As Dutch left-back Jeff Hardeveld trudged off following a red card last summer, he was braced for a bollocking from his manager and a long journey home.
He certainly didn’t have time to notice the attentions of fourth official Shona Shukrula, who stood on the touchline, mentally undressing him and wondering whether he was kind to animals and children.
But the pair got talking and now, four months later, they have officially announced they are a couple. Mazel tov!
The ancient myths spoke of him. The runes foretold that one day he would come: taller, faster, stronger, bendier, more bethunderbastarded of left peg, a goalscoring phenom from the Northlands who would pop elite, effete European football into his big daft giant’s pockets.
Even Fred Nietzsche, in a passage later nicked by the Nazis, seemed to anticipate Erling Braut Haaland’s faintly psychotic nine-goal contribution to a 12-0 win over Honduras in the U-19 World Cup: “They appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too convincing, too sudden, too different even to be hated … Some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which … unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless…”
After three years’ laying his terrible claws upon Austrian and German Bundesliga defences, yomping through on goal with that odd CGI gait of his, arms locked in pec-flex rigidity, like Thanos running for the last train while carrying two Samsonite cases full of €50 notes, Haaland now sits in his gilded Rhineland palace where the princelings of European football flock to bestow jewels on Mino Raiola in the hope of winning his favour and prising him from Borussia Dortmund in the summer.
Well, I say gilded palace. Actually, right now he’s almost certainly relaxing on a state-of-the-art ergonomic sofa in socks and sliders, slurping a carrot and celery smoothie, E-stim electrodes dotted across various muscle groups, Hed Kandi Beach House 19 pulsing out of Klipsch speakers, those big feet unable to quite find the groove, the destiny of the football universe in his mostly empty head. For soon Haaland will decide which footballing behemoth – City, Real, PSG or Barça – to futureproof with his mutant goalpowers.
But for now we have questions. Lots of them.
Who exactly is this cat and what do we really know about him (a question best read in the tone of parents concerned why their daughter isn’t yet back from that first date)? We know he’s special, but is he a bit, well, special? Would you, for instance, strategically exclude him from the lads’ weekend of eurodebauchery in Riga, knowing he couldn’t go three days without a full-blown dick-move? Where precisely does this devotee of meditation sit on the RoyMicah Chill Scale? Is he here to do terrible things to us? What, exactly, is his ungodly mission?
Take his goal celebrations. Aside from the Zen meditation pose that, ironically, managed to piss off PSG, these seem to alternate between wholesome if slightly weird hoedown jigs to straight-up S&M chokeholds, with some hair-metal frontman leaps and the occasional trolling of middle-aged women from Wolfsburg thrown in (not exactly a Dalai Lama move, if we’re honest).
We know from his Flow Kingz vid that he’s not a particularly silken mover – lower ionosphere scissor-kicks aside – more a gangling, ungainly slab of coiled energy, like some Great Dane pup rescued from the streets of Salzburg now essentially too big for your house and prone to hospitalising grandparents with overexuberant shows of affection. But still, there are boundary issues here, questions about basic norms of socialisation. It’s all a bit “tell Barça I quite fancy him but is he okay with some asphyxiation?” All a bit cross-examination by expensive barristers drilling down into ‘consent signals’.
Then there are the oddball interviews in which, frankly, the babyfaced Norwegian superstar gives short shrift to the admittedly formulaic queries of your legacy-media Shreeveses and Kellys, forlorn mic-thrusters whose innocently bland attempt to find out whether Erling felt the result was more important than the performance casts them as nerdy dads busting into a 15-year-old son’s room to offer him and his mates a game of Monopoly in the dining room in, say, 10 minutes, oblivious to the fact that they’ve been smoking bowls for three hours and have already racked up £750 on his credit card getting some Filipina sexcam girl to do terrible things with an aubergine. The subtext is very much: “Look, Grandad, I don’t need this. I am an economy unto myself, generating more revenue than the GDP of Guinea-Bissau. Entertain me or jog on.”
Maybe it’s the impudence of youth, maybe all a sort of Owen Wilson surfer-dude airhead vibe. Like, bro, what’s with the seriousness? Haaland intimated there wasn’t a lot happening in the upstairs room at Club Bonce in another interview, given after he’d brushed aside Yann Sommer’s psyche-out manoeuvres to convert a crucial penalty against ‘Gladbach: “He tried to get into my mind but he had no chance.” Quite.
Or maybe all that Nordic goofball shtick is a kayfabe, and Erling has been sent from the far future to avenge his father, in this life or the next. Think about it. He once said he’d love to play for Leeds United, city of his birth. He’s likely to sign for Man City. Both choices clearly indicate he’s coming for Roy Keane, has been built for it. Would we be surprised to see him celebrate a first-half triple hat-trick in an epochal 16-0 shoeing of Man United by lifting up his shirt to reveal a still of the ‘Roy Cunt’ scene from Succession, or even leaping into the Sky studio and grabbing him round the throat (a vibe Roy could probably get behind)? No, we wouldn’t.
For now, though, the man-boy ingénue with a Techno Viking torso and head full of nothing seems the fitting icon for our post-cognitive, Influencer age, a depthless will-to-power made flesh. Indeed, there’s a certain type of lost young male kicking about the alt-right / incel / gym bro / ForEx trader nexus – dudes who daydream about Lamborghinis and fucksluts and Fight Club – who would regard Haaland as an Aryan Alpha apotheosis, all the more so given a face that looks like Todd from Breaking Bad in a pantyhose mask about to carry out an impromptu stick-up (on which note, Haaland very much seems like the sort of guy who’d try to become besties with someone he was keeping in an improv dungeon). The ubermensch truly does overcome! Plus, bro, his name is ‘Whoreland’, uh-huh-huh.
Cocooned in blissful moneyed juvenilia, Erling would no doubt find it bare jokes that every rampaging water buffalo run on goal and welted Thorhammer finish was seen by these fanboys as another knife in the ailing ‘cucked’ body of liberal democracy, an oblique vindication of the ethno-cultural ‘superiority’ of the Norse genes, as expressed through xG efficiencies. Our teetering, precarious world might well be one inadvertent retweet by the lunking Norwegian airhead from the definitive victory of fascism. Such is his burden (besides, obviously, the 40-plus goals per season). The world truly is in his hands. The runes foretold this.
In the meantime, this posthuman cipher-cum-corporate mascot for a frozen yoghurt drink has some extremely bro shit to be getting on with: neo-NekNominations, NFT ventures, nobbling Keano and a handful of Ballons D’Or to hoover up before the curtain finally falls on our dying, deranged world.
Arsenal’s Granit Xhaka controls the ball with his back against Norwich on Boxing Day.
This is probably a good time to remind you of another great Mario Balotelli moment – when he tried to slot an easy goal with a needless backheel trick shot and missed, leading Roberto Mancini to substitute him after just 30 minutes.
Extremely weird free kick routine in the Japanese Premier League – the attackers do the “ring around the rosie” dance before attacking the box where one of them nods it in.
Somehow feels extremely Japanese, like something in an anime cartoon.
