Erling Haaland back in Red Bull paddock as Man City face Champions League test at Leipzig

Back in November, when the pairings for the last 16 stage of the Champions League were drawn, Manchester City’s Erling Haaland and RB Leipzig’s Dominik Szoboszlai were quickly on the phone to one another.

Their friendship, formed in Austria in their teens and nourished through mutual support and shared congratulations for one another’s steps up the career ladder, is close.

Haaland and Szoboszlai are contemporaries, born three months apart and, at 22, long accustomed to the privileges of being the superstars of their national teams – Norway and Hungary, respectively – and the pressures of bearing such heavy individual responsibility for levering those countries up Europe’s hierarchy.

They are both sons of ex-professional players. Their bond mostly comes from the formative period they spent as teammates at Red Bull Salzburg, a hothouse for youthful talent and launch pad for a number of leading footballers and coaches and a club that formed the basis of an expanding corporate sporting empire.

The Salzburg supply line will be well represented in East Germany this evening, as Leipzig host the first leg of their tie against City.

The home team’s coach, Marco Rose, built up his reputation there. A number of current Leipzig players followed the established feeder route from the Austrian club, the starting point of the Red Bull soft drink company’s investment in football, to the Bundesliga club who rose up through the German lower divisions on the back of its backing.

In another timeline, Haaland might have made the same journey, from Salzburg to Leipzig, as Szoboszlai or the midfielder Konrad Laimer did. But it was clear, even in his teens, that Haaland was destined for a more accelerated path upwards. From Salzburg he went