Record-breaking Haaland is the perfection of Manchester City’s vision

T he most notable thing, watching them all back, is how simple it looks. Elementary tap-ins at the far post. Slotted finishes into an empty net with the goalkeeper sprawled several yards away like a battlefield casualty. Two-yard headers levered from the shoulders of punier, more beta males. Penalties dispatched with all the certainty of a bow and arrow. These are the goals that gild the legend: the ballast, the meat and potatoes, the dull matter of which Premier League record goal hauls are made.

And when we say simple, we should not labour under any delusions that what Erling Haaland does is easy. On the contrary: this is the culmination of perhaps the most audacious and complex project undertaken in English football. A club purchased and refitted with the sole aim of assembling and training a team whose sole aim is to deliver the ball into dangerous attacking areas, again and again and again and again.

To this end, City’s Abu Dhabi’s ownership have been prepared to stop at virtually nothing. Transfer records have been written and rewritten. The world’s best coach has been hired and given pretty much whatever he wants. There was a slight misconception last summer that the signing of Haaland somehow represented a break with the classical Pep Guardiola method. And yet go back through Guardiola’s previous teams and there is a common evolutionary theme to them: a machine slowly being assembled, a process being refined, honed and finally sharpened to a single spectacular point.

At Barcelona, the goals were initially shared out among the front three of Samuel Eto’o, Thierry Henry and Lionel Messi. By Guardiola’s final season, in 2011-12, the team had been comprehensively rebuilt around Messi, who scored 50 league goals