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Manchester City superstar Erling Haaland to be first £1billion player - Agent
Erling Haaland will be the world’s first £1billion player according to the Manchester City superstar’s agent Rafaela Pimenta.
The Norwegian striker arrived from Borussia Dortmund in the summer for a reduced fee of £51million, and has taken the Premier League by storm, as he scored his 16th and 17th goals in the top flight in the 3-1 win over Brighton on Sunday (22 October).
He currently has 22 in all competitions this season from only 15 appearances, and opponents are yet to come up with a way to stop the 22-year-old.
Pimenta, who became his representative following the death of Mino Raiola in April, told Sky Italia, as per The Times: “If you put together his football value, his image value, his sponsor value, it is for sure one billion. I think Erling will be the first player to achieve a transfer that will be around one billion.”
According to The Times he is paid over £400,000-a-week at the Etihad.
Astronomical
The rationale that if anyone currently playing were to reach such a wild sum it would be Haaland is probably pretty fair.
Were it not for a clause in his Dortmund contract he would have cost far more than City paid for him in the summer, and the likes of Chelsea were willing to pay a much higher amount the year before.
But the inflation of transfer fees would have to move at some pace and would necessarily have to include a club for which money is close to no object.
It took 10 years for the world record fee to increase ten-fold from the £19.5million that Inter paid Barcelona to buy the original Ronaldo in 1997 to the £198million that Paris Saint-Germain paid the same club for Neymar in 2017 [BBC Sport].
Even that inflation required Paul Pogba’s record move from Juventus to Manchester United the year earlier to be more than doubled in a deal that ultimately plunged the Nou Camp into chaos it is still not out of, and the transfer market into the realm it currently operates in.
For Haaland to reach the £1billion mark he would likely need to do it in the next decade or so before age makes his value decrease, and avoid injury.
The way he has adapted to the supposedly hardest league in the world with unprecedented speed suggests he should be able to keep up his end of the bargain through performance.
But the practical matter of who could afford him and whether he would want to go there might ultimately keep it from happening.
City, PSG and potentially Newcastle are the only clubs who could even afford him before any sort of FFP considerations, no matter how flimsy they might be, so the options are narrow unless state ownership continues to proliferate.
The market will have to inflate at a pretty rapid rate for it to come close to that level during Haaland’s career and the practical stars would have to align.
If it happens it seems unlikely that it would be a particularly good thing for football, but if some sort of Super League does end up being forced through then all bets are off.
In other Manchester City news, Paul Merson says Haaland wouldn’t score 60 goals in League Two.