The data that shows Erling Haaland needs Man City team-mates to step up

Numbers show that champions are struggling to score this season, exposing a reliance on the Norwegian goal machine

Few could dispute the reasoning behind Manchester City’s decision to sell Julián Alvarez to Atlético Madrid in the summer.
The £81.5 million fee represented an enormous profit on the £14 million spent to sign the player from River Plate 2½ years earlier and, just as significantly, it was clear the Argentina striker wanted a new challenge elsewhere and was reluctant to keep playing understudy to Erling Haaland. All things ­considered, a sale made sense.
There is little doubt, though, that the loss of Alvarez has left a hole which, coupled with Kevin De Bruyne and Phil Foden’s truncated starts to the campaign and a season-ending injury to Rodri, go a long way towards explaining City’s ­relative shortage of goals and the overdependence on Haaland to find the net.
In only one of Pep Guardiola’s previous eight seasons as City ­manager have his team scored fewer goals after 17 matches. That was the 2020-21 campaign, when they spent most of the time without a centre-forward because of Sergio Agüero’s persistent injury problems and had to implement a new system primarily using midfielders in a false-nine role.
Otherwise, City’s total of 35 goals this term to date is notably down on past seasons – they had hit 51 and 52 after 17 games in 2019-20 and ­2017-18 respectively, for example – and the burden on Haaland is ­pronounced. The Norway striker’s 14 goals account for 40 per cent of those scored by the team.
That is a jump of seven percentage points on last season, when Alvarez had already chipped in with seven goals by this stage. In Haaland’s debut campaign, when he had scored 22 goals after 17 matches, City had plundered 48 all told, a notable increase on this season.
Southampton were seen off 1-0 thanks to an early Haaland goal a fortnight ago but, without their prolific No 9 riding to the rescue, the last three outings have all ended in defeat. Haaland was kept on the substitutes’ bench for the 2-1 Carabao Cup defeat at Tottenham and failed to find the net in the 2-1 loss to Bournemouth, or 4-1 thumping at Sporting in the Champions League on Tuesday, when he missed a ­penalty. Brighton will hope his mini barren run continues at the Amex Stadium today.
There is a big fall from Haaland’s 14 goals to City’s next highest scorer, with five players on three, two of whom – Josko Gvardiol and John Stones – are defenders. The spread of goals is consistent with past seasons – City have had 11 ­different scorers so far – but they are not brushing aside opponents with the ease or frequency of ­previous years.
Half of their 10 wins have been by a single goal. Equally, there have been just five matches this season in which City have scored three or more, compared to eight by this stage last term, and seven in the two years before that. In the first 17 matches of the 2019-20 campaign, they had scored at least three in a game on 10 occasions.
Guardiola and City, of course, are not going to be unduly alarmed. He has dismissed the suggestion that City were suffering for the lack of another forward like Alvarez and insisted the issues were solely down to a debilitating injury list.
This is the sixth successive ­season in which the team have suffered a brief autumn slump and, in the past four years, they went on to win the title. But whereas last season Foden was on hand to fill the creative void left by De Bruyne, who missed five months after rupturing a hamstring on the opening day, Guardiola has been without his two most potent midfielders for a lot longer than he would have liked.
De Bruyne has featured for just 439 minutes in all competitions because of injuries and Foden – who did not have much of a pre-season after reaching the Euro 2024 final with England – was absent for a month through illness and then eased back very gradually.
He has started the past five matches and is now getting back up to speed, but he is still not yet at the level that won him the Professional Footballers’ Association, Football Writers’ Association and Premier League player-of-the-season awards last time around. Factor in the loss of City’s most influential player, Rodri, who, aside from making the Guardiola machine tick also contributed nine goals last season, and it is probably no surprise that City’s attack is not at its fluid best.
Gvardiol and Stones have done their bit, but Guardiola needs more from his wingers especially. Savinho has started well following his £33 million summer move from Troyes, but has yet to score and ­neither has Jack Grealish, who is again being inhibited by injury. The mercurial Jeremy Doku has just two league goals in a year, which is not nearly enough for a winger in a team of City’s talents.
The man the Belgium winger effectively replaced at the Etihad Stadium – Cole Palmer – has 26 league goals over the same period for Chelsea. If selling Alvarez was the right call in the circumstances, offloading Palmer evidently was not, no matter what City have won or perhaps continue to win.