Tommy Martin: Like Ronaldo and United, has ravenous Haaland outgrown City?
Manchester City's Erling Haaland, left, celebrates with teammates after scoring his side's opening goal during the Champions League opening phase soccer match between Villarreal and Manchester City in Villarreal, Spain, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Alberto Saiz)
Let’s be clear, Erling Haaland is not fair.
He is a 6’5” cross between Marco van Basten and a buffalo, whose father was a professional footballer and mother was an international heptathlete, who can head the ball with the force of the Large Hadron Collider.
It’s rarely a square go when he’s around.
He is living embodiment of the F. Scott Fitzgerald line that “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth,” except instead of fundamental decencies it’s the ability to plunder goals using all the commonly used body parts.
He made it 12 consecutive scoring games for club and country on Tuesday night in Villarreal with one of his 12 touches of the ball in Manchester City’s Champions League victory. He has 24 goals in 14 games for club and country this season. Earlier this campaign he became the fastest player to reach 50 Champions League goals, doing it in 49 games. The record-breaking is constant, relentless.
The goal on Tuesday was with his third touch: the first came in the opening seconds, when he mercifully laid the ball off instead of shooting; the second moments later when he rose like a great salmon heaving itself above the frenzied rapids before horribly miscuing his header.
You don’t survive a third chance. Villarreal’s stadium is known as El Ceramica, in reference to the industry that drives the local economy. As he charged at skittish defenders closing them down in possession, Haaland was almost literally a bull in a china shop.
It was a night when it was hard to avoid the unequal parcelling of things. While City were beating La Liga’s third place team with ease, Arsenal thumped another Spanish giant, Atletico Madrid, even more impressively. Up at St James’s Park Newcastle United dispatched Benfica 3-0. Nine goals scored by the Premier League teams against European football institutions of various levels of historical grandeur, and none conceded.
This is the way of things, of course, and why Haaland chose in 2022 to bring his talents to Manchester City, club of Shaun Goater and Niall Quinn and his dad. Circumstances (by which I mean oil) had made them the richest and most powerful club in the richest and most powerful league, and it didn’t hurt that Alf Inge used to play for them either.
By the end of his first season, he’d helped them to finally win the Champions League after Pep Guardiola had spent the best part of a decade blowing a gasket in the competition’s latter stages. All those years trying to pick the lock, when all he needed was a battering ram.
Haaland’s arrival was a fundamental change in the City ecosystem. There was lots of talk about how, yes, he was a gushing wellspring of goals that you just needed to position a bucket under, but that he had disturbed the carefully calibrated springs and cogs of Guardiola’s design.
While you had this great Norse elk rutting about in the penalty box waiting to score goals, the argument went, you were missing the delicate brush strokes that made City what they were – which, at their peak, and appropriately for the property of a dictatorship, was a totalitarian football concept, full state control of the football pitch, with Raheem Sterling tapping in at the back post.
Of course, Guardiola figured it out and City went and won the treble. But arguably they have never been quite as chloroform-tastic as they were pre-Haaland and certainly not since the onset of injury problems for Rodri, their giant, all-seeing midfield sentry post.
Recent weeks have suggested a return to some sort of full-service City, with several Premier League teams turning up to the Etihad to be clubbed aside. Meanwhile the Villarreal victory, aside from another notch on the Haaland bedpost, featured the sort of genius Guardiola tactical twiddling that people too quickly forget on the nights when things are going wrong and he’s scratching his skin off.
But none of that is the story with City right now. Even flicking through the reports of a night like Tuesday, with his very mortal single goal tally, the story is Haaland. With no disrespect to City and their achievements in that time, he has been by far the most interesting thing about them – unresolved court cases notwithstanding – since he walked in the door.
It might sound ludicrous to suggest given that he has a contract with the club that runs up to 2034 and is clearly assuming more of a leadership role in the team, but there is the sense that Haaland is outgrowing City. This is not unexpected, given that he was signed with at least half an eye on being the sort of ‘franchise’ player that the club had hitherto lacked.
As he surges through the goalscoring records, as he gets stronger and better and greedier, Haaland seems more and more incongruous in his surroundings. Some of it comes back to that unequal parcelling thing. For all they have achieved in the modern era, City still leave many people cold – there is the sense for some that their success is unearned given the riches their owners possess. Even their manager’s famous style of play, the way it eschews ‘you have a go, we have a go’, seems, in a childish way, unfair.
Haaland does not leave you cold. His physicality is invigorating at a time when humanity is desk bound and lived experienced is hunched over a screen. He moves like a beast – galloping, rampaging, leaping, devouring. Even in moments of repose he seems to growl and stalk in a state of hungry readiness. He is a man who has staked out his own territory. He wears sky blue football kit, but really it should be a loincloth.
Maybe this is why they keep him to 12 touches – any more would be obscene. It's no slight on City to say he is one of those exceptions to that thing about no man being bigger than the club. The same happened with Cristiano Ronaldo, who outgrew Manchester United and Real Madrid and eventually grew so big that he could only be housed in a golden desert palace, occasionally loaned for display in the Portuguese national team.
Haaland is going the same way. It’s not fair, but some people are just made that way.
