Manchester City's over-reliance on Erling Haaland is crazier than you think

On the back of their worst league campaign since Pep Guardiola's Premier League debut season, Manchester City’s response has been to transition into Erling Haaland FC for 2025/26. The Norwegian striker has been on fire for his part with a mind-boggling return of 28 goals in 18 matches across all competitions for club and country.

After City’s 5-1 win over Burnley in late September, there was a fun stat doing the rounds saying that Maxime Estève was their second top-scorer for the season due to his two own goals. Five league games later, that is still true. Haaland has been responsible for close to two-thirds of his team’s goals, as seven of his teammates have just one goal each.

These freakish stats are not the result of some crazy variance – they are the intended product of Manchester City’s approach. The rest of the City squad have a cumulative xG tally of 8.2, so their return of 7 goals isn’t too bad. Haaland has, of course, been overperforming his xG, but that is par for the course for him.

Before investigating the sustainability of this approach, it is worth touching on what exactly Manchester City are doing. Let’s start with their xG trendline going back to last season, where we can see pretty much the exact point Rodri got injured, how they started giving up way too much at the back thereafter, how their attack also dropped off as they sought a solution (and couldn’t get any better in April due to Haaland’s absence), and how they seemed to be heading on the right track at the very end of the campaign.

This term, City have been able to keep the defence solid and have also generated enough in attack to pretty clearly be the second-best team in the Premier League right now. This has necessitated some stylistic shifts.

The most apparent changes have come out of possession. One of the biggest questions after their attacking rebuild over the summer was how they would overcome the limitations of their personnel in terms of pressing. The answer they have seemingly settled on probably is the best one – don’t press as much. The stats reflect a significant drop in City’s aggressions, defensive distance and PPDA between seasons, and all their shot conceding statistics look better for it.

As was particularly evident in the big games against Arsenal and Liverpool, Guardiola’s side are now quite happy to block-and-counter when needed. This has also helped their attack in these cases, as their increased willingness to generate counterattacking shots has helped improve their chance quality average.

Having the world’s best striker also comes pretty handy. By attacking in more open situations now, City are getting the most out of Haaland’s insane physical abilities and unstoppable off-ball runs in behind. That results in goals like this:

Of course, Haaland is not a transition merchant by any stretch of the imagination. His qualities also translate into making him an elite box presence even against settled blocks, so he is the key to unlocking any type of defence for City.

Building an attack around an elite striker certainly isn’t the worst idea in the world, but can a team of Manchester City’s stature get away with it for a full season? The historical evidence does not make for good reading from their perspective.

Haaland currently takes just under 30% of City’s shots, but his npxG tally of 10.3 on Opta’s model accounts for as much as 60% of City’s aggregate npxG tally in the league this season! That usage rate is the highest in a big five league season as far back as Fbref data goes (2017/18) by quite a big margin.

As you might have noticed, pretty much everyone else in that chart played for teams that weren’t exactly great. The first title winner in the list comes in at 12th place, namely Robert Lewandowski in 2020/21 when he used up 35.54% of Bayern Munich’s npxG to produce a record-breaking 41-goal Bundesliga season. The first Premier League title winner is none other than Haaland himself, with a usage rate of 32.36% in 2022/23.

The Norwegian striker scored 36 league goals in his very first Premier League season, but he did receive a sizeable amount of support from his teammates. Phil Foden also hit double digits with 11, Julian Alvarez got 9, İlkay Gündoğan and Kevin De Bruyne added 15 combined, and the trio of Jack Grealish, Riyad Mahrez and Bernardo Silva chipped in with 14 altogether. So, Haaland was comfortably outscored by the rest of his teammates.

The ex-Dortmund striker is currently at close to double his npxG usage rate from that season, and as we have previously seen, he is the only reliable goal threat in the City side at present. That is not to say that they can’t get any goals from elsewhere – the returning Omar Marmoush should provide some support, Foden has scored a couple from range in the Champions League, and someone like Jérémy Doku or Rayan Cherki could well bag a few too.

But each of them does rely on Haaland’s presence to maximise their own threat. Marmoush has formed exactly the kind of off-ball connection I anticipated when he moved in January, but his threat as a lone striker would be significantly limited. Foden really benefits from Haaland’s presence up top to get clear shots from just outside the box, while Doku and Cherki’s dribbling and creative threats are also magnified by the Norwegian international.

More so than their dependence on Haaland’s goal-scoring contributions, City’s tactical reliance on Haaland might prove to be their undoing. If they just had a similar profile of a striker, they could directly replace their star forward in a line-up and hope to get enough out of the other attackers to get over the line. However, as was evident during Haaland’s absences in the latter half of last season, they currently need to revamp their attacking setup if he isn’t in the side in order to avoid toothless displays such as the one against Liverpool in February.

If Haaland remains perfectly fit for the entire season, City should be alright. On an individual match-to-match basis, they are good enough to sustain this level of performance – they comfortably have enough creation in the side, not least in the levelled-up Doku, reinvigorated Foden and brilliant Cherki, while the Norwegian striker’s quality is absolutely indisputable. However, he has had a couple of injuries in the last two seasons that have led him to miss a noteworthy amount of games, so that is where things start to get concerning.

Even if he isn’t forcibly ruled out for any games, Haaland will surely have to be rested from time to time. As the fixture schedule gets ever busier on the other side of this international break, there will be fewer random EFL Cup games and more Premier League games that he might have to be benched for. What Guardiola’s side do in those games will be quite interesting to follow, but they haven’t shown anything convincing so far.

As the current title favourites Arsenal have found out in previous seasons, overreliance on individuals is likely to prove very costly in the Premier League. So, Manchester City will surely need almost everything to go their way in order to take the title race to the distance. However, a firing Haaland and a well-functioning team around him could make them a noteworthy Champions League contender, so that should be their main target.

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