RISE OF A GENIUS

LONDON. - Erling Haaland’s first coach remembers the moment his former prodigy burst into the wider footballing consciousness.

The forward had been scoring goals for Red Bull Salzburg in Austria but announced himself on the European stage with a superb first-half hat-trick on his Champions League debut against Genk in September 2019.

“Whoosh!” says Alf Ingve Berntsen, the man who gave Haaland his first senior start for Bryne in the Norwegian second tier aged just 15.

“That was the trigger for really being a person everyone knows about. Even I, his old coach from the early days, noticed this was something different.”

Haaland would go on to score in his first five Champions League group games, becoming the first teenager to do so, and left for Borussia Dortmund in the January transfer window having got 28 goals in 22 league games that season.

“I have seen Erling score the same goals for many years,” Berntsen told BBC Sport. “But it is not common when you grow older that you keep scoring. He is always just taking the next level and the next level.”

Now he is on the move again, with a protracted pursuit finally leading the 21-year-old to Manchester City. It is a huge moment for a player considered one of world football’s most exciting attacking talents.

Bryne is a small town of around 12,000 people in the south west of Norway. It is where Erling’s dad, Alf-Inge Haaland, began his career and where the family returned after the midfielder left Manchester City in 2003.

Erling, who was born in Leeds, was three at the time and Berntsen began to coach the young forward when he was moved up a year group at the age of eight because of his obvious promise.

“In a way, we could predict he was something special because in football you develop your skills in four basics,” explains Berntsen. “Tactical, how smart you are and movements; technical, how good you are with the ball; physically, if you have speed, endurance and so on; and mentality.

“When top clubs are scouting, they are looking at if you are really good in two of these four areas or quite good in three or four, but Erling from quite an early age was very good in technical, tactical and mentality.

“But he has a brother (Astor) who is five years older and he is big and strong and fast, so we knew the missing part in Erling’s play would maybe become his biggest strength. In a couple of years, we knew he would have four out of four.”

Haaland, whose mother Gry Marita Braut was an athlete, was part of a talented group at Bryne, with four of the 40 players Berntsen coached going on to play for the national team at various levels.

“He had a passion for football but many kids have that,” says Berntsen. “He had what you in the UK call grit. He had something special and when he was on the pitch he was totally focused on football.

“He learned from an early age how to behave as a footballer, how to behave in the dressing room, how important it is to have fun but to practise a lot.

“He had perfect genetics and his family was also very good at letting him think in a football way.

“We began to talk quite early, from when he was 12, that he was something special because tactically, technically and mentally he is never afraid, he has enormous grit and we knew that in a few years, when he was strong and fast, this would explode. But you never know, he could have got bored of football.”

Training was always competitive but the young forward stood out and scored goals at a regional and national level. In fact, the only time in his career he struggled to find the net was in that first season with the senior team at Bryne.