We’re watching as legends are born
Messi and Ronaldo may be slowing down, but a host of fierce young footballers are playing for a place among the greats
Over the last couple of years, as the giants of football Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo slowed down, we mourned because a protracted golden age of goal-scoring and breathless attacking football was coming to an end.
Such ruminations were premature. Of course players with the astounding skills of these two men are unique, but as they play out the final stages of their careers, we are witnessing one of the finest goal-scoring eras in football history.
Last season’s goals were rich, generous and mindboggling. Look at Mo Salah pull off another sensational run and finish! There goes Robert Lewandowski again, right man in the right place, ball destined for the back of the net! There’s Kylian Mbappe, accelerating like an Olympic sprinter to meet a Messi throughball!
The coming season could be even more astonishing, as two players with incredible prowess step up. I’m talking about Liverpool’s new striker, the Uruguayan Darwin Nunez, 22, and the Norwegian Erling Haaland, 21, newly signed by Manchester City.
Nunez has it all. He is powerful and fast. His finishing is preternaturally clinical. Playing for Benfica, he gave his new club a harrowing time in the recently concluded Champions League. He is 6’2” but leaves defenders slipping in his wake. As much as I hate to see the talismanic Sadio Mane leave the Reds, Nunez will add a new dimension to Liverpool’s already incredible attacking play.
Haaland, meanwhile, has it all and then some. The man’s a ghost. No one — not Salah or Benzema or Lewandowski — can slip behind defenders the way Haaland does.
A towering bundle of lean muscle with fantastic pace and game intelligence, Haaland is perhaps the most clinical finisher playing the game today. His goal-scoring record is barely believable. He’s the fastest in history to 100 top-flight goals, which he achieved in 146 games for club and country, better than Mbappe (180 games), Messi (200) and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (245).
Haaland’s father, Alf-Inge Haaland or Alfie, was a Manchester City player too. The man — basically a tree-trunk neck and a boulder-like jaw atop a barrel of muscle — terrorised the Premier League in the late ’90s, playing as a defender and midfielder for Nottingham, Leeds and finally City. Alfie’s career was famously ended by a horrendous premeditated tackle by Roy Keane in a Manchester derby in 2001 (though technically it was a left knee injury from before that spelt the end of Alfie’s football). It’s a bit ironic because in most other circumstances, it was Alfie who threatened to end the careers of others with his violent tackling.
If anyone has any nostalgia left for the “good old days” when tackling laws were laxer, please watch the awkward video City has released of Haaland and his dad watching old clips of Alfie playing. As one clip after another shows his father scything into forwards, Haaland has a look of shock on his face. Alfie has the smile of a person who knows deep down that he was wrong, but has decided to ride it out as if it was nothing.
At one point, when Alfie chuckles at a particularly horrid tackle, Haaland lets out a disapproving grunt. “You would have ended my career,” he tells his father.