win over Southampton, a 4-2 win over Spurs, a 3-1 win over Arsenal (the third City goal, scored in injury time to make it even more pointless, but while it no longer officially counts as a goal, it does earn style points for being scored with his hair flowing free as he awaited the final whistle), a 4-1 win over Bournemouth, a 3-0 win over Bayern Munich and an unneeded goal in the box-ticking exercise that was the second leg of that clash, another goal in a drubbing of Arsenal – 4-1 this time – and goals in 3-0 wins over West Ham and Everton (who were both busy being absolutely terrible at the time), another goal in a 3-1 win over West Ham, and further strikes in 3-0 and 3-1 wins over Man United, in a 4-2 win over Palace, a 2-0 win against Forest, another in a 2-0 win against Chelsea, one in a 3-1 win over Copenhagen and it’s impossible to conclude anything other than this guy being a waste of space.
New Haaland City goals total: 40 goals
The one Carabao goal
Not a proper cup, is it? Definitely the least important anyway. City haven’t even bothered winning it at all for the last couple of seasons, and Haaland to his credit doesn’t give it much thought either, scoring but a single goal in his two appearances. It was against some team called Liverpool, who I’ve never heard of and surely aren’t much good, so that’s an easy one to get rid of.
New Haaland City goals total: 39 goals
The three goals scored when Phil Foden also got a hat-trick
We love Phil Foden, but he’s a clever, tricky attacking player rather than a pure goalscorer, isn’t he? His record supports this, with 87 goals in 271 games for Manchester City and more compellingly just four in 41 for England. Can get goals, sure, but not an elite goalscorer. So if a team is letting him get a hat-trick, as Manchester United cartoonishly did in October 2022, then it stands to reason that this cannot be considered a proper or sensible game of football and that Haaland’s own hat-trick in the game should thus be struck from the record. If further evidence of this game’s outlier-anomaly-to-be-ignored status is needed – and it surely isn’t – then Anthony Martial scoring twice provides it.
New Haaland City goals total: 36 goals
The three goals scored when he only touched the ball 16 times and on the same day Liverpool scored nine
Doubly embarrassing one for the big Norwegian, this. Not only did his quick-fire second-half hat-trick against Crystal Palace back in August 2022 come in a game where he could only be bothered to touch the ball 16 times (seven of which were shots) but also on a day when Liverpool scored nine goals against Bournemouth. Clearly, Haaland was mucking about this day and scored his goals purely and spitefully in a bid to try and ride the coat-tails of Liverpool’s goal-plundering exploits. Tacky. Cheap. Tawdry. Only a fool would include them in a meaningful list of goals that count.
New Haaland City goals total: 33 goals
The two goals scored in the city of his birth
Two reasons: one, you can’t really call goals scored against Leeds proper goals, can you? Everyone scored goals against Leeds. And second, he was bound to be more comfortable in the cosy familiar surroundings of the West Yorkshire environs he called home for the first three years of his life. Daft and unfair to rank those alongside goals players have scored in cities they have never lived in at all.
New Haaland City goals total: 31 goals
The one goal with the muted celebration
We hate muted celebrations. We’d genuinely scrub off all goals that are followed by performative non-celebrations if we had Arsene Wenger’s job (hey, it’s less mad an idea than his offside ramblings). You should celebrate more when you score against your former club, if anything. Go really wild. Emmanuel Adebayor – now there was a man who had the right idea. Some would say it’s needlessly harsh to chalk off an 84th-minute Champions League winner against Borussia Dortmund for a reason that is quite this small and twatty, but to be honest we are already really struggling here. If you hadn’t noticed.
New Haaland City goals total: 30 goals
The 11 remaining goals assisted by Kevin De Bruyne
Oh, you can score goals when you’ve got the world’s best playmaker just popping them on a plate for you? How very impressive. And by the way, we were being sarcastic. Other players at other clubs don’t have the advantage of De Bruyne making their lives easy like this. Any fair comparison between Haaland and others therefore requires De Bruyne-assisted goals be removed to ensure the statistical robustness of the dataset.
That takes care of the second goal against West Ham on the opening weekend of last season, the opening goal of his hat-trick against Wolves in January, one of the goals he scored in a 2-0 win over Everton, four of his five goals in the FA Cup win over Luton and City’s third goal against Leicester in April.
We’ve also now managed to get rid of both goals Haaland so fraudulently scored in what might otherwise appear to be the very significant 2-0 win at Tottenham towards the end of last season without us even having to resort to a lazy ‘Lads, it’s Tottenham’ category. One thing we don’t want this to look like is lazy. But the harsh reality is that his goals that night came from a KDB assist and a penalty. Ange Postecoglou got all upset for nothing.
New Haaland City goals total: 19 goals
The four goals against a newly promoted club
Luckily we’ve already got rid of a lot of these in our other fair and even-handed categories, but there should definitely be a Promoted Side Tax for goalscorers. These goals are ones with the distinct whiff of the flat-track bully about them, hammered past plucky little teams still blinking at the bright Premier League lights having clambered their way up heroically from the Sky Bet.
