Erling Haaland deserved to be sold by Man City – they've made a huge transfer error

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.

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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.

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.