Do you know those kind of articles when a big football club has a chance to sign a future star and they don’t realize it at the time and then regret it? Well, this is another one of those articles. This time, it’s not about Arsene Wenger not signing Cristiano Ronaldo or Robert Lewandowski not coming to Blackburn Rovers, it’s about another future (or present if you will) star – Erling Haaland. And of course, we are not talking about his time in Red Bull Salzburg, when he was already known to every club’s director in Europe, we are talking about his early days, way back in 2017. And this story is about the ability of Manchester United, City’s arch rivals, to sign a young kid from Norway, whose coach was Red Devil’s legend.Jude Bellingham has no idea how to stop Erling Haaland 🤷♂️ pic.twitter.com/OaptDbkVC3— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) September 13, 2022 Former head Molde scout John Vik talked to The Athletic about Haaland’s time at the Norwegian club, where his coach for around 50 games was – Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. It was during the time when current City striker was not even a regular in the first 11, and other scouts who followed him, Arsenal and United included, thought that he will become only a target man, mainly due to his size. But, Vik told Solskjaer that he would become much more than that, and so the former United striker agreed to call his club.Champions League is Haaland’s ringtone, desire, ambition, dream – and his reality“Me and Ole understood that this kid was so good we were not going to be able to keep him. Ole agreed with absolutely everything. ‘I will put a phone call in’, he said, ‘they need to hear about this kid’. We had friends at United. I used to work closely with United, in the early 2000s, and most of the guys I knew had gone. But Ole was Ole. I said, ‘call Nicky Butt (then United’s head of academy), or call somebody, because this kid is unreal’. This was even before Erling had really started to play for Molde properly. Ole put the phone call in. So the name was put in. Then, how or whether United followed it up, I don’t know” said Vik. Well, they obviously didn’t. A mistake, don’t you agree?##NAJAVA_MECA_6643007##
