Erling Haaland is making a mockery of the Premier League, and he’s only getting started

Let me tell you a quick story. I remember my dad once told me that he was the fastest kid in his class throughout primary school. It was an accolade he was proud of until his first PE lesson at comprehensive when he lined up at the starting block alongside a Scandinavian boy called Karl Petersson who had just moved to England, and who had already hit puberty like a runaway dog sled. From that day forth, my dad was only the second fastest in his class, perpetually trailing a 12-year-old Norse man-child with a wispy golden moustache and legs like Norway spruces.

To watch the Premier League these days is to be reminded of my dad’s hyper-hormonal Swedish usurper on a weekly basis. Sometimes bi-weekly. Sometimes even tri-weekly. Back in the summer, people asked the question as to whether or not Erling Haaland would adapt to the English top flight. Six months later, the English top flight is still yet to adapt to Erling Haaland.

On Wednesday evening, the Norwegian juggernaut took his tally for the season to 20 goals in 14 Premier League appearances with a brace against Leeds United. It took Thierry Henry 34 matches to reach that same total. Harry Kane needed 40 outings. Luis Suarez needed 50. Even the greatest striker to have ever graced the division, Kevin Phillips, had to wait 21 games to score a score.

What we are witnessing is something the likes of which the Premier League, at least, has never seen before. This is Ivan Drago coldly killing Apollo Creed with a wanton left hook, or Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier for the very first time, or Nirvana eviscerating the pageantry of hair metal with Nevermind. Everything before is dwarved, everything after cowers in awe.

And the most terrifying thing is that Haaland is only just getting started. You can hear it in the flecking of dissatisfaction during his post match interviews, you can read it in the menacing, languid tension of his body language. At the moment, we are being collectively humbled by Erling the Viking, a fearsome giant of a presence who is still prone to relatively frequent pangs of wasteful humanity. But snarling behind the glint of his ravenous eye is Erling the Beserker; more ruthless, more cunning, more lethal. Haaland may have started to Ragnarok, but he is still, somehow, yet to truly Ragnaroll.

Take it from the horse’s mouth. Reflecting on his double at Elland Road, when most players would have been basking and self-eulogising, Haaland instead took the opportunity to demand yet more of himself. “I said to my team-mates I could have scored five and that’s the truth,” he mused. “I was at home on my sofa a bit mad that I wasn’t playing at the World Cup. I was a commentator in my own home about the World Cup but nobody was listening to me. I recharged my batteries and watching other people scoring and winning games at the World Cup motivated and irritated me. I’m hungrier than ever.”

The exact parameters of Haaland’s appetite are impossible to know. If he were to continue at his current rate, he would end the season with around a half century of goals in the Premier League alone. Such preposterous figures, and the casual nature with which he pursues them, make a mockery of the English game. It’s like that Mitchell and Webb sketch in which the Nazi officers have an epiphany about their own polarity on the moral compass; you find yourself asking, ‘are we the farmer’s league?’

But in truth, you get the feeling that Haaland’s feats of demolition are less about the ineptitude of those around him, and more about his own otherworldly supremacy. You could pit him against anybody, and he would still be wreaking this kind of havoc because he is, simply put, that good. And the scariest thing of all is that he is only going to get better.