Three games, three goals, every single minute played. Erling Haaland has started the season the way he usually does — by making himself indispensable. The winner against Coventry on Saturday took him to 300 club goals, a number that lands somewhere between remarkable and faintly absurd.
And yet the conversation around City's No.9 is no longer about what he scores. It is about when he stops.
Enzo Maresca has already conceded the obvious: Haaland cannot play every minute this season. The admission came before the trip to Porto, where the Champions League presents a rather less forgiving stage than the Premier League's early-season offerings. The Estádio do Dragão is not the sort of place you experiment with resting your best player.
“Depends on the game and gameplan,” Maresca said when asked when those rests might come. Which is manager-speak for: we will figure it out as we go.
“Depends on the game and gameplan.”
There is logic in the caution. Haaland has played every minute of City's opening three league games. A long season waits, and Maresca spoke after the Coventry win about protecting a player who will be central to everything City hope to achieve. There will be games, he said, when Haaland needs to recover.
Porto, though, are not obliging hosts. They arrive having won all five of their opening league matches, and Maresca spoke on Monday night about the difficulty of the game. This is the sort of fixture where the manager's protective instincts collide with the reality of the opposition.
There is also the small matter of who steps in. Maresca confirmed last week that Antoine Semenyo can operate through the middle following Omar Marmoush's departure, offering a glimpse of the contingency plan. Whether that plan gets an airing in Portugal on Tuesday night is another matter entirely.
City's official preview frames Porto as a side in formidable form. The maths is simple enough: five wins from five, a noisy stadium, and a manager weighing up whether his star striker can be spared. The guess here is that Haaland starts. The question is how many more times Maresca can ask the same of him before the answer changes.