‘A monster is coming to see you’ ran the headline of one local newspaper in Seville on the morning of Manchester City’s visit to the Ramon Sanchez Pizjuan. Erling Haaland has been called worse. A robot. An alien. A freak. You name it. None of them sound particularly flattering to the uninitiated but watch him play and you know they are meant as compliments. Each of them in some way captures his strange, supernatural and almost inhuman abilities as a striker.
‘Monster’, in particular, carries its own connotations: of fear, of terror, of something devouring everything in its path. Given Haaland arrived in Spain with 10 goals in his first six competitive games for City, it’s not hard to see why the newspaper’s editors thought it appropriate.