That takes care of his opening-night goals against Burnley last season plus another against Sheffield United, as well as the one remaining goal of his five against Luton in the FA Cup that has clung on this far.
Meanwhile, we’re so good at finding ways of making Haaland’s goals not count that we don’t even need this category for any of his goals against Ipswich (penalty, KDB assist, flabby and unnecessary respectively)
New Haaland City goals total: 15 goals
The five goals when City didn’t even win
We’ve already explained how goals scored in games City would have won without them shouldn’t really count, so it stands to reason that goals scored by Haaland that didn’t even help City win the game anyway should also be struck from the record. That’s goals in a 3-3 draw against Newcastle and 1-1 draws against Everton, Aston Villa and Liverpool dealt with. And also takes care of his second goal (the other was a by now long-discounted penalty) in that daft 4-4 draw with Chelsea last season. Also a reminder that City somehow managed to draw 1-1 with Everton. At home. And 4-4 with Chelsea, for that matter.
New Haaland City goals total: 10 goals
The one goal in a competition City didn’t even win
If we’re quite correctly not counting goals that didn’t contribute to a City win on the day, it seems only right to extend that category further. On a fundamental level, what is the point of goals scored in a competition you don’t ultimately go on to win? What are they worth? That’s right, absolutely nothing.
That’s an otherwise inconvenient goal in a 3-2 win over Leipzig in last season’s Champions League sorted anyway. Best to just not think too hard about this category when it comes to other players who play for clubs that never win stuff. Just move swiftly on now.
New Haaland City goals total: 9 goals
The one fluke drought-breaking goal
Erling Haaland’s first goal in a routine 2-0 win over Everton back in February was his first for 417 minutes of football and ended a run of 17 shots without a goal. Pretty clear from this data that we can discount this goal as a fluke. Anyone given 400-odd minutes and 18 shots is going to score at least one of them, surely. It’s a fluke. A law of averages irrelevance. It is simply too silly for words for anyone to act like this is a goal we should take seriously.
New Haaland City goals total: 8 goals
The four goals against Young Boys
The big bully scored twice both home and away against the Swiss side in last season’s Champions League. We’ve been cheerfully scrubbing off his goals against full-grown adults, and have absolutely no qualms about eliminating those he’s scored against children.
Neville Southall didn’t stand for it from Michael Owen, and we won’t stand for it from Erling Haaland.
New Haaland City goals total: 4 goals
The one goal from a goalkeeping howler
We’ve already got rid of two-thirds of Haaland’s hat-trick against Wolves in January 2023 thanks to Penalty Tax and KDB Tax, but his third goal came after Jose Sa dropped a bollock and gifted the ball to Riyad Mahrez, who duly laid on the easiest of finishes for our hero. We’re marking this a bit like an unearned run in baseball, because we can and frankly at this stage must.
New Haaland City goals total: 3 goals
The two further unearned goals after an error
And why limit ourselves to goalkeeping errors? We can and must cast the net wider to include defensive errors or the whole thing becomes entirely unfair.
Haaland’s goal in last season’s 2-1 win over Brighton last October seems, on the face of it, hard to get rid of. Clearly not flab, and it came in a game City really had to win after unthinkably losing their two previous games. It wasn’t a penalty. It wasn’t assisted by De Bruyne.
But do you know what it was? Another defensive mistake. As the esteemed and respected BBC put it in their match report:
Erling Haaland ended a run of three matches without a goal 10 minutes later as he pounced on a Carlos Baleba mistake in the middle of the park and sent a thunderous left-footed shot into the back of the net.
Then there’s the seemingly crucial only goal in a must-win game against Brentford later in the season.
But again we defer as all right-thinking Britons must to the wise words of the BBC.
Brentford defender Kristoffer Ajer appeared to have the situation under control when Julian Alvarez played a pass into the visitors’ half as City countered.
But as Haaland began the chase, Ajer slipped and could not regain his feet as the Norwegian sped past.
The 23-year-old kept his cool to beat Mark Flekken with a precise shot.
Hardly seems right or fair to give the striker the credit in these circumstances.
New Haaland City goals total: 1 goal
The one route one goal
We’re so very close. The only Haaland goal that has survived every other attempt to kill it off is the opening goal in a 3-1 win over Brighton in October last year. Hard to claim it was flabby – he scored two that day (the other a penalty) so his goals decided the outcome and it was the opening goal anyway. And it came against a good side. It was at home, so chalk it off for that if you like, but that’s just silly. Stop being silly. You’re allowed to score goals at home. Why are you trying to discount Haaland’s goals for silly reasons? Embarrassing, that.
But are you allowed to score route-one goals? For Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City? No. We’re not interested in any of your lumpy bumwater about Ederson’s ability with the ball at his feet or how this was a long pass not a long ball and that there’s a significant difference because Glenn Hoddle said so once. In my day, goals assisted by the goalkeeper were called route one and that was not a compliment. There. Done it.
New Haaland City goals total: 0 goals
