Erling Haaland in the Football League feels implausible

0If Manchester City are punished with effective relegation or demotion then Erling Haaland’s future will be called into question – AP/Jon SuperEven before Enzo Maresca became the first Manchester City insider on Friday to field questions on the club’s guilty verdict in all but one of their Premier League charges, one key figure had made his own attempt to calm the storm.

Not the chief executive Ferran Soriano, whose only public utterance so far has been a video to staff that was not as reassuring as he may have hoped. He also appeared on Sky News being pursued around the European Football Clubs conference in Copenhagen, and handling the ambush interview with less composure than one would expect of a junior cabinet minister. Pep Guardiola asserted his belief in the club’s innocence, but he is no longer a contracted employee of City Football Group. Instead it fell to Erling Haaland to offer a way forward.

The face of City – and indeed the face of the Premier League – did not reference the charges, nor the 40-page core decision document by the independent commission that was so lacerating in its verdict on City. Instead, in a short interview published on the club’s website, Haaland encouraged the support to “stick together”.

“We have to stay with each other, and we have to stay positive,” he said. “No matter what happens in life, we always have to have a smile.”

The message was repeated a few times, and there was no question what elephant it was addressing in the corner of the room even if neither party wished to say so explicitly. “So, yeah,” Haaland concluded, suggesting more than just the visit to Anfield, “stick together, enjoy the ride and smile.”

Haaland is the Premier League’s biggest star and yet even his future has had to take second place to the immense fallout from the City guilty verdict, delivered between Norway’s defeats to Portugal and Wales at the end of last month. By the end of next January, the man who was odds-on to break Alan Shearer’s long-standing Premier League goalscoring record may have to make some hard decisions about where his future lies – and whether that future is in English football. Haaland is 26, and may have many goalscoring years left in the elite, but whether he could spare a few to play outside the top flight as part of a sanctioned City is another question altogether.

Another question is whether a post-verdict City, or one that found its Abu Dhabi ownership banned by the independent football regulator from owning the club, would be able to meet the contract liabilities to Haaland and many more of its first team. These remain possibilities rather than inevitabilities. City deny the verdict. But the options are narrowing for them to demonstrate it. Haaland, it should be noted, said that he cares “a lot about City”.

“I care a lot about the fans because I am a fan myself,” he said. Yet one would expect a sporting brand as big as Haaland, with all the attendant management his career requires, to have war-gamed all the eventualities over the last month.

He signed a contract with City until 2034 in January 2025, a 10-year deal that will have made him an extraordinarily wealthy man. Perhaps there was some strategy on City’s part in that deal with one eye on a guilty verdict. Even so, Haaland in the Football League feels implausible. There would be something pleasingly eccentric to imagine him at Stevenage or Lincoln City grafting for three points but that is not where he or his brand belong. He is Mr Champions League. He is eighth on the official all-time goalscoring list with 59, and only one current Champions League player ahead of him in Kylian Mbappé on 71. At the rate of one goal a game, Haaland has scored the goals quicker than anyone. The next best in that regard is Lionel Messi on 129 goals at a rate of 0.79 a game and second on the all-time list.

Even allowing for Haaland continuing at his current pace he needs at least a further 80 Champions League games to catch Cristiano Ronaldo’s record of 141. One season’s run to the final only yields 19 games, excluding a post-league-phase play-off. Haaland needs all the seasons he can get.

How much do these records matter? One can only say that he did not become the phenomenon he was playing outside the elite. Now in his prime years, he broke through into the US public consciousness this summer at the World Cup finals with some shrewdly judged social media offerings that played up his cheerful, everyman character. His career has been well managed by his father Alf Inge and his agent Rafaela Pimenta. That may also involve making some hard decisions when the moment comes.

If he does leave City then every big club will be in the market. A clean break from the Premier League might be his greatest wish although that would ask a lot of the heavily indebted big two in Spain. No doubt the likes of Paris St-Germain and Bayern Munich are also weighing it up, whoever they may currently have in the No 9 shirt. Then there is the Premier League competition too. Joining another big-six club would be a hard call for a man who has generally only ever been the subject of admiration, even of the grudging kind from fans of rival clubs. But great players often have to make tough decisions to get the most from their careers, and Haaland may be no different in that regard.