Erling Haaland’s century? The statistic to cherish in Manchester City’s win at Fulham was 5-4

On a night notable for big numbers, Erling Haaland inevitably stole the headlines. 

The Manchester City forward’s opener against Fulham marked his 100th Premier League goal, making him the quickest player to reach that milestone in the competition’s history. The wonder is it took him so long.

Haaland had already struck a post by the time he swept home a Jérémy Doku cross in the 17th minute. That temporary setback came hard on the heels of some uncharacteristically slack finishing at Newcastle, where breaking Alan Shearer’s record would have carried a special resonance, and it was much the same story at Leeds, where he had opportunities to reach the landmark in the city where he was born. Even so, breaking the record in 111 games – 13 fewer than Shearer – was not too shoddy.

But Haaland wasn’t the only story in town. In a competition that feels ever more bereft of the spontaneity and excitement that once defined it, other statistics associated with City’s extraordinary 5-4 victory felt equally significant. 

Since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, only three teams have scored four goals at home and gone on to lose. After their heroic but doomed attempt to overcome a 3-1 half-time deficit, Fulham became the latest reluctant addition to a list that includes both Norwich, who went down 5-4 to Southampton at Carrow Road in April 1994 and lost to Liverpool by the same score-line in January 2016, and Tottenham, who scored four but shipped five against north London rivals Arsenal in November 2004. 

Broadening the parameters to acknowledge the reality that English football existed before the Premier League, Fulham have only once before in their 146-year history found the net four times only to taste defeat. That was in September 1952, when Arthur Rowley, the Haaland of his day, banged in a hat-trick for Leicester in a 6-4 victory that, going by the score-line, might have been better suited to the lawns of the nearby All England Club than the turf of Craven Cottage. 

As for City, not since 1957, when they won 5-4 at Sheffield Wednesday four days before Christmas, have they let in four and still salvaged a win.

So results like the one at Craven Cottage on Tuesday evening are vanishingly rare, and never more so than in today’s Premier League. Only 13 of the 32 games in which nine or more goals have been scored in a single match in the competition have come over the past decade. Typically, those games have been lopsided affairs. As the table below shows, only four have ended 5-4 – just one more than the 9-0 wins posted by Liverpool against Bournemouth, and by Manchester United and Leicester City over Southampton.

Highest-scoring Premier League matches

Goals	Date	Match	Result
11	29/09/07	Portsmouth v Reading	7–4
10	29/12/07	Spurs v Reading	6–4
10	22/11/09	Spurs v Wigan	9–1
10	28/08/11	Man Utd v Arsenal	8–2
10	29/12/12	Arsenal v Newcastle	7–3
10	19/05/13	West Brom v Man Utd	5–5
9	09/04/94	Norwich v Southampton	4–5
9	04/03/95	Man Utd v Ipswich	9–0
9	26/10/96	Southampton v Man Utd	6–3
9	26/08/97	Blackburn v Sheffield Wednesday	7–2
9	06/02/99	Forest v Man Utd	1–8
9	12/02/00	West Ham v Bradford	5–4
9	11/03/00	Spurs v Southampton	7–2
9	13/11/04	Spurs v Arsenal	4–5
9	11/05/08	Middlesbrough v Manchester City	8–1
9	16/01/10	Chelsea v Sunderland	7–2
9	14/12/13	Man City v Arsenal	6–3
9	22/03/14	Cardiff v Liverpool	3–6
9	30/08/14	Everton v Chelsea	3–6
9	23/01/16	Norwich v Liverpool	4–5
9	26/11/16	Swansea v Palace	5–4
9	04/02/17	Everton v Bournemouth	6–3
9	14/10/17	Man City v Stoke	7–2
9	13/05/18	Spurs v Leicester	5–4
9	25/10/19	Southampton v Leicester	0–9
9	04/10/20	Aston Villa v Liverpool	7–2
9	02/02/21	Man Utd v Southampton	9–0
9	26/12/21	Man City v Leicester	6–3
9	27/08/22	Liverpool v Bournemouth	9–0
9	02/10/22	Man City v Man Utd	6–3
9	22/12/24	Spurs v Liverpool	3–6
9	02/12/25	Fulham v Man City	4–5

If such results are, increasingly, outliers, it should come as no surprise. The trend towards rigidly defined systems and patterns of play, where positional discipline is prioritised over individual attacking flair, has ensured most English top-flight games are closely contested affairs. With fewer dribbles, fewer long-range shots, fewer risks, a greater reliance on set plays and a football culture in which similar players do similar things, is it any wonder that the game has become less unpredictable?

That is why moments like Tuesday night’s goal rush at Craven Cottage should be cherished. They are a throwback to what the game used to be: chaotic, capricious, spur-of-the-moment. If a reminder of those virtues were required, it may be found at the top of the above table. Portsmouth’s 7-4 victory over Reading in 2007, the highest-scoring game the Premier League has thrown up, was an afternoon of delicious carnage, the stuff of managerial nightmares and neutral dreams.

The Reading defender Nicky Shorey described the match afterwards as “the worst game I’ve ever been involved in”, and you can understand why. Neither Pompey boss Harry Redknapp nor Steve Coppell, his Reading counterpart, could have been happy about their respective teams’ defensive performances that day. On Tuesday night, Pep Guardiola felt much the same, despite seeing his team move within two points of league leaders Arsenal. 

“Did you enjoy it?” enquired Guardiola. “I lost my hair. I know you’re going to ask what happened, but I don’t have an answer. Football is emotion – all the goals were bad defending, we go so deep to defend these kinds of crosses, we have to occupy the spaces a bit better but we made incredible things today because I know how difficult the team is. 

“It was impossible for me to enjoy it. At 5-1 maybe, but at 5-4 I was watching the clock more than the game. It was tough and it would have been tougher if we could not get the result, but I will remember I was there.”

And isn’t that precisely the point? Managers, players, fans – don’t we all want to see goals? High-scoring games in which the outcome remains in the balance until the dying seconds, just as it did by the Thames when Fulham’s Josh King was narrowly denied an improbable equaliser with virtually the last kick of the evening? Back in 2007, Redknapp captured those sentiments perfectly in the giddy aftermath of Portsmouth’s victory.

“I would rather win 7-4 than 1-0, personally,” he said. “I watched Barcelona play the other day and they had a forward line of [Lionel] Messi, [Thierry] Henry, Ronaldinho and Deco. It was just fantastic to watch. In this country, we would say, ‘Hang on, we’re playing 4-4-2, track him back’.”

You can watch players track in the Premier League every weekend, but you will rarely see the chaos of old. Even more than Haaland’s century, perhaps, 5-4 remains a score-line to be treasured.