Pep Guardiola expects Erling Haaland to smash Premier League record at Man City

Pep Guardiola has said ‘you don’t have to be a genius’ to see Erling Haaland could break the record for the most goals in a single Premier League season.

The Manchester City striker netted twice on Sunday as the Blues beat Brighton & Hove Albion 3-1, with Kevin De Bruyne netting the third for City. The brace takes Haaland up to 17 goals in the league from just 11 matches.

It means the Norwegian is on exactly half of the highest-ever tally recorded in a single Premier League campaign – set by Alan Shearer and Andy Cole respectively in the early 1990s, although over a 42-game season.

Therefore, despite the 2022/23 campaign being less than a third of the way through, Guardiola feels Haaland is in a good position to break the record. “You don’t have to be a genius, if he continues to play with this rhythm and the average every game, he is going to break the record, definitely,” opined the Catalan. “But in football maybe you score and in a few days you stop scoring.

“I think he is happy when the team win,” Guardiola added. “But all the strikers I have seen in my career like Samuel Eto’o, David Villa, Lionel Messi, [Robert] Lewandowski, Thomas Muller, Sergio Aguero – they have incredible ambition to score goals. It’s normal and it has to be like that.”

The City manager also said Aymeric Laporte seemed fine after the full-time whistle against Brighton. The defender, who made his first Premier League start of the season after recovering from a recent long-term injury, went down in the latter stages of the game and appeared to be in pain. However, Guardiola laughed off any suggestion of a knock, claiming Laporte’s reaction was a little ‘exuberant’.

“I didn’t speak with him but he came into the locker room quite well, walked normally. Ayme, when he gets a kick, is a little bit exuberant,” he said. “The important thing is [after] a big injury we want to control the minutes because every game at the end he is suffering muscular issues. But it is necessary.”