Premier League champions Manchester City have pulled off a transfer coup by capturing Erling Haaland, but he faces a double jeopardy next season.
Title winners do not usually feature the top scorer and there is also a Premier League Golden Boot curse on foreign imports in their first campaign in England.
Odds against title/top scorer double
Mohamed Salah and Son Heung-min were the Premier League’s joint-top goalscorers in 2021-22 with 23 goals each, but neither played for the title-winning team.
This is more common than people realise, with the Golden Boot winner also taking home a league winner’s medal in just nine of the Premier League’s 30 seasons so far.
The last player to win both in the same season was Robin van Persie for Manchester United a decade ago in 2012-13, when he hit 26 goals in his first season at the club. The Dutchman had also finished as the Premier League’s top scorer the previous year when he struck 30 times for third-placed Arsenal.
Forwards arriving from overseas have also struggled to make an impact in the English top flight. Great things are expected of Haaland when he arrives to spearhead Manchester City’s title defence in 2022-23, but a foreign player has never topped the Premier League scoring charts in their first season in English football.
Several players have come close, however, with 10 having scored 18 goals or more in their debut season, including fellow Norwegian Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. However, Pep Guardiola’s latest signing will surely see the impact made by his predecessor Sergio Agüero – who netted 23 times in his first Premier League campaign – as the benchmark to hit.
The Argentinian legend was denied a Golden Boot by van Persie’s aforementioned tally of 30 and the 27 netted by Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney. However, his longevity at the top of the English game saw him break the latter’s record of scoring the most Premier League goals for a single club
Is the era of the 20-goal striker over?
Regardless of whether Haaland is a success or a flop in England, recent seasons suggest that elite clubs relying on one superstar to fire them to success could soon be a thing of the past. Of the five players to have won the Premier League while scoring more than a third of their club’s goals, only one did so after 2008; Jamie Vardy in Leicester’s miraculous 2015-16 title win.
Each of the last six title winners have spread their goals around, with at least one other player whose goal tally was within four of their top scorer. For example, the legendary Aguero netted 21 times in both 2017-18 and 2018-19 but in each case Raheem Sterling wasn’t far behind him.
All 10 of the Premier League champions from 2010 to 2019 had a player who scored at least 20 goals, but this has not happened in any of the three seasons since then. Manchester City coasted to the 2020-21 title with top scorer Ilkay Gundogan firing in just 13 goals and Sterling the only other player to reach double figures, while 14 of their team-mates also found the net.
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