Erling Haaland Is In The Most Unusual Situation – He Can Complete English Football In A Year

There is an insouciance to the way Erling Haaland makes the miraculous look mundane. Each week of his maiden Manchester City campaign has furnished a fresh distinction, from becoming the first Premier League player to score hat-tricks in three successive home games to reaching 13 goals in the Champions League knockout stages, the same total as Thierry Henry managed over an entire career. At just 22, the Norwegian is the ultimate accumulator of accolades. Even Shirley Temple, who won her first and only Academy Award aged six, seems a slouch by comparison.

And yet the most luminous debut season in living memory still needs two further flourishes. Over the next eight days, Haaland still requires FA Cup and Champions League glory before he can truly be said to have completed English football in his first year. If you examine his body of work so far, a disjuncture emerges between his multiplying individual awards and his relatively slender haul of team honours. The league title that he did so much to secure for City sat in contrast to his restless quest for silverware at Borussia Dortmund, where, courtesy of Bayern Munich’s dominance, 2½ spectacular seasons yielded just one German Cup.

Haaland looks to City to propel him to the greatness he craves. Where Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo could augment their CVs at the international level, he is unlikely ever to enjoy the same luxury of representing Norway. Realistically, he needs to win the Champions League in Istanbul to stand any hope of denying Messi, still bathed in World Cup afterglow, an eighth Ballon d’Or. It is why his first FA Cup final assumes such magnitude: for Haaland, emblem of the post-Messi generation, everything is predicated on the club, not a country.

Fittingly, he performs like somebody without a moment to waste, transforming himself from a gangly “piece of spaghetti”, to borrow one childhood coach’s unflattering portrayal, into a veritable Norse god of a striker. Haaland was already in a hurry at Dortmund, where, in his first match against Augsburg, he scored with his third touch. A little under 23 minutes later, he had a hat trick. The same nonchalant, warp-speed rise has been witnessed at City. All those predictions he might toil to make an instant transition from the Bundesliga? He scored nine in his first five Premier League games.

It is Haaland’s capacity to shrug off even the most oppressive expectations that make his signing by City the coup of the century. He is that supreme rarity of a fully-fledged star, not some callow wunderkind or a rough-hewn jewel who needs Pep Guardiola’s polish to sparkle in his second season, in the manner of Jack Grealish. Here you are looking at one piece of treasure with no discernible flaw. For all the attempts to force comparisons between Haaland and Harry Kane, the only other player to hit the 30-goal mark in the Premier League this season, City’s insatiable centre-forward amassed his 36 in six fewer hours of football.

As for his appetite for the grand occasion? Haaland was a model of brooding brilliance in the two league deciders against Arsenal, scoring second-half goals in both. Even if he was expertly shackled by Antonio Rudiger at the Bernabéu, his interplay with Kevin De Bruyne against Real Madrid at the Etihad was dazzling, an aesthetic high-water mark for English clubs in Europe. Guardiola should have few worries about his lethal marksman rising to the stakes against Manchester United, the would-be Treble saboteurs. The only cavil, perhaps, is that he has scored just one in his last six, a drought of Atacaman severity by his standards. But perhaps even genius deserves a week or two off.

Terrifyingly, Haaland is convinced he can still improve in every department, from his left foot to his build-up play. It is a belief that Guardiola, who prides himself on spotting faults invisible to all but the most obsessive perfectionists, would share. Not that they have had cause for much discord in their first year together. The closest they came to a tiff was when Haaland grumbled at being substituted after putting five past Leipzig, infuriated at being denied the chance of a double hat-trick.

These are what you might label first-world problems. But Haaland, in truth, occupies a world all his own. While Andrew Cole grumpily claimed that he “couldn’t give a f—” about his single-season goals record being beaten by Haaland, the reality is that such parallels flatter him. True, Cole was magnificent for Newcastle in 1993/94, his first full top-flight campaign, scoring 41 in all competitions despite not being the team’s designated penalty-taker. Haaland, though, belongs in a separate category with 52, including 12 in Europe alone. Those dozen Champions League goals for City, with the final to come, have been surpassed over one season only by Messi, Ronaldo, Karim Benzema and Robert Lewandowski. Narrow the frame of reference to England, and he is without a peer.

It is a vertiginous trajectory that he is taking. But Haaland has the perspective to recognise that his absurd goal tallies are little more than ego trips without the trophies to match. He acknowledged this week that the prioritising of the Champions League, for what would be the first such title in City’s history, was the primary reason why the club bought him. For now, he must avoid surveying that horizon too closely. An FA Cup final against United is too precarious, too fraught with jeopardy, to be treated as a mere staging post. Haaland, self-evidently, is ready. Never mind being born ready, this incomparable talent was ready as an embryo. Today, one month shy of his 23rd birthday, he must apply the finishing touches to his conquest of the English game.