With Ollie Pearce yet to get off the mark for City this season, talk of him being a slow starter has resurfaced. But how true is it that he is never prolific for the first couple of months of the season? Let’s dig into his goalscoring data from each of the last four seasons, and see whether it backs up the claim.
Ollie Pearce has scored a lot of goals over the past four seasons. Looking purely at goals scored in the league, Pearce has got on the scoresheet a remarkable 130 times. And to show how consistent his output is, exactly half of those goals (65) were scored over two seasons at Worthing in the National League South, while the other half were scored at York in the last two campaigns.
There’s a strange quirk to this incredible record, though: he never seems to hit goalscoring form over the first month or two of the season. Pearce isn’t the only prolific striker who has suffered from this phenomenon, as Harry Kane famously scored over 100 Premier League goals and won the golden boot twice before finally scoring his first league goal in August at the fifteenth attempt in 2018.
The numbers for Pearce aren’t quite as stark as that, as he has notched at least once in August in each of the previous four campaigns. And, while he’s yet to get on the scoresheet this season, he did have the ball in the back of the net at Rotherham at the weekend only to be denied by a marginal offside call. But it’s worth delving into the data a little to see how much the “August curse” is borne out.
