An Erling Haaland Retrospective
What can we learn from how Manchester City's talisman made such an instant impact in the Premier League and in Fantrax and does it mean anything for future incomings?
“A take that could easily age terribly (and yet I’ll stand by after many years of watching new signings in Fantrax):
There’s not really a good argument for taking Haaland in the first round next season”
Some idiot, 19/04/2022, Twitter.
That same idiot took less than two Premier League gameweeks to be writing about how the Haaland experience is “unlike anything we’ve seen at Pep’s City before”.
And, as that idiot, I thought it would be a useful piece of cathartic learning to sit down and actually look at why I had Haaland scepticism, whether it was misplaced, and why the man himself seems to have been so totally immune to the pitfalls that befell many other big money transfers before him. And in doing so, maybe to see whether we should adjust anything about how we value future incoming transfers to get better at valuing them.
So lets rip the band-aid off and start looking at the roots of where it all went wrong.
Where did I value Haaland at the time and why?
I’m told exaggeration is great for content, so although it’s not my usual style, I attempted to use it in the intro. But the truth is: I was then, and (unsurprisingly) still am, a Haaland believer. In the tweets that followed that initial proclamation, I even said that I thought Haaland was an incredible player, going to a perfect landing spot. So why did I doubt him as a first-round pick?
It came down to three main variables that made him seem riskier than other established names:
He had unholy production at Dortmund. But production hasn’t always translated all that well from the Bundesliga to the Premier League.
His manager was (is) famous for managing the minutes his new signings get within the first team in their first season and loves to rotate basically everyone bar his goalkeeper.
His profile was basically just goals. So his all-round game looked unlikely to rescue any weeks where his scoring touch deserted him.
One by one, Haaland has seemingly made a mockery of the idea that any of these were real concerns. But we’re going to go on a journey through them in this article to work out how predictable this should’ve been. Accountability is fun, after all.
Argument 1: ‘The Bundesliga Tax’
I don’t particularly like the term ‘Bundesliga Tax.’ But I can’t deny that it’s tough moving from the Bundesliga to the Premier League for a lot of players. Time and again we’ve seen attacking players in particular make the move and see their production levels drop off.
In another life, I wrote about Timo Werner before he made his move to Chelsea, noting that his RB Leipzig output levels that season would’ve been equivalent to a 6th place Fantrax finish when compared to every player in Europe’s Top 5 leagues. And two of those 6 spots were just default given to Messi and Ronaldo at that point. And yet . . . He was not a top 10 Fantrax player that season (32nd in xFpts). Nor the one after (138th). Timo moved from a Leipzig team where he had room to run in behind defences to a Chelsea one where he didn’t. And it was a problem. Maybe it was something specific to Leipzig’s pressing and quick countering style that meant Timo was always destined to struggle at Chelsea and in the Premier League.
But Jadon Sancho has found life tough at Manchester United as well, and he transferred from Borussia Dortmund, the same club that Haaland came from. Sancho profiled as an elite chance creator who could also chip in with regular goal contributions and he’s been fine, but even the most generous Manchester United fan wouldn’t describe his output to date as elite. So the drop off doesn’t seem to just be a function of one club.
But what if it’s not about the origin, but about the destination? With respect to both Chelsea and Manchester United, Werner and Sancho moved from stable environments that suited their talents to considerably less stable ones that were not set up to play to their specific strengths. Chelsea did not attack quickly enough to get Werner the types of chances that he thrived on (with a few notable exceptions in the Champions League) and United forced Sancho to play second fiddle to a whole bunch of other names and put him alongside Cristiano Ronaldo, who was less than a team player. Both clubs signed players who’d shown the ability to excel at something, then set about asking them to try to excel at something different.
Haaland, on the other hand, was moving to Manchester City. The best chance-creating team in the Premier League. He profiled as a predatory finisher who can create space with his movement and can kick a ball really hard but who doesn’t really do a lot else. And Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City side are a team that are able to create shots for attackers at high volumes, currently through their wingers and Kevin De Bruyne, but who didn’t always have elite finishers at the end of those moves. He didn’t necessarily have to change or evolve his game to succeed.
The takeaway: Haaland fit at City, without a big drop in production, because the skill that he applied so incredibly in the Bundesliga was the exact skill City were well-suited to enabling.
