How Pep Guardiola appears to be molding Man City around their all-world striker Erling Haaland

One of the challenges for teams setting out on a new path across all sports is finding their north star. When the horizons are wider, it is critical to have a reference point. As many Premier League clubs prove -- Manchester United, you're in our crosshairs -- that is easier said than done.

Not for Manchester City. The summer has seen their squad pared back dramatically, with key cogs in the vessel thrown overboard. Kevin De Bruyne wanted to stay, but the club hierarchy didn't trust his body. Jack Grealish and Kyle Walker have left the smooth waters around the Etihad Stadium for the relegation shark tank. Ederson might be gone soon, too. With Rodri buffeted by injuries over the last year, only four of the XI that took the field at Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday had also been in Pep Guardiola's side for the Champions League final a little over two years ago.

One of those looks ever more like the man who will come to define City's style of play over the coming years. It is not as if Erling Haaland has not been a critical figure at the Etihad since the day he arrived from Borussia Dortmund three years ago, but with so many other guiding lights gone, the big man looks more vital than ever. Guardiola once cruelly, if inadvertently, dismissed Tottenham as "the Harry Kane team." Don't be entirely surprised if one day soon his team has the look of Haaland FC.

There were certainly signs of a shift at Molineux. Tijjani Reijnders might have grabbed the headlines with a goal and an assist but that is no small part because the idea of Haaland rocking up at any ground in England and scoring a brace is normalized now. And yet it still seems worthy of note that the 25-year-old ended matchday one with more expected goals, 1.99, than all bar three of the other 19 teams in the Premier League. Six of City's 15 shots went to Haaland, with Reijnders, who is shaping up to offer the box-crashing skills of Ilkay Gundogan, taking the only other two in the penalty area.

Haaland has normalized shot charts like the one above, but it should not go unremarked just how much one of the richest and most successful clubs in world football is prepared to make him a potential fault of failure. If his radar is off in any given game, City might just not win it. When is his radar off, though?

So far, so normal. City create lots of shots for Haaland. Perhaps against Wolves, they were doing it more than normal, but that is not an aberration. What was, however, equally notable was the purpose with which the visitors went about their attacking. Compared with their last trip with Molineux, City had nearly 20 percentage points less of the ball, had 44% fewer sequences of nine or more passes and cut their average time on the ball by over 15%. City played deeper, too, as first noted by Squawka.

What do all these statistical changes look like on the pitch? A team that gets the ball from back to front much quicker and anyone who has seen Haaland barreling through the open field can easily understand how that suits City's No. 9.

This adjustment is also a reflection on a 2024-25 season, when Guardiola seemed to fear that he had lost his grasp on the game. Speaking late last year, in the midst of the most sustained crisis of his managerial career, the 54-year-old said "modern football is the way that Bournemouth play, that Newcastle play, Brighton play... modern football is not so positional." Guardiola's teams have always been outliers: more methodical, willing to commit the bulk of their side high off the pitch to block off counterattacks and keep play in the final third. Erling Haaland has often looked like an awkward fit for a style of play defined by the sidelined Rodri, all steady build-up around the penalty box and a sixth sense for where counterattacks might break out. The No.9 still worked extremely effectively, but for three years, it seemed that the now deposed champions were using a sledgehammer to fit a square piece in a round hole.

There was precious little sign of the old approach at Molineux, where City regained possession in the attacking third on only two occasions and conceded it six times. The kings of field tilt had 175 final third touches to their opponents' 123. Such relative balance is not completely unheard of for City, but it usually comes in games against more evenly matched sides, the Arsenals and Liverpools of this world.

This probably is not just a one-off. After all their recruitment patterns this summer speak to Guardiola's more Haalandian vision. Rayan Ait-Nouri was a transition force at Wolves, and when the ball breaks to him at the box, he is less likely to recycle possession when he could swing a boot through it. If Reijnders is going to build on a bright start, it seems more likely he will excel at City because of his running power, blowing by defenders en route to the box. De Bruyne was one of those who could take City from zero to 100 with one pass, so is his presumed successor, Rayan Cherki. Meanwhile, on the left flank, the slow-it-down, keep-it-moving approach personified by Grealish has been swapped out for the more direct Omar Marmoush. Even the retention of Jeremy Doku and possibly Savinho speaks to a change in Guardiola's approach.

Whether City return to the old ways when Rodri is back to his best, whenever that might be, is hard to know. It seems hard to believe that Guardiola will want to return to an approach that we now have reason to believe was contingent on a Ballon d'Or winner at peak fitness. It may ultimately be that Haaland takes Rodri's place as the chief reference point, but there are ways to play a more direct style when the Norwegian is missing, particularly with Marmoush in the squad. This, then, looks like a new City. And it is one being formed in the image of their fearsome No. 9.