Erling Haaland is breaking football after latest heroics for Man City in Champions League - The Warm-Up

THURSDAY'S BIG STORIES Ridiculous Footballer Is Ridiculous Ad It's October. It's early October. And yet Erling Braut Haaland already has 19 goals for the season, 14 in the Premier League and five in Europe.

He's scored these 19 goals in 12 games, incidentally, which means he's motoring along at just over 1.5 goals a game. Stretch that out over a season and we're talking Messi numbers. Dixie Dean numbers.

An actual cricket score. Champions League‘Never witnessed anything like it’ — Grealish stunned by ‘unbelievable’ Haaland9 HOURS AGO This poses a number of problems. For defenders, first of all.

Against Copenhagen last night, Haaland scored with his first touch, and then scored again on the half-hour mark. He was denied another hat trick only by Pep Guardiola's decision to remove him at half-time, and by Davit Khocholava's panicked shank into his own net. It is, of course, impossible for us to say with any confidence what was going through Knocholava''s head as the ball deflected to him, and then off him, but we're betting it went something like: 'oh no oh no, oh no, he's behind me'.

But it also poses problems for everybody else. For a start, there's a very real danger that we'll have used up all the normal superlatives — amazing, outstanding, ridiculous — by the end of the month. At that point, we'll all be able to make a round of Halloween jokes — oh no, Guardiola was the scientist; this is Guardiola's Monster — but after that, we've got a serious problem.

He poses an existential threat, not just to the record books, but to the dictionary. Consider Jack Grealish. After the game, he told BT Sport that «It’s unbelievable, honestly, I’ve never ever witnessed anything like it in my life.