Argument 2: Guardiola’s freshman boot-camp
Having just said that the landing spot was a reason why we should’ve had less worry about his production on the field, his landing spot did have another reason for concern: how often would he actually be on the field?
Manchester City buy star players fairly often. In the Pep era, even just looking in attack, in addition to Haaland they’ve brought in superstar names in Riyad Mahrez and Jack Grealish. In both cases, Guardiola chose to integrate them slowly in their first year, whilst they were learning the system. Mahrez in his first year made only 14 starts. Grealish did a little better with 22. In Mahrez’s case, despite him being a key player for Pep for many years, he has never earned above 30 starts for Manchester City. Grealish appears to have made his case for being in the “first choice” eleven for City this season, yet has still only made 23 starts. Pep rotates and he doesn’t care about your price tag. In addition to the tactical rotation risk, Haaland had had some injury challenges at Dortmund, missing a big chunk of last season. It was probably reasonable to think that City would manage his minutes to prevent fatigue based injuries.
And yet Haaland made 33 starts this year. Rodri is the only outfielder with more games started for City. You might think that this is just because once you’ve got a player on the pitch scoring at Haaland’s rate, you just can’t take him out of the team. That’s a pretty compelling argument. You might also say that having a well-timed month off in the middle of the season is good for fatigue management. But at the same time, City did show us they were serious about this changing of the guard when they sold both Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus last Summer.
We should have probably guessed at that point that it was going to be Haaland’s spot to lose, with only fellow newbie Julian Alvarez as natural competition for the striker position. We will never truly know if Pep always planned to start Haaland this many games, but to paraphrase Maya Angelou: “when someone shows you how much they value their new Norwegian cyborg, believe them.”
Takeaway: Haaland signed and not a whole lot later, City were happy to ship away two of the biggest parts of their attack from previous seasons. The Pep roulette risk dropped at that point and I should’ve adjusted my priors upwards as a result.
Argument 3: Goal reliant players are too boom and bust.
Doesn’t matter how you want to analyse it, football is about goals. Fantrax is also about goals, but we tend to be a bit suspicious of players who only score goals. And especially those who do it whilst over-performing their expected goals numbers (xG).
Marking Haaland down for scoring more than his xG at this point feels pointless. For four consecutive seasons (probably more but the data’s only available for those four on FBRef) he’s just made a mockery of the numbers. But crucially with Haaland, he doesn’t just outperform xG, he also generates it at an elite rate.
But it is true that outside of shots and goals, Haaland isn’t going to do a lot for your team. My view coming into the season was that for Haaland to return round 1 value, he was going to have to score at a rate to compete with the two gentlemen pictured above. Challenge more than accepted, on Erling’s part.
I’m not going to drag this one out. You can be goal-reliant if you’re going to score 36 of them a season. And who could rule out him improving on that tally at some point?
Takeaway: He’s not human.
What should we learn from Haaland?
This public shame walk I’ve taken for last April’s tweet should not be all for nothing. Haaland is clearly a one or two in a generation level goal-scorer. In his specific case, over-analysing isn’t necessary. I was wrong because he’s that good.
But what should we take away for potential future transfers? It’s likely only a few weeks until Christopher Nkunku walks his 22/23 Bundesliga Top Scorer trophy out of Germany and over to SW6, so are there updated guidelines we can apply to him and others? I think there are.
Try to work out whether the player is going into a context where they will be doing the same thing on the pitch they were doing at their previous club. If they’re not, adjust the output expectations down significantly. Better to take the safer option here than waste a high draft pick.
Look at the competition that the player is facing and in particular what moves the club makes in their spot (contract renewals, players purchases and sales) to see how confident you should be in their starting role. If they’re being positioned as the main man, generally trust that.
Still try to pick up a rounded profile of player if you can, but if a player is ticking the right boxes in 1 and 2, don’t worry too much about goal reliance. Especially if they’re generating good xG.
And lastly: unless Kylian Mbappe signs, it’s unlikely we see a Haaland-like impact from a new signing any time soon, so you still need to keep your critical eye well-trained for other incomings. But crucially, do allow for occasional miracle-like freaks of nature to fit within your assessment range every now and then!
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