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Erling Haaland was an hour away from becoming a Manchester United player.
This is according to longstanding Scandanavian senior scout of Tottenham, Aston Villa and Everton, Bryan King, who was speaking to Football Insider’s Inside Track podcast.
The scout “revealed that the Premier League giants had a full agreement in place for the Norwegian but missed the deadline to call his then-club Molde by one hour”.
The move was just before the Norwegian was sold to Red Bull Leipzig by Molde in 2019.
The 23 year old has since taken like a duck to water in England for United’s cross-city rivals and has scored a remarkable 71 goals in 75 games for the Citizens.
United have been involved in a series of transfer mishaps in the post-Ferguson era, but very few could be described as haphazardous as this incident.
The scout revealed that numerous English clubs were circling over the talent, including the Old Trafford side and Everton.
Speaking of the Red Devils’ interest in the player he claimed, “I know the chief Scandavavian scout at United and he worked really hard to get him over there. There was a mix-up at the end of the season and a lot of people were on holiday at United. They were told that they had to ring Molde at a certain time in the morning.”
“The guy who was handling Haaland’s deal from Molde to Salzburg was Jim Solbakken and he has good connections with Man United. He said that if the call is not in by 10 o’clock, then Haaland will go to Salzburg. The people at United who made the call made it an hour late. They should have rung at nine but they rang at 10, which is 11 in Norway.
“That caused the deal not to go through”.
The Mancunian side were desperate to sign the Manchester City attacker under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in 2020 but the striker opted for a move to Borussia Dortmund, much like Jude Bellingham in the same year.
Many fans will be incredibly frustrated to hear of this news and it sums up exactly the scale of the job that INEOS have when they aim to fix what is so clearly broken at Old Trafford in terms of transfer dealings.
