Haaland: Dortmund star touches world 60m record against PSG
The Dortmund star's father, Alf-Inge, has revealed that his young son was quite the athlete, which explains his speed and agility despite standing over 6ft tall.
Erling Haaland’s incredible scoring run for his new side Borussia Dortmund continued against PSG with the teenage striker bagging twice to give the Bundesliga side a 2-1 advantage over the Parisians ahead of the second leg and the amount of attention the Norway international has been garnering shows as few signs of stopping as the goal machine.
The 19-year-old’s brace took his tally to 10 goals in seven Champions League appearances this season, making him the fastest player to reach that mark, and he has scored 11 goals in his first seven games in all competitions for Dortmund, another first in Bundesliga history. Haaland has also scored on his Dortmund debut in the league, DFB-Pokal and the Champions League, another club first.
Quick-fire Haaland
With so much attention focused on him, it is little surprise that Sky Italia decided to place a speedometer on the Norwegian during the PSG game, which showed that he had almost matched the world record over 60m. Haaland completed a sprint over the distance in 6.64s, three-tenths of a second off the world record set by American sprinter Christian Coleman in 2018. It was also just shy of the Norwegian national record, which stands at 6.55.
It was also revealed by athletics stats website International Age Records that Haaland already holds an athletics record, albeit one at the five-year-old age group: the standing long jump, in which he managed 1.63m back in 2006.
Alf-Inge Haaland: "Erling could have been a handball player"
“That was before he started playing football,” Haaland’s father, former Manchester City and Norway midfielder Alf-Inge, told Norwegian daily Dagbladet. “When he was young we took him to several athletics meetings. Erling also played handball as well as athletics and skiing. Thorir Hergeirsson [the current Norway women’s team coach] wanted him to become a handball player. I thought it would be a good idea for him to play tennis as well. Versatility is important, so you are able to develop different parts of your body. There are similarities between sprinting and long jump, they employ the same muscles and that can give you an advantage on the football pitch.”