Haaland is the perfect plan for City and their ambitions

LONDON • A few days before last summer's transfer window drew to a close, a handful of Manchester City's most senior executives gathered in a conference room at the club's sprawling campus to pick through what had gone right, and what had gone wrong, over the previous couple of months.

Although the reigning Premier League champions had succeeded in persuading Aston Villa to sell Jack Grealish for an English record £100 million (S$170 million), they had failed to land their other priority target, Tottenham striker Harry Kane.

What had always been a complex, fraught pursuit had descended, instead, into a squabble over who was to blame.

Kane had, at one point, refused to train with Spurs in the hope of forcing his boyhood club's hand, but his act of brinkmanship failed.

That afternoon, City's executives reflected on their strategy, contemplated why a deal had not materialised, and considered where they would go from there.

As the meeting wound up and his colleagues stood to leave, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the club's chairman, made one final remark. It amounted to only two words, an ambition and an instruction.

"Erling Haaland," he said. A little more than nine months later, that objective has been achieved.

On Tuesday, City confirmed they had reached an "agreement in principle" with Borussia Dortmund to acquire the Norway striker, one of the most coveted players in the world and the scorer of 85 goals in 88 games for the German Bundesliga side.

In reality, it had not taken nine months to strike any sort of agreement with Dortmund.

Haaland's contract contained a buyout clause, somewhere in the region of €60 million (S$87.4 million).

All City, or anyone, had to do was to inform Dortmund of an intention to pay it.

Far more convoluted was the process of persuading Haaland that City was the correct next step in his meticulously planned career.

The 21-year-old might have an emotional bond to the club. His father, Alfie, played for City at the turn of the century and, though his son has no memory of his time in Manchester, he told The New York Times in 2019 that he has some affection for all his former teams.

But, as City would have known, there has been precious little room for romance in Haaland's inexorable rise.

Every stage of his journey has been mapped out with surgical - possibly cynical - precision by his twin sherpas: his longstanding representative, Mino Raiola, the divisive Dutch-Italian agent who died last month, and his father.

When Haaland left his hometown team, Bryne, as a teenager, he rejected the overtures of the English and German teams pursuing him in favour of Red Bull Salzburg, home to both a reliable production line of talent for Europe's major leagues and the prospect of regular Champions League games.

When he left Salzburg a year later, it was not for England but for Dortmund, a club with a track record of developing and selling players and a willingness to set a reasonable buyout clause.

City's offer is the reward. It is not a move without its caveats: Manager Pep Guardiola has worked with some of the finest strikers of the modern era, but not always successfully.

He has spent six years painstakingly fine-tuning his system at City, only to have to refit it completely to suit Haaland.

Sometimes, though, football is a startlingly simple game.

A player who scores lots of goals joining a team that creates lots of chances should really have only one outcome. Whether it is the final reward, though, is a different matter.

That is the challenge that awaits City, somewhere down the line. They have won, this time, by convincing Haaland this was his best next step.

The question, for a player whose career has been planned out so coolly, so ruthlessly, is whether it is also his last one.

NYTIMES