HAALAND – City’s path to redemption

Erling Braut Haaland, easily Kylian Mbappe’s lone rival at the top of the raw attacking talent “food chain”.. Born into more or less a footballing family with his father Alf Inge Haaland a former Manchester City player, it’s not hard to see where his passion and drive towards the sport comes from.

Big, strong, tall( 6″5) and astonishingly quick for a man his size, Haaland is simply just a goal machine, plundering goals literally everywhere he has been. His club career really took off at Molde in his home country of Norway, scoring 14 goals in 39 appearances as a 17 year old but it was at the U-20 World Cup in 2019 that Haaland arrived on the world scene scoring NINE goals in a 12-0 win for Norway vs Honduras. By then he had also moved to Red Bull Salzburg and Haaland introduced himself to the Uefa Champions League, becoming the first player ever to score 6 goals in his first three games, banging in the goals vs the big guns. Perhaps, the most impressive came against a Virgin Van Dijk led Liverpool only 4 minutes after coming on as a substitute.

It was evident that Salzburg wouldn’t be able to keep such a talent for long and after 29 goals and 7 assists in only 27 games, he moved to Dortmund and announced his arrival with a hat trick in just twenty minutes of play in his debut match vs Augsburg, which he followed up with two goals in the next match as he became the first person to score 5 goals in his first two bundesliga games. Haaland scored 86 goals and gave 23 assists in only 89 games for Dortmund and he did all these between the ages of 19 and 21.

He boasts an astounding tally of 23 goals in only 19 UCL matches.

It’s a new dawn for Erling Haaland now though. It was an open secret that he would end up leaving Dortmund too for one of the heavyweights with Real Madrid, Barcelona and Man City all seeking his signature, Man City has won that race though and if we thought their team was great before, we might be about to witness something truly special with Haaland now on the team.

If there’s one small thing Man City have struggled with in recent memory, it’s finishing the plethora of chances they create in a match and although they usually do more than enough to win most of the time, some moments have been when it cost them dearly, most notably in their Ucl quarter final match against Lyon in the 2019/20 season where Raheem Sterling missed from point blank range and they were eliminated and in more recent happenings in last season’s Ucl Semi final vs Real Madrid with Phil Foden and Riyad Mahrez guilty of big misses that contributed to them being eliminated by the eventual champions.

Haaland is the closest thing to a perfect solution to that problem, scoring 10 goals in his first season in the UCL and taking home the golden boot despite getting eliminated at the round of 16, it would seem like City is destined to cross the coveted UCL line now with his addition.

A goal on his debut against Bayern during pre season might have been overshadowed by a rough game in the community shield but that will not be a constant happening, and he showed

that on his premier league debut scoring twice against West Ham, a penalty he intelligently won and a calm and collected finish from a Kevin De Bruyne pass.

At City, he will get every type of chance he wants. He usually prefers to latch onto passes in behind, and that will be taken care of by players such as Kevin De Bruyne, easily one of the best passers in football at the moment and with players like Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden also available, it’s hard to see Haaland not delivering like he so usually does.