Why Erling Haaland Can Avoid The ‘Bundesliga Tax’

Manchester City’s new signing Erling Haaland got off to a dream Premier League debut on the weekend, scoring twice as City beat West Ham United 2-0.

Haaland averaged around one goal a game at his previous club, scoring 86 goals in 89 appearances for Borussia Dortmund. In the Bundesliga, he averaged a goal every 87 minutes he was on the pitch.

This has led some pundits, including former England striker Alan Shearer, to say he can score 30 to 40 goals a season in the Premier League.

Others remain unconvinced, claiming that strikers from the Bundesliga often struggle to replicate their rate of goal scoring when they move to England.

This so-called “Bundesliga tax” is often cited as the reason why previous strikers have failed to light up the Premier League.

One such example is Chelsea’s Timo Werner, who could be offloaded to his previous side RB Leipzig this transfer window. The German international bagged 86 goals in 219 Bundesliga games for Leipzig and VfB Stuttgart at a rate of one goal every 179 minutes. He was scoring almost twice as frequently in Germany as he has been since moving to Chelsea, where his ten Premier League goals have come at a rate of one every 389 minutes.

Some strikers have joined from the Bundesliga and completely flopped, such as Wout Weghorst at Burnley or Milot Rashica at Norwich City. Weghorst scored once every two games in Germany, while Rashica scored roughly once every four games. The pair only managed three Premier League goals between them last season, although that might be down to them joining teams that ended up getting relegated.

Once complete flops from struggling teams are ignored, big-name strikers who join Premier League sides from the Bundesliga generally fare better than Werner.

The ten strikers or attacking midfielders who have joined the Premier League in the past five years after playing at least ten Bundesliga matches, and who have more than two Premier League goals to their name, have scored 70% as many goals a game in the Premier League as they did in the Bundesliga.

If Haaland scores goals 70% as often as he did in Germany, he still should score around 25 goals a season.

But there are signs that he could score at a faster rate than that.

The stronger the team signing a striker from the Bundesliga, the smaller the drop-off in goals-per-game appears to be. That’s bad news for Nottingham Forest’s new signing Taiwo Awoniyi, who scored 15 league goals for Union Berlin last season, but it is good news for Erling Haaland.

Five big-name attacking players have joined a so-called “Big Six” side from the Bundesliga in the past five seasons.

Of those, Jadon Sancho has struggled to match his Bundesliga form at Manchester United, but that might have more to do with the troubles at Old Trafford than anything else.

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s record at Borussia Dortmund is probably most comparable with Haaland’s. Aubameyang scored 31 goals in 32 games in his final full season at Dortmund. His spell at Arsenal might have ended badly, but in his first two-and-a-half seasons in London, he scored 54 goals in 85 games. That works out as scoring goals at 75% the rate he scored at in his final two-and-a-half years at Dortmund or 90% of the rate he scored at overall in Germany.

Chelsea’s Kai Havertz is often seen as having a similar drop as Werner following his move to London, but in fact, he has seen his goalscoring rate drop by just 10% since joining Chelsea, and Christian Pulisic is actually scoring more frequently than he did in Germany. Pulisic has 19 league goals for Chelsea in 73 appearances, compared to 13 in 90 appearances for Dortmund.

This suggests that for the top players, a drop-off in goalscoring when moving to the Premier League is not inevitable.

And one factor that benefits Haaland is that he is joining a team that creates a lot of goalscoring chances. Dortmund last year scored 85 goals, but their expected goals scored was only around 65. Haaland still managed 22 goals, but had to outperform his expected goals by five in order to do so. He joins a Manchester City team that scored 99 and had an xG of 93 last season. This huge difference in the number of chances Haaland will get at Manchester City will likely cancel out much of the “Bundesliga tax” anyway.

If Haaland plays every game and avoids injury, then with Manchester City creating chance after chance for him, there’s every chance that his goal tally could reach the sort of numbers that Alan Shearer is predicting for him.