- Erling Haaland has scored 17 goals in just 11 English Premier League matches this season.
- It means the Norwegian is on course to smash a number of the division's goalscoring records.
The English Premier League season may still only be in its opening stages, but Erling Haaland is already well on his way to making goalscoring history.
The 22-year-old striker, who joined Manchester City in the summer from German side Borussia Dortmund, has scored 17 goals in just 11 matches this season, including two against Brighton in a 3-1 win Saturday.
Nine of his goals came from netting an EPL-first three consecutive home match hat tricks earlier this season – first against Crystal Palace, then Nottingham Forest, and then City's great rival, Manchester United.
Haaland's unbelievable start to the 2021-22 season leaves him, astonishingly, just six goals shy of matching last season's EPL top scorers mark – Liverpool's Mohamed Salah and Tottenham Hotspur's Son Heung-min, who hit 23 apiece.
Even more astonishing, the Norwegian is more than halfway to equaling the record tally of 32 goals for a 38-match EPL season, which was set by Salah in 2017-18. He's also exactly halfway to equaling Alan Shearer's and Andrew Cole's joint record tally of 34 goals for a 42-match EPL season.
Keep scoring at the rate he is – 1.55 goals per game – and Haaland will equal Salah's record by game 21 and break it by game 22.
He'll finish the campaign with 59 goals, a single-season total that would not only be the highest ever in the EPL, but in all of European soccer.
Lionel Messi currently holds that record. He hit 50 in Spain's top flight, La Liga, for FC Barcelona in 2011-12.
Of course, it seems outlandish to believe Haaland can continue to score at the same rate through the remaining 27 games. His form for his former clubs, however, suggests he can.
Haaland began his career with in his home country with Bryne before moving to fellow Norwegian club Molde FK at 16, where he would score 20 goals in 50 matches.
He moved to Austrian team RB Salzburg in January 2019, where in just one year, he scored 29 goals, including five hat tricks and six goals in the Champions League – form that prompted Borussia Dortmund to come calling before the turn of the year.
For Dortmund, even despite struggles with injury during the last of his two-and-a-half seasons in Germany, Haaland scored 86 goals in 89 matches.
Haaland also boasts an extremely impressive scoring record for his country, having netted 21 goals in 23 matches.
In total for club and country, he's scored 198 goals in 238 matches, and he's still just 22. To put that into context, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi – the two highest goalscorers in soccer history – had managed 60 and 92 goals, respectively, by the time they had turned 22.
Given his ludicrous record of finding the net, Haaland is being backed by some of EPL's greatest ever players to break the records set by Salah, Shearer, and Cole.
"He could be the greatest ever in the Premier League, couldn't he?" the former Chelsea FC and England captain John Terry said of Haaland in September after his hat trick against Manchester United.
"You're trying to compare him with somebody, [but] I've never seen a player so young have that desire to score the goals he's scored.
"He is just relentless."
The former Liverpool FC and England defender Jamie Carragher also said the same of Haaland last month.
"He just looks absolutely amazing," said Carragher. "We know we've got a great player in the league, but I think we've got something really, really special, where when he's finished his time at Man City or in the Premier League, we'll be taking about him alongside Thierry Henry.
"I think this lad could end up being the best player we've seen in the Premier League, I really do. He's that special and he's made a brilliant start."
Even Shearer is backing Haaland to break his own record.
"My record of 34 goals in a season is under serious threat," the Englishman, who is the EPL's record career goalscorer with 260, said earlier this month. "If he stays fit, he's breaking it."