– Haaland does this almost perfectly, says Geir Jordet to news. He is a professor of football and psychology, and has recently studied the way Haaland uses his gaze during a football match. Now he can state that, in addition to being the top scorer in the English Champions League, he is completely in the top tier in this field as well. STUDIED HAALAND CAREFULLY: Geir Jordet. Photo: Tom Balgaard / news – He is well above the average of strikers in top European leagues, he says. The look is the reason why you almost never see Erling Braut Haaland running offside, and now the professor tells how he achieves it. Stand out Jordet has studied many of Haaland’s matches. What the professor thinks is extra interesting to follow is his head. More specifically: The way he collects information. Jordet has studied this by counting how many times Haaland searches, or scans, the surroundings before he receives the ball. – Normally strikers lie quite low, and look around two to three times before they receive the ball. Haaland looks around three to four, sometimes five times, on average, says Jordet. – Why is he doing this? – He is always looking for information, and is always looking for the perfect position, says Jordet. WATCH VIDEO: Against Sevilla, Haaland “timed” the run perfectly before scoring 1-0. This is how he does what Jordet mentions three things Haaland does when he uses his eyes: Before he receives the ball, he looks around to get good scoring positions. It happens quite early in an attack. He applies early to get into position. When the ball is heading towards him, he is even more focused in his gaze. Then he looks for the nearest counter-player. When do they come in, and where do they come in. When he has the ball, and it’s only the finish, he hardly looks at the ball. He mostly studies goalkeepers and goals. He knows exactly where the goalkeeper is, where it is open, what foot the goalkeeper is on, and where he should put the ball in the goal. – He does this significantly more than other strikers, says Jordet, but mentions two who do it just as much: Robert Lewandowski and Kylian Mbappé. He points out that Haaland can look very physically strong in a duel with opponents, which he is, but that he has prepared himself. – He knows exactly when and where this opponent will come in, because he has scanned, says Jordet. This way of looking plays a big role in why Haaland rarely jumps offside. – It is special when you look at a striker who lives his life on the offside line, as Haaland does, and almost never goes offside. It is related to this. He has such a good overview of where the opponents are. He knows where the line is, and can thus stay on the right side. TOP LIST: Erling Braut Haaland has scored ten goals so far in his debut season in the English Meisterliga. That’s four goals more than Aleksandar Mitrovic in Fulham. Photo: Jose Breton / AP Can learn from the top player The professor believes Haaland has become so good at this, because of his enormous hunger to score goals. – He is so incredibly obsessed with scoring goals. He has a hunger to get into position, shield the ball and finish correctly. Then he has solved some codes about how he should behave on the track, in order to collect that information. Then these pieces fell into place, he says. He is simply very impressed by the jærbow’s use of the gaze. – He is extremely good at this here, but all this is very logical stuff. When you collect information in this way here, you will be more efficient as a goalscorer, says Jordet. – What can Norwegian football learn from this? – We have a research environment in Norway that is well advanced in these matters. We know a lot about how this should be trained, how we should work with it, and now we have a model at the top of the world that is completely exceptional in this regard. We have to study these things, look at how he does it, learn from it, practice it, so that everyone becomes equally good at it, he says.
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