Pep Guardiola would like to have a striker who scores 30 goals next season, with the Manchester City manager seeking to replace their record scorer, Sergio Agüero, and being linked with Tottenham’s Harry Kane.
Agüero will leave the club after a decade following next Saturday’s Champions League final against Chelsea and while Guardiola is interested in signing Kane, he did not speak directly about the centre-forward.
City claimed the Premier League and Carabao Cup title without a traditional No 9, instead having several players contributing goals. These included Ilkay Gündogan, Phil Foden, Raheem Sterling, Ferran Torres, Agüero and Gabriel Jesus. Guardiola would like the option of having a prolific forward at City but emphasised he does not want the burden of goalscoring to fall on one player.
“I would love to have a guy who scores 50 goals,” he said before City’s final game of the season, at home to Everton on Sunday. “I would love it – but at the same I don’t like just to have all the pressure on one player. Even at Barcelona Lionel Messi scored more than 50 goals every season, but in that team for example, in our first season Samuel Eto’o scored a lot.”
Eto’o outscored Messi in La Liga that season, with 30 compared to Messi’s 23, although Messi ended the season with 38 in all competitions, two more than Eto’o .
Guardiola said: “To win titles, especially the Premier League … the statistics speak for themselves – you need at least three guys [scoring] more than 10, 12, 15 goals to be competitors. But when you have a guy who scores 25 or 30, it helps a lot.
“We will try due to the way we play to have everybody involved in scoring goals – the more players we have with this quality the better we will be.”
Agüero, who faces a late fitness test to be available on Sunday, has recalled his most famous goal, the winner against Queens Park Rangers on the final day of the 2011-12 season after 93 minutes and 20 seconds to win City the title.
“It is the best memory that I will ever have in my head,” said the Argentinian. “I don’t think it will happen again in another country or in this one. It’s not something that can be repeated.
“I don’t know if it was the best goal because it was just another goal, but it was the best moment of my life. Every time I watch the goal with my friends or my son shows it to me and I watch it with my family, it seems as though it was last year when actually a lot of time has passed.
“But I will always remember this goal like it was yesterday – it was just so crazy. I remember that night we went with our families and everyone from the club to party. Two days of crazy partying but with family, people from the club.”
