Cyle Larin Scored Once in 15 Games on a Failed Feyenoord Loan, and Is Now Outscoring Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland at Southampton

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Cyle Larin has scored seven goals in seven Championship games for Southampton this season, a better goals-per-90 rate than Kylian Mbappe at Real Madrid or Erling Haaland at Manchester City.
The 31-year-old Canada international arrived at Southampton on loan from Mallorca in early 2026 after a loan spell at Feyenoord in which he scored only once in 15 appearances, mostly from the bench.
Southampton head coach Tonda Eckert has called Larin “the best striker in the league,” and the club sit inside the top eight after starting the season on minus four points following the Spygate scandal.

The Striker Nobody Wanted a Year Ago Is Now Outscoring Mbappe

A year ago, Cyle Larin was a 31-year-old striker on loan at Feyenoord, scoring once in 15 appearances and watching most of those minutes from the bench. Now he is the leading goalscorer in the Championship, and his numbers hold up against anyone in Europe’s top five leagues.

Larin has scored seven goals in seven league matches for Southampton this season, averaging a goal every 73 minutes. That is a better rate than Mbappe is managing for Real Madrid this season, at 75 minutes per goal, and better than Haaland’s 90 minutes per strike for Manchester City. Only Norwich’s Mathias Kvistgaarden, on 1.27 goals per 90 minutes against Larin’s 1.23, has a better return in the entire Championship.

A Nightmare Loan at Feyenoord

Larin’s route to St Mary’s ran through five countries and a career that never settled in one place for long: spells in the United States, Turkey, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands preceded his arrival on England’s south coast. His longest spell at any single club came at Besiktas in Turkey, where he spent four and a half years, before the Feyenoord loan that became the low point of his career: a single goal in 15 games, most of them off the bench, is not the kind of form that usually earns a club’s leading scorer award somewhere else the following year.

Southampton took him on an initial loan from Mallorca in early 2026, and he scored three minutes into his debut. He finished the second half of last season with eight Championship goals in 16 games. Relegation politics got in the way of a permanent stay: the club’s Spygate points deduction meant Larin never got the chance to help Southampton reach the Premier League, and he turned his attention to representing Canada at the World Cup instead, scoring twice, including a late equaliser against Bosnia-Herzegovina, as Jesse Marsch’s side reached the last 16 before losing to Morocco. Canada was one of three nations hosting the 2026 World Cup, giving that run an audience far bigger than anything Larin had played in front of at club level.

Faster to Score Than Mbappe or Haaland

Back in England, Larin has been more prolific than he was even in that promising back half of last season, scoring eight times in nine appearances across all competitions. His conversion rate sits at 25 percent, seven goals from 28 shots, and only West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen has attempted more shots than his 28 in the entire division.

Eckert has called him “the best striker in the league,” a claim that carries real force in a division that also features Bowen, Raul Jimenez, Mohamed Toure and Will Lankshear. The praise is not limited to his own manager. “When you have quality footballers like Larin then you get goals,” former Southampton midfielder Jo Tessem said on BBC Radio Solent’s Goin’ Home podcast. “Quality players like him step up when you need them and so far this season he’s done that. Eckert has said that Larin has been a lot fitter right now than when he arrived in January and that has made a difference so far.”

The System Built Around One Man’s Runs

Larin rarely plays a full 90 minutes, with Eckert tending to withdraw him in the second half, which makes his output more striking rather than less. His game is built on simplicity: he stays on the last line rather than dropping into build-up play, ready to make direct runs into the channels the moment Southampton break the opposition’s press. Right-back James Bree has become a regular supplier from crosses aimed at the back post, an area Larin has made his own.

He has not carried the goalscoring load alone. Finn Azaz and Leo Scienza have combined for five goals and six assists between them this season, and the space Larin’s runs create up front has opened room for Azaz to work between the lines. Larin has been quick to spread the credit. “It feels good but I don’t think I can do this without my team-mates,” he told BBC Radio Solent after scoring twice in a 4-1 win over Bristol City. “They play such a big role in me being able to score and I have to give credit to the coach too, he’s given me the role to play free up there and that’s what I’m doing. It’s the beginning of the season and we have to keep working hard as we have a long way to go. You can’t get too high after these games, you have to be level-headed.”

A Key to the City, and a Club Trying to Climb Back

Larin’s form has been recognised well beyond St Mary’s. He picked up the Championship’s Player of the Month award for August, and his home city of Brampton, Ontario, is presenting him with a key to the city in the coming international break, a nod to his standing as Canada’s second-highest goalscorer of all time.

For Southampton, his goals are arriving at a point when the club needed a reason for optimism. They began the season on minus four points as punishment for the Spygate scandal and have climbed from bottom of the table into the top eight. Their underlying form is stronger than the table shows: they would sit second, behind West Ham only on goal difference, without the deduction hanging over them.

None of it has come as a surprise to Southampton’s coaching staff, who watched his fitness improve steadily after he arrived in January. Eckert has pointed to that conditioning work as the difference between the striker who managed one goal in 15 outings at Feyenoord and the one now leading the goalscoring charts in the entire second tier of English football. The Championship has produced its own share of stories this season, from Bowen’s volume of shots at West Ham to Kvistgaarden’s efficiency in front of goal at Norwich, but none of those forwards spent last year fighting for a place on the bench at a club in the Netherlands.

The Championship promotes only its top two clubs automatically, with places three to six going into the playoffs, so every point Southampton claw back from their opening deduction carries outsized value. A points tally built on the back of a misconduct penalty rather than results on the pitch is an unusual position for a promotion-chasing club to be fighting from, and it is part of why Eckert has been so willing to praise the individual doing the most to offset it.

Last season, Larin shared his minutes up front with Ross Stewart. With Stewart now at Swansea, Larin is Southampton’s clear first choice, and the extra playing time has coincided with the best scoring stretch of his career in England. A player who could not get off Feyenoord’s bench a year ago is now the reason Southampton believe their points deduction will not be the story of their season. Eckert will need him to keep finding the net through a busier winter fixture list if Southampton are to turn this start into a genuine promotion push rather than another mid-table finish undone by a single points penalty.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.