He Scored 6 Goals in 3 Champions League Games, and Real and Man Utd Are Interested. Who Is Erling Haaland

The 19-year-old Norwegian giant is among the top 20 finalists for the Golden Boy award.

On Tuesday evening, in the third matchday of the Champions League group stage, Napoli visited Salzburg, but the Austrian giant did not offer its opponent a warm welcome — the Neapolitans did win, but they had a hard time. And these problems came mostly from Salzburg center forward Erling Braut Haaland, who scored a brace against them.

With these two precise strikes, the 19-year-old Salzburg striker brought his Champions League goal tally in this competition to 6. This way, the Norwegian, who stands almost 2 meters tall (194 cm), managed to break the record for fastest scoring in the first 3 matches of the tournament. The record previously belonged to Didier Drogba, who scored five goals for Marseille in the 2003/04 season.

Haaland also became the second teenager (after Karim Benzema of Real Madrid) in Champions League history to score in each of the first three matches of the tournament. This season Erling already has 4 hat-tricks, and in 13 matches this season he has scored 20 goals in total.

Who is Erling Braut Haaland?

Erling — son of Alf-Inge Haaland, who played quite a lot in the English Premier League in his time (Nottingham Forest, Leeds, Manchester City). Alfie also played more than three dozen matches for the Norway national team, but he became best known for his feud with Manchester United captain Roy Keane. In September 1997, Keane suffered a serious knee injury in a challenge with the elder Haaland, which forced him to miss almost a year. And in April 2001, Keane took revenge on Alf-Inge. So much so that he himself then received a lengthy ban.

It is still hard to judge the character of the younger Haaland, but when it comes to physical toughness he took after his father. And his father, at 185 cm, was no small boy, while his son at 194 cm looks like a real machine at 19. A machine that scores a lot, and a machine that made the list of the 20 best young players of the year according to Italy's Tuttosport and is in contention for the Golden Boy 2019 award.

Haaland made his professional debut at 15, coming on for Bryne in a match of the 1st Norwegian division (in fact, the 2nd tier). Less than a year later, Erling was already a player in the top division, when Molde signed him. There, in a year and a half, he grew into a regular starter, and having scored 16 goals in 30 matches in the 2018 season, he was named the breakthrough player of the year in the league.

Haaland did not delay the next step in his career and as early as August 2018 agreed to move to Salzburg. The Austrian league is not a particularly big temptation, but it is an excellent springboard, since Salzburg has quite concrete (Red Bull) ties with Leipzig, and they certainly know how to sell, if we recall the example of Sadio Mane.

Thanks in part to Haaland, Salzburg reached the group stage of the Champions League for the first time in 10 years, where they are now trying to hold their own against Napoli, Liverpool and Genk — after 3 matchdays they have 3 points but an impressive 11 goals scored. Such scoring output from the team as a whole and from Haaland in particular cannot fail to attract scouts from top-league clubs — reports say observers interested in precisely a prolific, big-bodied striker regularly attend Salzburg's recent matches.

Among the clubs most often linked with Haaland are Manchester United, where Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, well known from their time together at Molde, now works, and Real Madrid, which has recently regularly bought talented young players (Vinicius, Rodrygo, Kubo), including Norwegians (Martin Ødegaard).

Vasily Obaraz