Haaland vs Mbappé 2019/20 season stats

Two half-seasons that added up to one monster

Haaland arrived in 2019-20 as a 19-year-old with an Austrian league and cup double already to his name and left it as the most talked-about teenager in the sport. At Salzburg he scored 28 in 22 games before Christmas, 16 of them in 14 Austrian Bundesliga matches, plus 5 hat-tricks. Then came the €20m move to Dortmund and the most famous debut of the modern Bundesliga: a 23-minute hat-trick from the bench at Augsburg on 18 January 2020, followed by two more goals as a substitute at home to Köln a week later. He finished with 13 league goals in 15 appearances for Dortmund, a goal every 81.6 minutes, as the club finished second behind Bayern. Combine the two spells and the raw total, 44 goals in 40 club games, is the highest single-season tally of his career to that point and the one that set the price for everything that followed.

Mbappé's quadruple, and the one that got away

Mbappé, aged 20 when the season kicked off, had a stop-start year: a hamstring injury in August cost him most of the autumn, and an ankle injury in the Coupe de France final in July cost him the Coupe de la Ligue final and most of the Champions League quarter-final. He still finished as Ligue 1's top scorer with 18 goals in 20 matches when the league was halted in March, and he still ended with 4 team trophies: the league, both domestic cups and the Trophée des Champions. The missing piece was the Champions League. PSG reached their first final, in Lisbon, and lost 1-0 to Bayern Munich; Mbappé had a clear chance saved by Manuel Neuer before half-time. His 5 Champions League goals all came in the group stage, including a hat-trick in Bruges; in 5 knockout games he scored none but supplied 2 assists, one of them for the stoppage-time winner against Atalanta that saved PSG's season.

Champions League: the teenager out-scored the finalist

Haaland's 10 Champions League goals in 8 appearances made him the competition's second-highest scorer that season behind Robert Lewandowski, even though his teams went out in the round of 16. He scored 8 in 6 group games for Salzburg, starting with a first-half hat-trick on debut against Genk, becoming the first teenager to score in five consecutive Champions League matches, and then added 2 in 2 for Dortmund, both against PSG. Mbappé played 10 games and reached the final with 5 goals and 5 assists. Measured by goals the gap is 5 in Haaland's favour; measured by what the campaign was for, it belongs to Mbappé.

Dortmund v PSG: the first meetings

The two legs in February and March 2020 are the only times the pair met that season and the first two of their career. In Dortmund, Haaland scored twice in eight second-half minutes, the second a rising drive from outside the box, while Mbappé set up Neymar's equaliser. In Paris, in an empty stadium on the eve of Europe's lockdown, PSG won 2-0 and went through 3-2 on aggregate; Haaland was marked out of the game and Mbappé, recovering from illness, came on for the last half hour. The PSG players' imitation of Haaland's meditation celebration became the lasting image. Both meetings are itemised in the cards above and on the head-to-head page.

The shooting numbers behind the goals

Understat only covers the big five leagues, so Haaland's shooting rows use his 1,061 Bundesliga minutes alone. Even so the pattern that defines both careers is already there: Haaland scored 13 from 8.89 expected goals, an over-performance of 4.11, and buried 10 of 13 big chances (76.9%). Mbappé, playing wider for a dominant PSG, took more shots (5.20 per 90 to 2.80), created far more (10.58 expected assists to 1.53) and converted 11 of 23 big chances (47.8%). Neither took a league penalty that Understat records in 2019-20: Haaland's 13 and Mbappé's 18 league goals were all from open play or set pieces.

International football, mostly on hold

Haaland's senior Norway debut, against Malta on 5 September 2019, falls inside this season; he won 2 caps in 2019 without scoring, and his first international goals came in September 2020, the following season. Mbappé's France played only Euro 2020 qualifiers in the autumn of 2019, and he missed the September and October matches injured; his 3 international goals of 2019 were all scored before this season began. The pandemic then wiped out every international window from March to August 2020 and pushed the Euros back a year. The international page has both careers year by year.