Erling Haaland kept the 2025/26 PFA Player of the Year race alive on Tuesday, May 19, when he scored Manchester City’s equaliser in a 1-1 draw with AFC Bournemouth. The goal was his 38th of the season and underlined how little he has slowed down, even as City’s title defence slipped away and Arsenal wrapped up the Premier League crown.
Haaland now has 162 goals in 198 matches for City, a run that has made him the standard by which the rest of the league is measured. He has 27 goals in 35 Premier League matches this season and nine assists, while Manchester City’s final match comes against Aston Villa on Sunday, May 24.
That finish matters because the award conversation is being shaped by more than one club. Arsenal’s title win puts Gabriel, Declan Rice and David Raya into the reckoning, with Raya already having taken the Golden Glove and Rice adding five goals and seven assists in 54 matches. Bruno Fernandes, meanwhile, leads the league with 20 assists, another marker that makes the vote harder to call than it looked a few weeks ago.
Haaland’s case is still the loudest. He has won the award before, in the 2022/23 season, when he scored 52 goals, and he has already shown this year that his floor remains absurdly high: his lowest tally in a season is 34 goals. Even in a first half of the campaign that was not up to City’s usual standard, he kept producing.
The tension in the race is that City did not deliver the kind of season that usually powers an individual winner, but Haaland’s numbers continue to argue the other way. Arsenal’s champions have the team success and the defensive steel to put their players in the frame, yet the award is likely to come down to whether voters value the player who drove the title race or the player whose output kept his side relevant when it was falling behind.
That is why the final week matters. City still have one more game to play, and Haaland still has one more chance to add to a season that has already reached 38 goals. If he finishes with another decisive performance, the pfa player of the year 2026 discussion may narrow to a familiar conclusion: the league’s most relentless scorer is once again the player everyone else is chasing.
