Battle of sharpshooters: Erling Haaland vs Gabriel Jesus could decide Ethiad title showdown

Around this time last year, Mikel Arteta set a challenge for his Arsenal players.
“To be with the top teams, you need to score 90 to 100 goals at least [over the course of a season],” he said in March 2022. “Somehow, you need those goals in the team. Don’t ask me how, but you need them. They have to come.”

Thirteen months, two transfer windows and almost a full season later, Arsenal are succeeding in this regard. After 32 matches, they sit on top of the table, with 77 goals scored. At this rate, they will exceed the 90-goal mark for the first time in their Premier League history.

In the past, this firepower alone might have been enough to carry a team all the way to the title. But this is 2023 and, sadly for Arsenal, Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City are once again proving to be just as devastating in the final third of the pitch.

Just like Arsenal, City are on course to score more than 90 goals. At their current rate, they will not be far off 100 goals. Both teams are playing with the same style of Barcelona-inspired possession-based football, building from the back and attacking with width.

But there is one significant difference: how they score their goals. The key to Arsenal’s success has been spreading the threat across the attack. In signing Gabriel Jesus from City last summer, they added a player who is more of a facilitator than a finisher and a forward who roams across the front line to create space for others. They then doubled down on this strategy in January, when they bought Leandro Trossard, another floating forward, from Brighton.

City have taken the opposite approach. The presence of Erling Haaland, a pure striker, marks the main point of divergence between the teams and therefore between Guardiola and his former apprentice. Arteta’s attacking approach is multi-pronged and similar to that produced by City in recent seasons. Guardiola’s attack, by contrast, is now built primarily on the extraordinary goalscoring talents of one man.

​Arsenal have three players in double digits for league goals – Gabriel Martinelli, Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard – while Jesus is on nine, despite missing three months through injury. City, by contrast, have only three players with more than five league goals and only one with more than nine. That one player, of course, is Haaland. His 32 strikes in the Premier League represent 41 per cent of City’s goals, while Arsenal’s top scorer, Martinelli, has scored only 19pc of Arsenal’s.

Haaland and Jesus will surely both start in the centre of a three-man front line tonight, and yet their interpretations of the role could hardly be more different. The City striker’s main strength is his finishing, which also happens to be the Arsenal forward’s most obvious weakness. And Jesus is a master of linking the play and drifting wide, while Haaland usually offers little outside of the penalty area.

In terms of goalscoring prowess, there is no contest between the two. Jesus has nine goals from 65 shots, while Haaland has scored his 32 goals from 96 shots.

Against Southampton on Friday night, when Arsenal drew 3-3, Jesus wasted a handful of opportunities that would simply never have been spurned by his counterpart at City.

But Arsenal always knew this was likely to be the case. If they wanted to sign a pure goalscorer, they would not have turned to Jesus. They chose the Brazilian because of what he brings to the collective unit, on and off the pitch, and there are many aspects of his game which Haaland could not hope to match. For example, Jesus has attempted five dribbles per match. Haaland has attempted fewer than one. Jesus completes an average of 24 passes per game, compared to Haaland’s 11, and takes an average of 56 touches per game compared to Haaland’s 26.

One of them creates chances, then, and the other takes chances. A false nine against a real nine.

Tonight’s match represents this season’s first meeting of the two forwards, of City’s past and their present, and the biggest game of the season could be decided by which of these strikers best imposes his own personality, style and skill-set.