Watching Erling Haaland play football is like showing up to an amateur poker night where the house decides to bring in a card-counting supercomputer. He exists solely to make world-class defenders look like toddlers chasing a balloon in a gale-force wind. Most strikers need nuance, touch, or a sophisticated tactical plan to break down a low block.

Haaland just needs to exist in the general vicinity of the goal and wait for gravity to do the rest. - Height: 6'4" of pure, unadulterated efficiency. - Goal conversion: Statistically more reliable than your morning coffee machine.

- Tactical role: Human battering ram. The real issue here is not that he is good; it is that he is boringly good. There is no drama, no flair, just the inevitable thud of ball hitting net while defenders stare blankly into the middle distance.

He has stripped the sport of its tragic unpredictability and replaced it with a monotonous assembly line of tap-ins. Manchester City clearly realized that playing intricate tiki-taka was too much work, so they hired a Viking to kick the ball harder than anyone else. It is a masterpiece of efficiency, provided your idea of a masterpiece is watching a demolition crew flatten a historic building with a wrecking ball.

Opposing managers have spent the last two seasons pretending they have a plan to stop him. In reality, they are mostly just praying for a localized power outage or a very well-timed rainstorm to keep the pitch slick enough for him to trip over his own laces. We have entered an era where football has been solved, and the solution is just being physically larger and faster than everyone else.

It is the tactical equivalent of bringing a tank to a knife fight. Is there any point in even playing the next three seasons, or should we just hand him the Golden Boot now and go home to watch paint dry instead?