ON Saturday the Premier League starts with the Merseyside derby at Goodison Park and concludes with Manchester City’s trip to Aston Villa. The equivalent Everton vs Liverpool fixture in March 1980 ended as a 2-1 win for the visitors but is remembered more as the day Everton icon Dixie Dean died, shortly after watching his former side. Dean is surely the pre-World War II footballer who is most widely remembered in England and it’s for a very simple reason: the 60 league goals he scored for Everton as they won the league title in 1927-28. Dean scored 60 of Everton’s 102 goals that season, or 59% if you prefer it that way, and did so only a season after Unlucky George Camsell had set what looked like an unbreakable record of 59 goals in the second tier.

59 was beatable, then, but 60 seems to be the high-water mark for goals in a season. Dean was confident he would stand the test of time, saying “people ask me if that 60-goal record will ever be beaten. I think it will. But there’s only one man who’ll do it. That’s the feller who walks on water. I think he’s about the only one.” Now whether Dean meant popular magician Dynamo or Jesus (it was probably Jesus) it’s clear that he was convinced no future footballer would ever play in England’s top flight and score 60+ goals in a single season.

Enter Erling Haaland.

.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Manchester City’s new striker has started life in the Premier League more prolifically than any other player in the competition’s history. A record nine goals in his first five games, the quickest player to reach two-hat-tricks, Haaland is currently on course to score 68 goals this season if he continues at this rate and plays in every game. But, and here’s the question, can both of those things happen?

Looking at scoring rates, Haaland has had 22 efforts at goal in his nascent Premier League with an incredibly high xG per shot rate of 0.25. By way of comparison, when Mohamed Salah scored a record (for a 38-game Premier League season) 32 goals in 2017-18 he had 144 shots at a rate of 0.17 xG per effort. The unknowable factor here is whether other teams can work out an effective way of stemming Haaland’s conveyor belt of chances. Manchester City under Pep Guardiola have made short crosses, passes or cut-backs in the penalty area their main channel of creativity. Raheem Sterling took a lot of shots from distance in the pre-Guardiola era but in successive seasons under the Catalan tactician his efforts moved closer and closer to goal until he – aided admirably by the likes of Gabriel Jesus – became one of the league’s most profitable six yard poachers.

Erling Haaland to score 40 or more Premier League goals this season – 4/1 Bet Here

What Manchester City have done this summer by selling Sterling and Jesus and bringing in Haaland is essentially give him the chance to feed on the same chances that their old players were getting, it’s just that the Norwegian looks like one of the most effective finishers the Premier League has seen for some time. People have focused on the relatively low number of touches that Haaland makes (he reached nine goals before he even reached 100 touches) but it doesn’t matter at all. Like a brooding naval vessel waiting to be called on in a sea battle Haaland simply waits until he gets the opportunity – and he will – and then makes the most of it. Quick, strong and deadly are three devastating attributes for a striker and it remains to be seen how some of City’s main rivals will deal with Haaland. They know that City will create good opportunities but what if you make sure they fall to other players. Last season City scored 99 goals from an xG of 98.8; so far this season they have scored 19 from 11.8. You don’t need to be Inspector Morse to work out what the big change is.

The other factor potentially stopping Haaland breaking Dixie Dean’s record is fitness. He played 24 league games for Borussia Dortmund last season suffering from a series of hip flexor and muscular injuries. They could just be growing pains, Haaland has grown quite a lot to be fair, but Guardiola has already spoken of resting his medieval weapon of a striker, and with a Champions League title a priority for City, surely this will affect his league minutes.

Dixie Dean played in 39 of Everton’s 42 games in 1927-28 so we already know that Haaland can’t play in that many and the Everton man still needed an astonishing end of season to reach the magic 60 goal mark. In Dean’s last eight games he had a scoring sequence of 2, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 4, 3, finishing with that hat-trick to overtake a surely-aghast Camsell. Five games into the season Dean was on six goals, so Haaland is three ahead as it stands, but Dean was about to score three braces in a row, followed by all five goals in a win against Manchester United (advice to Haaland: do this, City fans will approve). Dean then failed to score against Liverpool before scoring hat-tricks in successive appearances against Portsmouth and Leicester. The sheer volume required to reach 60 is staggering when you look at it, although Dean did fail to score in 10 games that season, so it could have been even higher.

So, at this point here at the start of September 2022, Dixie Dean remains fairly safe. Should Haaland continue at his current rate for the next 5-10 matches, though, then we may have to consider just how close he can go. In the meantime, the overall Premier League seasonal record of 34 held by Alan Shearer and Andy Cole looks tempting, as does Jimmy Greaves’ total of 41 goals in 40 games for Chelsea in 1960-61, the last time someone scored 40+ goals in an English top-flight season. We got used to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo posting these sort of industrial goal numbers in La Liga, now it’s time for the Premier League to get the same treatment.