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Career goals of Haaland, Kane and Gyokeres
Haaland (for club): 337 appearances, 293 goals, 66 assists
Haaland (for Norway): 52 appearances, 59 goals, 7 assists
Kane (for club): 624 appearances, 447 goals, 112 assists
Kane (for England): 116 appearances, 81 goals, 19 assists
Viktor Gyokeres (for club): 317 appearances, 169 goals, 66 assists
Viktor Gyokeres (for Sweden): 35 appearances, 21 goals, 8 assists
Courtesy of transfermrkt
In years past a pantheon of elite number nines have dominated the Ballon d’Or awards; centre-forwards whose stock-in-trade was to put the ball into the back of the net as regularly as was humanly possible.
In the early-Eighties, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge won the Golden Ball back-to-back, a prolific finisher for Bayern Munich and West Germany. Paolo Rossi was the next recipient, fresh from converting six times for Italy at the World Cup.
In subsequent years Marco Van Basten – widely viewed as the most complete number nine of any generation - was crowned on three occasions while the clinical Jean-Pierre Papin was honoured too for his sharp instincts inside the box.
Later still, there was Michael Owen and Andriy Shevchenko, centre-forwards whose pace, movement and unerring accuracy chilled the blood of the very best defenders around.
In 2005, the Ukrainian was the last out-and-out centre-forward to win the Ballon d’Or and though the sustained, combined genius of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo partly accounts for this, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
The bigger picture informs us that football was changing, supposedly irrevocably, apparently forever.
A tactical tectonic shift
Goals have always been the most valuable currency in football, and so it naturally followed that the forwards who scored those goals were typically the most feted. Until they weren’t.
The rise of Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona and the Spanish national team in the late-2000s introduced tiki-taka to the wider world, a model of football that was soon embraced by almost every club, from the Champions League down.
This tactical revolution in itself halved the number of centre-forwards at a stroke, with partnerships up front no longer in vogue, while the over-riding remit of possession-based fare dramatically altered the role of every striker.
No longer were they expected to merely ‘run the line’ and poach in penalty areas. No longer were they allowed to ‘play dead’ for large tracts of a game, then pop up with a headline-grabbing winner.
Now they were an integral element to build-up play, an outlet still but also a fundamental part of the process. This consequently gave rise to the hybrid striker and, in due course, the ‘false 9’.
Of course, there were exceptions to this rule, most notably Robert Lewandowski who was – and remains – an apex predator in a sport that in modern climes has produced so few of them.
As a general rule of thumb though, the archetypical finisher was all-but-finished. Considered out of step and fast becoming an anachronism.
A lethal trade once more venerated
Until they weren’t.
The last decade has seen a welcomed renaissance of the centre-forward and this World Cup has seen number nines strongly come to the fore, on a scale not seen for several major tournaments.
To this point in the competition Harry Kane, Erling Haaland and Viktor Gyokeres have scored seven goals combined and this is pertinent given that each of them have won the Gerd Muller Trophy in recent years.
Each are match-winners to the core, presently winning matches by plying their lethal trade on the biggest of sporting stages.
2025/26 numbers for Kane, Haaland and Gyokeres
Kane: 61 goals, 4050 minutes, a goal every 66.3 minutes
Haaland: 38 goals, 4144 minutes, a goal every 109 minutes
Gyokeres: 21 goals, 3481 minutes, a goal every 165.7 minutes
Moreover, while lionised talents such as Kylian Mbappe, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have almost inevitably made the headlines it is atypically not their explosive ingenuity that is being celebrated, but rather their goal-scoring.
Mbappe was talked about around the world following France’s opening fixture after becoming his nation’s all-time leading goal-scorer.
Messi has been universally acclaimed this week after scoring the most World Cup goals of any player in history.
Read all about this, along with other accolades won by the Argentine this summer, above.
As for Ronaldo, a brace against Uzbekistan on Tuesday ensured that he became the first player to score in six World Cups.
Naturally, these giants of the modern game have been broadly venerated across their era, their every attribute highlighted and celebrated. Rarely before, however, has just one of their skillsets been so singularly focused on.
Their finishing. Their prolificacy.
Back to nature: Football returns to what it knows
So why has the art of goal-scoring been re-elevated to priority status, and why are managers once again turning to tall, powerful front-men to spearhead their sides?
To answer this, we return to tiki-taka, a methodology that is aesthetically pleasing, and hugely impactful, and can kill opponents via a thousand cuts, but can be somewhat limited against a well-organised low block.
The rise of the low block prompted coaches to turn to aerial presence and physical attrition, while having the ability to get in behind a regimented back-five became a highly prized commodity.
Dragging defenders out of position was additionally a vital skill and that’s, of course, before we even get to a consistent volume of goals scored, courtesy of finely honed instincts.
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Yet tactical considerations only play a part in the revival of centre-forward play. There is also the lottery of genetics to acknowledge too.
Erling Haaland didn’t purposely grow up to be 6ft 5 and obsessive about scoring a large quantity of goals, presciently aware that when he was in his prime football mores would change to make his assets invaluable.
Nature simply made him that way.
The same goes for Kane and Gyokeres, but staying with the Striking Viking, and to illustrate the extent in which number nines have returned from the wilderness, it simply cannot be over-stated how important 13 June 2022 was in this context.
Because that was the day when Pep Guardiola – the absolute authority on, and devout advocate of, possession-based football – paid £52.5m for the services of an out-and-out finisher, a player who could conceivably have been born with a nine on his back.
Football changes. At times, it stays the same. In this instance, it appears to be going back to what it knows.
