Erling Haaland could break Dixie Dean’s goalscoring record

The Viking with the long blond hair who eats lumps of cow hearts approaches the man who ended his life with one leg and, according to legend, was kicked so hard between the two of them that he spent most of his career with only one testicle.

Another goal for Erling Haaland against Arsenal took him to 49 goals in 43 games in his debut season for Manchester City. Ahead of him is Dixie Dean, whose tally of 63 goals from 41 games for Everton in 1927-28 remains unmatched and the pinnacle of goalscoring in English football.

Haaland needs 15 more goals. He has 11 games left: seven in the Premier League, the FA Cup final and three in the Champions League as City get past Real Madrid to reach the final. He averaged 1.14 goals per game this season.

That success rate puts him at another 12, or 13 if we round up, leaving him horribly short of Dean’s record. One wonders how much he will regret letting Riyad Mahrez take that penalty against Sheffield United.

On the other hand, he scored 17 goals in his last 11 matches. Keep it up for the next 11 and Haaland will write his name in history.

He has already broken the record for goals scored in a Premier League season of 38 games. One more today and he will tie Alan Shearer and Andy Cole’s 42 game record.

Dean’s league record of 60 goals remains secure, if not his total for all competitions.

One more goal and Clive Allen, whose 49 goals for Tottenham Hotspur in 1986-87 under David Pleat were chasing the treble at home, will also be beaten. Regardless of how close he comes to Dean, whether he passes or falls short, Haaland’s goalscoring achievements and his impact on City will be talked about and praised for generations to come. His achievements will become a part of the English football legend in his own right.

And that’s the problem with legends. The longer it is shared, the more mouths it passes through the years, the more it grows and becomes in more wild and absurd forms.

We are already obsessed with Haaland, hoping to reveal his secrets. The 6,000 calories he consumes a day – the same as seven Sunday roasts. Haaland’s revelation that he eats a cow’s heart and liver. The home-made lasagna his father Alf-Inge Haaland cooked before every game. The filter system he installed for his drinking water. The pints of milk. The orange goggles he wears to block out high-energy blue light. Getting sun in his eyes as soon as he wakes up, because it’s good for his “circadian rhythm.” Wearing an Oura ring to measure his sleep quality, stress and heart rate.

Can you imagine what those stories will be 50 years from now when the next superhuman assailant hunts him down? Not only will he eat with heart and liver, grandparents will swear they saw him eat an entire cow with his bare hands and his hair fell to his waist.

Because the only way we can understand superhuman powers is to make them come from superhumans. They can’t just be normal.

When asked if his 60-goal record would ever be broken, Dean once replied, “I think it will, but there’s only one guy who’s going to do it – that’s the guy who walks on water.” He’s about the only one.’

Few have spun the legendary yarn like Dean. For many of the stories about him, the passage of time means that no one knows for sure where the truth ends and the myth begins.

Like the one he told about losing a testicle early in his career after a solid, well, tackle from Rochdale defender Davy Parkes at Prenton Park. When one of his teammates rushed to ease the pain, Dean said he declared, “Don’t rub ’em, count ’em.”

Football historians have long struggled to confirm the veracity of the story, but that hasn’t stopped Dean from adding more thread to the spinning wheel with claims he later knocked Parkes out to repay the favor at a Chester pub .

“He sent me a pint over the bar,” Dean told a BBC interview. When I asked the bartender who sent it, he pointed at him and I couldn’t quite place the face for a while. But I did, and then I put his face up and they took him to the hospital, so we’re even!’

Haaland and Dean were different in stature – Dean was 5ft 7in tall, Haaland is 6ft 8in. Haaland is the master of the first time left-footed finish, Dean the most prolific header of his generation.

A story passed down by Everton fans was about the time Dean passed Liverpool goalkeeper Elisha Scott on the street. When Dean nodded in his direction, Scott reacted with goalkeeping instinct and dove right through a window.

So long has passed that it almost seems like the truth no longer matters and what adds to the myth is where the true currency lies. Some supporters swear it’s true. When asked to verify the story in a 1977 Guardian interview, Dean had no recollection of doing so, but did say that before every Merseyside derby he would send Scott a bottle of aspirin with a note that read: ‘Go to sleep tonight, ’cause I’ll be with you tomorrow – Bill Dean’.

He disliked the nickname by which history remembers the great striker. His teammates called him Dixie, or so the story goes, because his tan skin and curly black hair reminded them of the black slaves of America’s southern “Dixieland” states.

Historian Gilbert Upton, however, believed in his history of Tranmere Rovers that they corrupted an earlier playground nickname of ‘Digsy’. Dean claimed he learned to play with both feet by kicking rats against a wall while working with his father as an apprentice mechanic on the Wirral Railway and honed his heading skills by bouncing a ball off the roof of a church.

He nearly died in a motorcycle accident the season before his record-breaking performance. He fractured his skull, broke a cheekbone and broke his jaw in two places.

“Doctors were afraid he wouldn’t live for many hours,” Thomas Keates wrote in his history of Everton FC. His survival surprised them. When recovery was assured, the medical certificate read: ‘This man will never be able to play football again.’

And yet his prowess in the air during his historic campaign was so great that envious onlookers suggested that surgeons insert a steel plate into his skull. And they call Haaland a robot.

Dean’s father first took him to an Everton game when he was eight. Haaland earns £375,000 a week at City with staggering bonuses that are believed to take his wages closer to £900,000.

In his splendor at Everton, Dean earned £8 a week in the winter and £6 in the summer. He cost Everton £3,000 from Tranmere Rovers. City initially paid Borussia Dortmund £51 million for Haaland. When Everton won the FA Cup in 1933, his bonus was less than £30.

He once said he would have played for Everton for nothing and in 1928 turned down an offer from the New York Giants to move to the US and triple his wages.

Arsenal offered Everton a blank check for his services in Dean’s prime, only to see their open offer rejected by the Toffees. Dean was literally priceless.

Bill Shankly described Dean as ‘the best centre-forward there will ever be. He belongs to the company of the greatest, such as Beethoven, Shakespeare and Rembrandt’.

A blood clot forced his right leg to be amputated and he spent his final years confined to a wheelchair. He died in March 1980, aged 73, after watching Everton play Liverpool at Goodison Park. As his old teammate Joe Mercer said when he heard the news, “Where else?”

The stories that live on are almost as incredible as Dean’s goals. Haaland is only 22. Whether or not he breaks the record this season, there is no doubt that history will tell remarkable stories about the Striking Viking in years to come.