Story by Harry Brent
When Julian Alvarez was allowed to quietly slip out the back door and catch a flight to Atletico Madrid two years ago, Manchester City fans might have felt a slight sting, but mostly they shrugged. After all, they still had the Norse God of goalscoring.
But fast-forward to today, with the Argentine currently being linked to a £128million-plus mega-move to the likes of Arsenal and Barcelona, that collective shrug is starting to look like a colossal, historic miscalculation.
The brutal, necessary heresy that needs to be spoken in the corridors of the Etihad is this: Manchester City sold the wrong striker. They should have kept Julian Alvarez and cashed in on Erling Haaland.
Let me immediately dispense with the obvious caveats. Haaland is an otherworldly beast of a striker – a terrifying, laboratory-designed goal-golem who was already a proven, continent-conquering force of nature when he arrived in Manchester.
Alvarez, by contrast, was a relatively unknown quantity, so you cannot call City’s hierarchy entirely silly for choosing to build their tactical church around the Norwegian at the time. But a club of that stature should have possessed enough foresight to see the player Alvarez was destined to become.
Here was a player possessing every hallmark of Sergio Aguero’s natural heir – that trademark low centre of gravity, an explosive snap in his finish, and the technical delicacy to dismantle low blocks in razor-tight spaces.
Julian Alvarez
The real crux of the issue, however, isn’t just about how good Alvarez is. It’s about how fundamentally counterproductive Haaland can be.
For all the broken records and match-ball hoarding, playing with Haaland often means City are operating with 10 men. He is the ultimate passenger off the ball, a phantom in the build-up who contributes practically nothing to the intricate, suffocating possession game City are famous for. He’s an apex predator who spends 89 minutes of a football match engaging in high-end loitering, waiting for someone to cross him the ball.
Yes, he is absolutely amazing at getting on the end of those crosses. But the team as a whole suffers deeply from his microscopic involvement.
Think back to the peak Pep Guardiola years before Haaland arrived. City were a flawless mosaic of 11 super-technicians. Every single player on the pitch was capable of passing, shooting, turning on a sixpence, and dribbling out of a phone box. The football was fluid, liquid, endlessly effective.
Now? They play with nine outfielders weaving intricate geometric patterns around the penalty area. And trapped at the epicentre of this endlessly churning possession diagram stands Haaland – a solitary, statuesque figure, wrapped in an imaginary oilskin mac, like a moody, salt-caked lighthouse keeper standing atop his granite tower, staring blankly out into the grey existential fog of the North Sea.
Around his ankles, the endless tide of modern positional play rolls and crashes – short passes, overlapping runs, half-space inversions – yet he remains completely untethered from the mania, brooding in total isolation, listening to the distant drone of his own internal foghorn. He doesn’t press, he doesn’t link, he barely moves. He simply waits, cold and unbothered, for that single, blinding flash of light from the touchline to break the gloom and gift him a three-yard tap-in into an empty net.
Erling Haaland of Manchester City celebrates with Julian Alvarez
It’s a strange approach that ultimately serves neither man nor machine. It cages Haaland – a galloping force of nature built for wide-open prairies and chaotic destruction – while forcing City’s once-liquid passing carousel to deliberately suppress its own hypnotic rhythms just to keep a static monument fed.
Had they kept Alvarez as their focal point, the dynamic would be completely different. Would he match the grotesque, industrial goal tallies of Haaland? Almost certainly not. But what is lost in the sheer, brute-force volume of a single 40-goal wrecking ball is returned tenfold in team alchemy: a slick, fluid attack where goals bloom organically from everywhere.
Alvarez has blossomed into a top-tier, all-action forward. He drops into pockets, he links play, he creates overloads, and buzzes around the final third with multi-directional menace. Haaland, by contrast, is only truly lethal inside the 18-yard box. And because modern defences compact so deeply against City, he’s left marooned in zero space – a claustrophobic realm he completely lacks the technical delicacy to pry open himself.
It’s easy to point at Haaland’s gleaming rack of Golden Boots and write off any criticism of him as mere pretentious contrarianism – a craft in which I am, admittedly, something of a grandmaster. But football is played in the unquantifiable spaces between the statistics. Haaland isn’t necessarily a problem. But he is a structural puzzle.
Where other elite strikers might pick a lock with a deft slip-pass, Haaland scuffs the delivery. Where others would cushion a lofted ball out of the sky with velvet reverence, he mis-controls it. When City are desperately probing for an opening, he’s hauntingly immobile.
Haaland is severely limiting in the things he isn’t good at. Alvarez isn’t limiting in the slightest.
Few could argue that City are a better team now – or in recent years – than they were in the pre-Haaland days under Guardiola. Is that entirely because of Haaland? No, but he is a significant variable.
He is fundamentally incompatible with the pristine gospel of Guardiola-ball or the algorithmic choreography of Maresca-ball. He’s a high-speed Viking battering ram, a terrifying counter-attacking force of nature stranded inside a ballet academy.
Manchester City are a team that desperately needs an Alvarez up front. They need the subtlety, the nimble link-up play, the unpredictable flourish, the sudden flick of spatial imagination.
Instead, they opted for the sledgehammer over the scalpel, choosing raw, industrial stardom over collective perfection – and it’s an error that might haunt them for years to come.
