Giving the No.9 yet another day in the sun
It took Erling Haaland a couple of seconds to notice something had changed.
Late last month, Haaland, a Norwegian striker, was inside the Manchester Institute of Health and Performance, patiently and quietly going through the many and monotonous steps of the medical exam that was part of his move to Manchester City.
At one point, stripped down to nothing but a pair of briefs, Haaland was asked to take a deep breath and stand perfectly still, so that the club could get an accurate read of his height. He did as he was told.
“OK, 1.952 metres,” the physician guiding him through the exam said, jotting down the figure on a piece of paper.
That, Haaland thought, was not right. Everyone knows their own height. He checked what the doctor had recorded. There was the answer again. 1.952.
“Wow,” Haaland said, sounding genuinely pleased with himself. “I’ve grown. Almost a whole centimetre.”
A meaningful one, too: those extra few millimetres had tipped Haaland over a threshold. At the age of 21, he was now, officially, 6ft, 4in tall.
Size is significant when it comes to Haaland.
That is not to diminish his rich array of other qualities as a striker — his technical ability, his movement, his intelligence, his capacity to drop deep and build play, the power and precision of his finishing from either foot — and it is not something that exists in isolation.
Indeed, watching Haaland in the flesh, what stands out first is his speed. Haaland is quick. He accelerates almost instantaneously, and then eats up the ground in front of him, his stride long and elegant.
It is only after a beat that it is possible to realise that what makes that speed so striking is that it is unexpected, that it is being produced by a man with that frame.
Nor is it to pigeonhole the type of player he is, or to ponder how he will fit in to the intricate, delicate style of play preached by manager Pep Guardiola at Manchester City.
Haaland has not been bought as some sort of battering ram. He is far more than a target man. It is just that,
at first glance, that is how he is built.
On a very basic level, Haaland is large, undeniably so. He is especially large in context.
Elite football is populated, these days, by slight, almost elfin figures.
Haaland is a head taller than most forwards. He towers over most fullbacks and wings. He has aerial clearance over central midfielders. He might even find the majority of central defenders a little diminutive.
Darwin Nunez, the Uruguayan forward added to Liverpool’s ranks by manager Juergen Klopp earlier this month, is similar. He is not quite so tall — only 6ft, 1in, unless he, like Haaland, still has growing to do — but he possesses a similar profile.
He drifts wide, rather than deep, to find space. He accelerates rapidly. He moves smartly. But he is, as Klopp noted, “powerful”, too.
Liverpool’s forward line, these past few years, has been constructed around three players — Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino, Mohamed Salah — who fit the accepted mould for modern forwards.
They are nimble, fleet-footed, technically flawless. None, though, could be described as “powerful”, not in the sense that Nunez is powerful.
Klopp did have a more robust option at his disposal, in the form of Divock
Origi, when he felt it was required — such as when needing a goal in a Champions League final, or playing Everton.
Origi was, though, viewed more as a chaos agent than anything else; he was deployed almost exclusively as a Plan B.
Like Guardiola, Klopp seemed to have moved beyond the idea of what might be called a “traditional” centre-forward.
That both have, this summer, committed considerable proportions of their transfer budgets to inverting that mode is significant.
The explanations may be distressingly straightforward.
City create a plethora of chances every single game; adding Haaland is a surefire way to ensure more of them are turned into goals.
Liverpool have, in Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold, a precise aerial supply line. It makes sense to exploit it.
Or it may, perhaps, hint at a shift that has ramifications outside the rarefied air of the Premier League’s top two.
Strikers — pure, thoroughbred strikers — have become vanishingly rare over the past decade.
Between the generation represented by Robert Lewandowski, Karim Benzema, Sergio Aguero and Luis Suarez — all in their mid-thirties now — and the one spearheaded by Kylian Mbappe, Haaland and, possibly, Nunez, the No.9 almost died out.
True, there have been occasional oases in the desert: Harry Kane, a late bloomer at Tottenham Hotspur, and Romelu Lukaku, who flowered sufficiently early in Belgium that despite being five years younger than Suarez, both made their debuts in the Premier League in 2011.
As a rule, though, football’s journey over the past 10 years has been away from what might be termed focal point forwards.
The tendency, instead, has been to engineer more fluid, more dynamic attacking lines, built around players who can drift and roam and transform, depending on the situation: a generation encapsulated by generalists like Mane and Neymar and Raheem Sterling, rather than specialists.
There is, most likely, no single explanation for why that might be.
It may partly be philosophical: Guardiola, in particular, pioneered an approach in which a fixed No.9 was optional and an aerial approach was deemed unsophisticated, while the German school that produced Klopp prioritised a player’s dynamism in the press. The rest of the sport followed suit.
What Guardiola and Klopp have spotted is a competitive edge.
Only a handful of teams possess a high-quality powerhouse centre-forward. Only one or two boast one that is not already well into the autumn of their careers.
Perhaps that is the next step in the evolution of the related, but distinct, styles both coaches have crafted: the repurposing of old virtues to fit the new game.
That, in turn, will have a profound effect on football’s incessant pipeline.
If the perception is that centre-forwards in the style of Haaland and Nunez are back in fashion, then there will be value in producing them: if not the target-men of old, perhaps, then certainly a modern version, players able to fit into complex counter-pressing systems but also, in a very basic, very real way, extremely large.
Size may matter once more. The No.9 may yet have another day in the sun.