AIn a strange way, Marco Rose was to be right. In the run-up to his team’s round of 16 second leg against Manchester City in the Champions League, the RB Leipzig coach was concerned that there was a debate in England about Erling Haaland.
Since moving from Borussia Dortmund to City before this season, he has scored as he wants, but he has also changed the style of Pep Guardiola’s team: The tactics are now tailored to him and are therefore more direct, less elaborate than before, than City often took his opponents in a stranglehold like a python with never-ending possession and fluid positional play.
When asked about this, Rose quoted Haaland’s incredible yield in the Premier League – 28 goals in 26 appearances – and asked smugly where City would be in the table without these goals. “If you don’t want him,” he teased, “then send him to me.” Last season Rose had worked with Haaland in Dortmund, on Tuesday evening they faced each other in opposing camps in the snowy rain of Manchester.
What is Haaland’s superpower?
And Haaland confirmed Rose’s statements on the debate about his person with an achievement that will probably not be surpassed anytime soon: In City’s 7-0 win, he scored five goals before being substituted after a little over an hour. On average, Haaland scored every twelve minutes, although he took less time with his two goals between the 22nd and 24th minute of the game.
And at the highest level that European club football has to offer – or should have to offer, because Leipzig did not live up to this claim at all on Tuesday. Haaland has now scored ten goals in six Champions League games – more than any other player in the competition – in his career so far it’s 33 in 25 games.
For comparison: Cristiano Ronaldo is the top scorer in the Champions League with 140 goals in 183 appearances. Haaland’s form should make the aging world star quite nervous. Because if Haaland continued to score with his current score, he would score more than 240 goals in Ronaldo’s number of games. He is just 22 years old.
He equaled another record on Tuesday evening: only two others had scored five goals in a Champions League game before him: Lionel Messi for FC Barcelona against Bayer Leverkusen (2012) and Luiz Adriano for Shakhtar Donetsk against BATE Borisov ( 2014). When Guardiola substituted Haaland on Tuesday evening, the joke made the rounds that the Spaniard just wanted to protect Messi’s record – both had worked together successfully in Barcelona.
When asked at BT Sport after the game which of his goals he liked most, Haaland said in his usual mischievous way that he couldn’t really remember each one. He just shot without thinking too much about it. What is his superpower? “I think after five goals I have to say: Score goals?”
It’s about being quick in the head, making the right decisions, making the right runs and putting the ball where the goalkeeper can’t reach it. It’s the simple recipe for success for a forward who now has 39 goals in 36 games in all competitions this season.
But why is this generational talent not beyond all doubt? The cut to Haaland as a thoroughbred center forward is a departure from football trimmed for playful dominance with the so-called “false nine”, with which Guardiola has led Manchester City to the championship four times in the past five years.
City is currently “only” second in the Premier League table behind Arsenal. After 27 games, City has 61 points with Haaland, last season it was already 66 without him at this point. City have scored three more goals this season than last season, but have conceded eight more goals. The danger: If Haaland has a bad day, City is more likely to drop points than in the old system, which spread the load over several shoulders.
In its current form, however, Haaland rarely has a bad day. With him, City now hopes to finally win the Champions League after all the successes in England in recent years. This is what Guardiola is measured against, more than national championships and cup wins, as he admitted before the game against Leipzig.
But so far he hasn’t managed to do what he did with Barcelona in 2009 and 2011 at Manchester. Even Marco Rose wished his opponent before the game that it might work out soon – “just maybe not this year”. Leipzig may not have been an opponent for City, but after this bombastic Haaland show he could not be right, at least on this point.