6 players who have outscored Erling Haaland since he told Arsenal ...

To the great satisfaction of Arsenal fans everywhere, Manchester City striker Erling Haaland has seen his form nosedive since telling Mikel Arteta and his players to ‘stay humble’ after their 2-2 draw back in September.

Haaland scored to put City ahead that afternoon, continuing his own blinding start to the season when the picture looked altogether a lot healthier for Pep Guardiola’s reigning champions.

That was his 10th goal in his first five appearances, but things have slowed down considerably since then. He’s scored just three goals in 13 league outings since that fractious clash at the Etihad as City have unthinkably tumbled down to seventh in the table.

Here are six players we can’t believe have outscored the Norway international in the Premier League since then.

As they’ve frequently done with their most promising academy starlets in recent seasons, City cashed in on Delap in the summer.

How might they do with a homegrown striker capable of carrying the load, with their current No.9 out of sorts and seemingly undroppable due to a lack of alternatives?

Since signing for Ipswich Town in a £20million deal, Delap has scored a tally of six goals – a more than respectable number given it’s his first experience in the top flight, doing the thankless task of leading the line for a newly-promoted club struggling at the wrong end of the table.

Four of those six goals – against Aston Villa, West Ham, Brentford and Tottenham no less – have been scored since Haaland’s ‘stay humble’ rant.

“Yeah, in a positive way, because there’s no negative to me not being at City any more,” Rogers said of facing his former club ahead of Aston Villa’s recent 2-1 victory over them.

“I suppose to show what I’m about, to show what I’m capable of, but I try to do that every game, every week. It’s an opportunity for me to show what I’m about.

“It would be nice to play against players that I’ve trained with when I was younger, to show them where I’ve come from to where I am now. I’m looking forward to it.”

He certainly did just that, scoring and running them ragged in a man-of-the-match display at Villa Park.

City sold him for just £1.5million to Championship side Middlesbrough in 2023, and he’s already risen back to the top as a full England international with five goals in his last 13 Premier League outings for Unai Emery’s Champions League-chasing Villa.

Given how outrageously good Palmer was in his debut season for Chelsea, we’re not surprised to see him catching Haaland in the scoring charts.

But we definitely are surprised to have seen the 22-year-old score three times as many Premier League goals as the Norwegian battering ram since that day in September.

In fact, Palmer could’ve failed to score in each of his last 12 league outings and he’d still have more goals since then than Haaland, having scored four in a ridiculous 20-minute period against Brighton a week later.

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It’s been a largely miserable old season for the Manchester United captain.

He picked up his third red card of the season in the Boxing Day defeat against Wolves and his team are enduring their worst campaign yet, toiling in the bottom half of the table while failing to see an uptick in results since binning off Erik ten Hag for Ruben Amorim.

And yet even he has scored more Premier League goals than Haaland, with four since September. Ouch.

Fulham currently sit level on points with City, having just beaten title-chasers Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. That’s a sentence you didn’t expect to read back in September, eh?

There are several excellent performers in Marco Silva’s overachieving Cottagers side, but chief among them is Alex Iwobi. Now 28 and something of a Premier League stalwart, he’s enjoying his best season to date, a decade on from emerging from Arsenal’s Hale End ranks.

The Nigeria international has five goals and three assists so far this season and enjoyed a particularly fine spell of form in late November into early December.

We ought to be used to Vardy defying father time by now. And yet…

Leicester are enduring a difficult start to life on their return to the Premier League, looking seldom more convincing than the side that got relegated a couple of years back.

Even in a Foxes side that have disposed of Steve Cooper and are conceding shots at a rate of knots under successor Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Vardy continues to age like a fine wine can of red bull.

The veteran has scored against Southampton, Nottingham Forest, West Ham and Brighton in recent months while Haaland has only scored three over the same period.