Shearer: Kane would be scoring like Haaland if he had moved to Man City
If 'it takes one to know one', there can't be many people better positioned to settle a debate over elite-level Premier League strikers than Alan Shearer.
The former England, Newcastle and Blackburn star retired back at the end of the 2005-06 season, finishing his illustrious and much-celebrated career as the Premier League's all-time leading goalscorer, notching 260 goals. His record still stands to this day.
Many had seen Spurs striker and England captain Harry Kane as the obvious heir apparent, his meteoric rise to becoming one of the world's best centre forwards compounded by consistent numbers in the league, season after season, with a couple of golden boots to his name. The Tottenham talisman currently has 191 Premier League goals and sits third in the list, behind Wayne Rooney and Shearer.
Shearer himself has long maintained that Kane was well and truly on course and deserving of breaking that record.
That is, until a certain Erling Haaland arrived at Manchester City.
With records tumbling, defenders panicking, opposition coaches baffled and a more than healthy 15 goals in just nine league appearances for the Norwegian, Kane has suddenly found himself in a head-to-head race that at one time seemed unfathomable.
Writing in his column this week for The Athletic, Shearer opened up about his admiration for both players and his two cents on whether Haaland really is better than Kane:
"If Harry was in this City team, he would be scoring as many goals as Erling has.
"This is dreamland for any top forward. I've said it all along - a top goalscorer in this City team should score 40 goals. If Erling stays fit then he'll get that and maybe even some more.
"Harry's record tells you that he would do that, too. There's no doubt what Pep thinks about Harry and what the vast majority of other people think about him as well. He is a top goalscorer: he's got eight in nine league games so far, which we'd be talking about a lot more if it wasn't for Erling."
To put Haaland's goalscoring statistics into perspective, if he continued at his current rate of 1.67 goals per game he'd end up somewhere in the high sixties - just in the Premier League - come the end of the season.
Of course, that'd shatter the previous record of 34 goals by Andy Cole (Newcastle United; 1993/94 - 42 matches) and Alan Shearer himself (Blackburn Rovers; 1994/95 - 42 matches), or in more recent times Mohamed Salah's 32 (Liverpool; 2017/18 - 38 matches).
Referencing City's style of play and the additional burdens on Kane for club and country, Shearer believes Kane would be just as devastating.
"If you put Harry in that City team, they would encourage him to stay up top more rather than coming deep to get involved in the game. I don’t think they would have taken that away from him totally, but they would want him to be more of a focal point.
"They’ve got other players who can do the stuff he does when he drops deep: Bernardo Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish, Riyad Mahrez. There would be no need for Harry to come as deep as he would at Spurs or even with England."
It seems as though the ship has sailed for Kane's City move, but that doesn't leave him short of other suitors, with reports of bids being readied for the summer by the likes of Manchester United and Bayern Munich.
