A Good Pair of Leeds Shorts Can Last Forever

Erling Haaland must be the calmest dude in football, the solitary relaxer in a sport characterised in 2021 by bottomless screaming about nothing, everywhere, from social media to Sunday League. Only Erling doesn’t take it so serious. He meditates! He gives monosyllabic replies to boring questions! He uses the Champions League anthem as his alarm sound! He whispers “Marching on Together” in Stuart Dallas’ ear, just for the heck of it!

Compare his ultra-relaxed demeanour to Cristiano Ronaldo lining up a direct free-kick as if he’s calculating the physics for a moon-shot designed by Helmut Newton, rather than Isaac, letting every camera linger before ballooning the ball way off towards Mars. Erling just grins and blasts the thing into the net. All of the fun and none of the fuss.

But Haaland’s is a land of contrasts. Those blasts feel even more powerful emanating from his chilled out Yorks-Norse nature. He grins, he shrugs, then he charges down the pitch like a gruesome b-movie monster petrifying everybody in his path, shooting into goal by harnessing the force of the atomic explosion a frantic scientist said was the only way to stop him devastating the valley. When the Bundesliga restarted in May 2020, the mid-pandemic silence was broken by Haaland rattling Schalke’s net with a noise like shaking chains. He danced through socially distanced celebrations and waved to where the fans should have been. “Why not?” was his reply about that.

His serenity is frightening in certain lights, like the bloke sitting placid in his pub corner for years, who one day starts smashing pint glasses over his own head.

It’s not a surprise, then, to see Erling Haaland wearing Leeds United shorts. They’re his dad’s, which also figures. Their provenance isn’t confirmed but I’ll bet you one pound those navy shorts with the LUFC shield belong or belonged to Haaland Senior, worn by him for Leeds United in a match or in training. Leeds had a few styles at the time: the ones with the pale blue stripe going with the Lazio-style away kit, darker unadorned blue for mixing with the white home shirts.

Alfie Haaland is the progenitor of his son’s innate calm, a person who appreciates quality shorts. These are good, well-made, player-issue Puma shorts, and it makes perfect sense for Alfie to keep them to go running in, to shove them in a bag with the rest of his belongings when the family moved back to Norway, and for Erling to pull them out again one day, and think, I might as well wear these. It’s not frugality, nor is Erling ‘sending a message’ to Leeds, in that vacuous clickbait phrase. It’s just normal. He grabbed a pair of his dad’s old shorts, maybe in his teens when he was outgrowing his own, maybe last week. They’re comfy, they remind him of the city where he was born, it’s easier to put them on than slicing through the plastic wrapping of Dortmund’s latest training kit, dumped in a big box at his door. I don’t imagine these shorts are the only hand-me-downs from Papa Haaland’s career, either, and won’t be surprised one day if he’s cycling in a Nottingham Forest Umbro drill top, bench pressing in Manchester City Kappa socks. In these particular Leeds shorts, though, we also see the value-calculator of any Yorkshire-born soul at work: Puma are Dortmund’s kit sponsor, so all their exasperated account managers can do about their highest profile star wearing Leeds shorts from before he was born is shrug, and say, well, at least they’re not Adidas. Erling Haaland will wear whatever shorts he likes, but he’ll make sure nobody can find a reason to stop him.

Erling’s on-off relationship with Leeds and Leeds United will continue, in ways likely to cause amusement — old shorts! — and fusement — when he rattles in three goals at Elland Road for Chelsea or someone. “That’s where my sense of humour comes from,” Erling says, about being born in Leeds, and he’ll probably find a hat-trick against us funny in his big weird way. Until Leeds United can afford the many millions Haaland’s services will fetch over the next decade and a half, the nearest we’ll get are these flashes of hometown humour, like when he scores his three goals and whips out an Ellie the Elephant (version one) tribute celebration. And, while everyone around him goes mad about it, he’ll pull on an old Puma King t-shirt his dad stole off Jimmy Hasselbaink as a joke, and head for home to meditate. ⬢