Up until last season, most had heard of a certain Norwegian tearing it up in the Bundesliga with Borussia Dortmund.
Averaging almost 1 goal a game, his exploits were taken lightly given it came in the supposedly easier German league.
This summer, this player moved to Manchester City and has silenced all doubters.
Yes, we are talking about the one and only, Erling Braut Haaland.
20 goals and 3 assists in 13 matches for Cityzens, these levels have not been seen in PL before.
And if he manages to sustain them through the season, Haaland is on course to break all sorts of records.
The striker is reaching fame levels that legends like Messi and Ronaldo have enjoyed for many years. And this fame is now being latched onto by newspapers and reporters who want quick clicks and likes.
A popular modus operandi by dailys and Twitter accounts is to somehow fit popular names in headlines to bait readers and increase viewership.
Haaland is the newest bait in town.
A few days, a clip went viral on social media featuring Erling’s cousin Albert Haaland.
The player in the clip scored a mid-air scissor volley, quite exquisite we must add. The cameras then focus on the player and we can see he has long blonde hair, not so different from Haaland.
And of course, as is the trend nowadays with all things Haaland, the hype train quickly jumped on this, stating that Albert had scored 64 times in 37 games while playing for Norwegian side Bran*.
If this turned out to be true, clubs would be lining up to sign him, lest they miss out on the free-scoring talent.
But as it turns out, everything in the tweet was wrong.
The clip does not even feature Albert Haaland. In fact, Albert Haaland is not even the cousin’s name, it is Albert Tjaland.
Does he play for Bran? You guessed it. He doesn’t. He plays for Bryne 2 in the 4th Division of Norway. He has scored a grand total of 7 times and not the 64 times that false tweet claimed.
The only truth the original tweet had was the video, which was scored against Luton by Brad Potts of Preston North End, who plays in the second tier of English football.
Here is the original video of the goal.
Brad has scored 52 times in his career, playing in all levels from League 2 to Championship. But who cares about that? Right?
This video on YouTube has only 72 likes and 7.8K views.
That tweet claiming it was Haaland’s cousin, on the other hand, has 60K likes and 2.9M views.
That’s click-bait content in all its glory.
Dare we say, get a handle on yourself Twitter, you’re embarrassing yourself.
