erling Haaland is a phenomenon. Not only that, he has already scored 22 goals this season, with five more in the Champions League. It’s the spirit he offers that is unstoppable: almost unbeatable for pace, almost impossible to knock off the ball and with a clinical eye for goal.
His bubbly, almost flippant, personality makes him even more terrifying. He jokes about a secret goal he’s set for this season. He’s not some inspired self-improver: he seems to score record-breaking numbers because he finds it funny. He plays football like an eight-year-old beginner and makes the game seem almost laughably easy. There are only a handful of forwards in the history of the sport who combine such physical and technical prowess.
There was Bernabe Ferreira, the Argentine dubbed Rufino’s mortar for the power of his shot. When River Plate signed him from Tigre for £23,000 in 1932, it was the first time the world transfer record had been held by a club outside Britain. There was the Brazilian Ronaldo, who managed a goal a game even in the relatively defensive ’90s before a knee injury hit explosive acceleration. And there was Edward Streltsov.
Streltsov is now best known as the young Torpedo Moscow striker who was arrested on the eve of the 1958 World Cup, convicted of rape and jailed for six years before returning to win the league. His time in the Gulag, and various attempts to clear his name, understandably dominate his discussion but his career also reveals strategic issues.
Over the next decade at Dynamo Kyiv, Viktor Maslov would invent the modern concept of pressure. His ideas had not reached that point when he was reassigned to Torpedo in 1957, but he was already thinking of the team as an integrated unit, realizing that a player’s actions in one part of the pitch could have profound strategic effects elsewhere.
He acknowledged Streltsov’s immense talent but never seemed as intimidated by him as the others. Part of that may be because he recognized early on how dangerous his wild streak could be, and seemed to lose patience with his star in the difficult months between Olympic success and the athlete’s arrest in 1956. But it is also possible to detect tactical doubts and it was only after Streltsov was jailed that Maslov led Torpedo to their first league title in 1960.
When Streltsov returned from the Gulag, he was a different kind of player. His momentum was gone and he would fall deep. A forward defined by his power began to talk about preferring shots that slowly rolled over the line to those that crashed into the net. Being less physically fit, he had to learn a new way of playing and to an extent he did, enough to help Torpedo win their second Soviet title in 1965.
But the game had changed and he could not change enough to adjust himself to this new world of systems and responsibilities. Streltsov won individual awards because he still did fascinating things (and because of the power of the story of a player returning from the Gulag to restart his career) but he clearly disappointed Nikolai Morozov, part of the great Torpedo tradition of thoughtfulness. and innovative managers who made his debut in 1954 as a 16-year-old and returned to the club in 1967. Notably, as national manager, Morozov made no effort to allow Streltsov to play in the 1966 World Cup.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that since football became a system game in the 60s, players with deep individual gifts, physical and technical, could also be detrimental to system-based teams.
Ronaldo did not win the national league title until 2002. Ruud van Nistelrooy scored around two goals in every three games in five seasons for Manchester United, but won just one championship during that time. Recently, Cristiano Ronaldo became the top goalscorer in three seasons at Juventus and one season at United.
There is a sense that Haaland’s goal scoring may be slowing down, although such statements are relative: with anyone else, the 333 minutes between his goals against Everton and Tottenham were spoken of as a drought? He is on course to break the Premier League goalscoring record in a season.
Yet halfway through the season, City have scored 50 goals and conceded 20. Last season they scored 99 and 26 respectively. Holland, the best goalscorer, have only seen a change in their goals per game statistics, while there has clearly been an adverse effect on goals conceded.
And it’s not just that. Haaland had 20 touches against Manchester United last Sunday. No City player played fewer than 71 when City beat United at Old Trafford last season. Pep Guardiola’s football was always in possession. Haaland demands direct early passes that run counter to Guardiola’s tendency to build slowly to establish a base to counter a potential counter, and his lack of involvement in normal play means trying to establish dominance that suppresses that characteristic of dominant force. .
There was a moment in the second half Last Saturday’s derby When, the game was stopped, Guardiola, trespassing on the pitch, shouted at Haaland, apparently gesturing for him to drop deep. Haaland’s body language suggested a teenager being asked to clean his bedroom, although there were a few occasions when he fell back and, like Harry Kane, he spun to play passes to advancing players.
Which is not to say that Haaland can’t succeed at City. The tension between two opposing philosophies can be constructive. Of course, it could be that his intensity gives City the kind of edge they have habitually lost in European ties. But in football, there is a tendency to emphasize the role of the goal scorer more. Just because a striker is dominant, just because he’s obviously a great player, doesn’t mean he’s making the team better.
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