A Series of Stray Observations About Erling Braut Haaland
3 min readApr 13, 2023
- There’s something anachronistic about the levels of pure spectacle surrounding Erling Haaland, as though this were the late-1800s and he’s the showpiece of a travelling theatre that flaunts him on posters as a ‘Wonder Of The Age’
- He appeals to the primitive desire for wilful destruction — the child’s impulse to burn ants under a magnifying glass, to watch a monster truck roll over a pile of sedans, to set fire to a wheelie bin. Haaland is essentially Jack from Lord of The Flies and he therefore provides a tantalising glimpse into the unrestrained id that dwells sleepily inside all of us
- If I ate a large plateful of Sunday dinner as a child my Grandmother would proudly proclaim me to be a ‘growing boy.’ Haaland, being both ‘big’ and ‘strong’, therefore exists to the delight of grandmothers everywhere
- Haaland is essentially a folk devil on the periphery of the Premier League. In another era he’d be terrorising the horses of a Victorian stagecoach or used as an instrument of torture by a mad King in the Achameanian Empire. He is, in short, a timeless monstrosity
- You almost forget when Haaland is sat in his Puma sliders bantering with Jack Grealish in a slickly-produced YouTube short that earlier in the day Pep threw him a still-beating reindeer heart and he crouched in the corner of the dressing room eating it with his fingers whilst the rest of the squad watched on in abject horror
- A decommissioned nuclear bunker on the Norwegian / Russian border revealed to house an army of mutated Haaland’s cannibalising each other would be a good opening to a sci-fi film
- (If Haaland really is a ‘machine’ or ‘robot’ as so often claimed, then naturally speculation arises over the whereabouts of earlier, prototype Haaland’s and to what extent they pose a wider existential threat)
- There’s something uncanny about watching iterative machine-learning models like this one gradually ‘learn’ to walk despite never having been explicitly taught what walking even looks like. Similarly, Haaland’s frenetic running style suggests that his neural networks should optimise in forthcoming iterations to allow him to reach an average sprint burst speed of 2000 mph by the 2024/2025 season.
- Haaland wearing his hair in Dutch braids is actually quite cute
- And probably reminds you of that girl you met in the first year of uni who went to an Equestrian Boarding and Day School in East Sussex and who you just knew was out of your league even as you accepted her invite to spend summer cleaning out the stables in preparation for her busy eventing calendar, a span of two months in which your presence seemed to inexorably fade into the dull background of everyday life until you eventually left without saying goodbye and made a point to never mention the affair to anyone ever again
- When Erik The Red landed at Lindisfarne and captured the local monastery boys in a vicious and unprovoked attack — would that be more / less / about the same level of terror as Haaland crunching into your brittle frame at full speed?
- Watch this footage of Haaland’s training ground volley and consider the parallels between his left foot and those viral videos where various household objects are stress-tested against an industrial grade hydraulic press. Haaland the machine at this point ceases to be a metaphor.
- I like it when you see footage of Haaland in a nightclub or walking back to his City Centre flat in Manchester because it leans towards the amenable, fan-friendly idea that Haaland is ‘just a normal guy’ — this despite Haaland sharing only 0.001% genetic similarity with any English male
