As a silly bit of fun during a dull international break and with talks of contract renewal, I was curious to answer a question.
If Haaland stayed at City for his whole career, and had similar longevity to Shearer, how many goals would he score?
Currently, he's clearly scoring at a rate which is faster than even the greatest players (see below for his performance vs. the top 5 PL goalscorers of all time). However, many will rightly argue he probably won't maintain this rate forever as an out-and-out striker. Looking at Cole and Shearer's lines below, there is a definite slow-down as they got later in their careers. Though worth noting, this isn't always the case. Kane is the best example of a striker that pretty much maintained his rate of scoring throughout his time in the PL, though he was younger when he left.
So with this in mind, I took Haaland's current rate of scoring and I modelled it onto the same parabolic trajectory as Shearer's. i.e. the difference between the scoring rate at the end of the career compared to the rate at the start is proportionally the same. They are both scoring at a 22% slower rate by season 14.
To cut to the chase, if Haaland retired at the same age as Shearer, he would finish on
396 Premier League goals. He would surpass Aguero and Cole in just his
sixth season. He would break Shearer's record in his
ninth season. He would surpass Dixie Dean in
season 12, and finally he would pass Jimmy Greaves in
season 14 to become the greatest top flight goalscorer in what by then will be 150 years of English football history.
Of course, there's a lot of assumptions baked into this... not least of which is that none of us are of the mind he will still be here in 2038. A fun thought experiment nonetheless.