Haaland Counts Bodies: Porto Never Stood a Chance

By Alex de Valletta, Sports & Culture Correspondent

There is a particular cruelty to watching Erling Haaland operate in a stadium that has already decided to hate him. Porto's crowd made their feelings plain from the opening whistle. By the final one, the Norwegian had scored twice, accused a Porto player of grabbing his backside during an on-pitch confrontation, and generally conducted himself like a man who finds hostility mildly entertaining. Manchester City left the Estádio do Dragão with three points and a story. Porto were left with neither.

The spat itself — Haaland's accusation of unwanted contact, the shoving, the theatre of it all — will dominate the highlights packages. But the goals are what matter, because goals are always what matter with Haaland, and what makes him genuinely unnerving is not the volume but the certainty. He does not look like a man trying. He looks like a man doing arithmetic.

Champions League nights have their own gravitational pull. They compress careers, amplify reputations, and occasionally break them in full view of a continent. Which is why the subplot running through Wednesday's fixtures felt pointed: Julian Alvarez, not starting for Atlético Madrid, watching Liverpool from somewhere other than the pitch. The Argentine, linked with Arsenal across a summer that ultimately went nowhere, has yet to begin a game this season. That is not a slump. That is a message — though from whom, and to whom, remains the question Diego Simeone has not yet answered publicly.

At Old Trafford, Michael Carrick is managing the mathematics of absence. Six players potentially missing for the Champions League opener against Sabah, Luke Shaw among them. Shaw's fitness has become something close to an annual ritual — the optimism of pre-season, the cautious updates, the careful language from the manager at the press conference. Carrick is not Ferguson. No one is. But he has learned the vocabulary of controlled uncertainty that Old Trafford requires, and he deployed it with professional composure.

The long story threading through all of it is a league quietly remaking itself. MLS spent the summer as though it had something to prove — which, hosting a World Cup and suddenly sitting in football's global spotlight, it absolutely did. Thirty clubs, a spending line that kept moving upward, a window that felt less like American football's off-season pragmatism and more like the restless ambition of a competition that has decided it belongs in the conversation. Whether the football justifies the expenditure is a separate argument. The confidence is real.

And somewhere at Manchester United's training ground, fifteen-year-old JJ Gabriel is presumably being told, very carefully, to be patient. Two goals in two Premier League 2 appearances. The journalists are already writing the sentences. The boy just has to keep being good.

That is the job. For all of them.