Erling Haaland learns reality of 10-year Man City contract in Real Madrid humbling

Erling Haaland just sat there looking like the bloke who’d won second prize.

Which was a night in the Bernabeu, watching the biggest club in the world show off. Haaland must have been desperate to be out on the pitch influencing the game. But for which team?

The one heading backwards faster than Max Verstappen in reverse, or the one cruising towards what most people expect to be another conquering of Europe?

Only Haaland and his inner circle will know what was going through his head this week as he witnessed Real Madrid teach Manchester City a footballing lesson in the Spanish capital.

Haaland missed the Champions League play-off because he was injured. So he had to witness Pep Guardiola’s side exit the competition with a whimper, having become the latest one to succumb to the overwhelming force that is Real, inside the astonishing environment of the finest stadium in the sport.

There is something mesmerising about the Bernabeu. Around 10,000 Madridistas swarm around the nearby Sagrados Corazones roundabout just to welcome Real’s team bus before kick off.

If you live near there and decide to nip out for a pint of milk on match day, best of luck.

The team of modern day Galacticos has to battle its way through a white blur of flags and flares just to get inside the stadium. Supporters, a lot of which don’t even have a ticket, hang off lampposts or find other vantage points, to be part of the experience of seeing nothing more significant than a coach with blacked out windows sleek past.

But the really lucky ones are those with a golden ticket to a game inside the newly refurbished cathedral of football that is the Bernabeu.

The noise and atmosphere is exceptional. Emotion pours down from the steep sides of a place that provides Real with a goal start before a ball has been kicked.

And the Bernabeu has the team it deserves. One including Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Jr, Eduardo Camavinga, Dani Ceballos, Rodrygo, Aurelien Tchouameni, Federico Valverde and Jude Bellingham, of course.

Young and hungry superstars picked in their best positions, who make the game look beautiful but simple. The polar opposite of the one Haaland belongs to, basically. Which, as we now know, is a side full of ageing stars no longer burning bright.

Real are the future, while City look like yesterday’s men. The chasm which now exists between these two old rivals is now vast – and wouldn’t have been lost on Haaland.

Guardiola will go on another spending spree this summer, of course, in a bid to rebuild a kingdom now in danger of being flattened to the floor. But the feeling is that City have had their moment in the sun.

Real, meanwhile, continue to reign supreme as the most powerful, attractive and dominant club in the world. A club which remains the ultimate place to be for an elite footballer, like Haaland is.

Before City lost to Paris Saint Germain in the Champions League group stages, Haaland disdainfully laughed off suggestions him signing a 10-year contract with City ruled out him ever heading to Madrid.

But he isn’t laughing now he’s got to sample what life is like for a Real footballer. The problem he’s got now though, is that the ink on the decade-long deal he penned with Guardiola’s fallen team is well and truly dry.