In Roy Keane’s scathing analysis of Erling Haaland on Sunday, a cheerier undertone was lost. “It has to improve and it will do over the next few years,” is about as optimistic as it gets from Sky Sports’ resident voice of doom, who condemned the Manchester City striker’s play outside the box as “like a League Two player”.
Haaland’s contribution in other areas of the pitch has been described in recent months both as “so poor” – by Keane – and as “a positive” by Jamie Carragher. For Keane, it is “laying stuff off, headers, whatever it might be” that lets down a forward who, in pure goalscoring terms, is “the best in the world”.
If the dirge against Arsenal was staler than the remnants of leftover Easter Egg, the Norwegian was one of the chief culprits. He managed no shots on target, two of his four attempts did not come until second-half injury time and he had just 23 touches, losing possession seven times.
His passing accuracy was just 54 per cent, well down from his average of 76 per cent, suggesting that bank holiday weekend borefest was a particularly off day. Part of that can be attributed to a muzzling masterclass from William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes, but it is also a long-running theme of Haaland’s record-breaking spell at City.
While he is on course for back-to-back Premier League Golden Boots with 18 goals in 2023-24, he has only ever scored three of those goals since arriving from Borussia Dortmund in 2022 from outside the box. The most recent, in the 1-0 victory over Brentford, ensured he has now scored against every top-flight side he has faced.
The vast majority of Haaland’s goals are scored with his left foot, and just three this term have come from within the six-yard box. In November, he became the quickest player in Premier League history to score 50 goals, doing so in just 48 games – 17 matches faster than previous record-holder Andy Cole.
Yet Keane’s puritanical criticism had nothing to do with goal gluts. The challenge for Haaland is what he offers aside from that, such as in a two-and-a-half month spell without a goal around the turn of the year, when City scored 39 times without him.
Carragher’s defence of Haaland’s play outside the box centred around him taking so few shots from elsewhere, in short as a by-product of an evolving game. In higher risk, higher stakes matches, players are disinclined to take chances with a lower xG (Expected Goals).
“When people are now scouting players, where they take shots from, do they take stupid shots?” Carragher said.
“And more often than not we talk about silly shots being from outside the box. We don’t see as many screamers or great goals as we used to in the past because of that reason.
“Even though he’s Erling Haaland, maybe at times he might be able to think ‘I’m going to have a shot from 30 yards, I’m going to shoot from 25 yards, I’m going to do what I want because I’m Erling Haaland.’ He always plays for the team and he always waits for the right moment to get his shot off.”
It is also a consequence of the way City play. Rodri and Kevin De Bruyne pick up much of the responsibility in the final third, leaving Haaland to provide less of the type of role Harry Kane might have played had Pep Guardiola been successful in trying to sign the former Tottenham striker in the summer of 2021. That does not discount the fact that some of Haaland’s hold-up play is easily neutralised, or that his touches can lack finesse when they are not directly aimed at producing a goal.
Still, City are producing chances outside the box. They have scored more from range (10) than any other Premier League team this season, followed by Burnley.
The reality is that, League Two standard or not, City have advanced in a way that accommodates Haaland purely as a goalscorer, having operated with only false nines for a spell before his arrival.
It is now more effective for De Bruyne to utilise Haaland as a target, creating a greater focus on not allowing Haaland to be dragged deeper by opposition defenders. There are pros and cons to that approach; Haaland presses, almost entirely, in the final third, whereas alternatives like Phil Foden were more likely to drop into the middle third.
Guardiola can ultimately afford Haaland’s greatest shortcoming over the course of a season, even if it makes him vulnerable when teams adopt a grittier approach like Arsenal did at the Etihad.
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