Why Erling Haaland deserved The Best FIFA Men's Player award

It stands to reason that the guy who scored the most goals in the team that won everything should be considered to have made the biggest impact in the year and be crowned the best.

That’s how 2023 went for Erling Haaland, with his monstrous haul of goals powering Manchester City to a Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League treble.

It was only the ninth time in 67 years of UEFA club competition that a team has managed that feat, with Haaland’s City just the second English outfit.

Manchester City have dominated English football in recent years, but having always failed to get over the line in Europe – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in the semi-final against Real Madrid in 2022 was their most spectacular collapse – there was almost a clear demarcation of before and after Haaland and, crucially, the difference that he was as the final piece of the puzzle that had ultimately been 15 years in the making since the very first day Sheikh Mansour opened his cheque book.

None of City's other signings ahead of last season had anything like his kind of impact, with Manuel Akanji the only other new arrival to command even a semi-regular place in the team.

Unfortunately for Haaland, the scale of his goalscoring is underappreciated because of how Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo skewed over many years the perceptions about what constitutes world class. Once upon a time, a striker might be lauded for scoring 30 goals in a season. But when Messi and Ronaldo were routinely getting to 50, 60 and in one season, even 73 (Messi in 2011/12), anything under 40 doesn't seem quite as impressive and even 50 has become normalised.

It is most definitely not normal to score that many goal in a season of elite club football.

Yet it was Messi