Pep Guardiola
Pep Guardiola believes Erling Haaland has the same mentality to improve and score goals as Lionel Messi and warned the rest of the Premier League that the striker will be even better in his second season at Manchester City. The next challenge for Haaland will be to back up his record-breaking feats, but Guardiola is confident his striker will be even better in 2023/24 and he has already spoken to him about where he can improve ahead of next season.
Pep Guardiola said: “Always I’ve said with Erling it will be tough when you look at what he has done and if he doesn’t score the goals like he’s scoring now people will say ‘Oh, he’s in a bad situation’ but his game can improve a lot. We have spoken about that. The movements, I wouldn’t say in the box but the game itself. I think he has that feeling ‘is that enough?’. I think he has the desire to get better as a player, as long as he has it he can do it. To go to work knowing you can do something better is the way.”
Haaland could establish a new Premier League single-season milestone tonight and he also has Dixie Dean’s 63-goal season in his sights. That English goalscoring record dates back 95 years, but Haaland needs 13 more to match it and could have 10 games to achieve it if City reach the Champions League final. Guardiola has admitted he is surprised at the sheer quantity of goals Haaland is producing, but he believes the player will have moved to the Premier League expecting to etch his name into the record books.
Pep Guardiola said: “Yes, I think so. I know him a bit and he is so competitive and positive in his mindset, that’s why. It’s a question for him but he has this incredible self-positive confidence in himself. It’s not arrogance. It’s self-confidence to say I am going to score. We have the feeling every game he will score a goal and that helps a lot but it’s not just about that, he gives us many things. He is involved in many things, pressing, defensive rates, he’s involved in long balls and before we didn’t have that, how he helps us to keep the ball, link with him and after run with the other players. He helps to give us an extra issue that we maybe didn’t have in the past, for the quality of the players we have.”
Guardiola has adapted his approach this season to get the best out of Haaland and he rewinds to the first home game of the season, a 4-0 win against Bournemouth when Haaland touched the ball just eight times in 74 minutes, as evidence of how the team is now getting the best out of their striker. It’s also proof that Guardiola himself can play a different way, with City looking to go more direct to Haaland at times, compared to the way the Catalan’s Barcelona and Bayern Munich players.
Pep Guardiola said: “The tactics that came from my past in Barcelona and Bayern Munich came from the skills they have and you have to adapt to the quality they have, not because he has an idea, and I am completely just with the idea… no… the day I will not train Erling Haaland, we have to adapt the movements of the other ones.”
What those three teams all had, now Haaland is scoring freely at City, is an incredible goal-getter, with Robert Lewandowski performing that role for Bayern. But for Guardiola nobody, not even Haaland, can truly compare to Messi on the field.
Pep Guardiola said: “No one can compare with Messi, it will not help Erling. In terms of goals and mentality yeah, but Messi has done it every season in the last 10 to 15 seasons. But Erling since he started and at Salzburg and BVB [Dortmund], he has got to the same level in terms of goals. It’s almost every game, he scores a goal. One or two every game, he had the chances to do it but Messi is the most complete player I have seen in terms of vision, dribbles, passes, competitiveness, in many things that are difficult hopefully Erling can be so close like [to] Leo, that will be great for us and him.”
