“We’re going to be together for a long, long time,” Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak told Erling Haaland on speakerphone, moments after the striker put pen to paper on the staggering nine-and-a-half year contract at the Etihad Stadium.
As exclusively revealed by The Athletic on Friday, Haaland has committed his future to City until 2034, signing the longest — and one of the most lucrative — contracts in English football history.
When it was put to manager Pep Guardiola on Friday that the news had put a spring in his step he revealed that, actually, the contract had been finally agreed upon at the end of December.
The Athletic has learned that more or less everything had been put in place as far back as September, with negotiations having intensified at the end of last season and advancing over the summer. Any exit mechanisms in his previous deal have been removed and while the length of the new contract means it is unlikely to have been signed without any clause in it, it has been agreed with the intention on all sides of reaching 2034.
“Talks have been going on for a long time so it’s not a burden but, like, you think of it,” Haaland said, once the deal was done.
Following conversations with people familiar with the situation — who wish to remain anonymous to protect confidence — The Athletic tells the story of how the deal was done.
When City reached a deal with Team Haaland before his arrival in the summer of 2022, they agreed to a set of release clauses to get the agreement over the line. Haaland’s camp, keen to keep all options open for one of football’s hottest, and most ambitious, properties, had wanted the clauses in case a better destination presented itself.
City’s mission, though, was to ensure he was so happy and successful that there would be no desire to leave at all — which is exactly what has happened. In Haaland’s first full season, he won the treble and in his second he won the Premier League title again, City’s fourth in a row. Overall, he has scored 112 goals in 127 games.
His relationship with Guardiola is known to be excellent but strictly professional. Their approaches are complementary: Haaland lives to improve, working 24/7 to be better, while Guardiola is always seeking to push those around him to be better. The two have had run-ins, and Guardiola has challenged him publicly to maintain his high standards, but all as part of what is described as a very healthy player-coach bond.
Whereas Guardiola and midfielder Ilkay Gundogan are neighbours and have spent time together away from the training ground, Haaland and his family are extremely private.
They initially moved to the city centre, but have been living in the Cheshire countryside for a couple of years already. It was felt that he would benefit from more peace in his life, which he was more likely to find away from Manchester, where scrutiny can be intense, especially at more turbulent moments.
Things like these explain why Haaland felt comfortable not just extending his time in Manchester but signing the longest contract in English football history.
Alf-Inge, Haaland’s father and a former City player himself, is a key influence in his son’s life but negotiations on the player’s side were driven by Rafaela Pimenta, his agent.
Pimenta, a Brazilian-born lawyer and former lecturer who is respected throughout football, has a maternal approach to looking after her players but is not afraid to be direct with them when the situation demands. As she told The Athletic in 2023: “If the players need a nanny (to help them perform), I am happy to be one.”
For City, talks were led by CEO Ferran Soriano, which is rare in the industry. It is 12 months since Omar Berrada left his role as chief football operations officer at City ahead of taking up the CEO role at Manchester United, and negotiating a new deal with Haaland would have been his remit.
City had always felt that they would not need to replace Berrada — they still have not (and do not plan to) — because they are structured in a way that allows them to rearrange people in different departments. In the immediate aftermath of Berrada’s departure, Soriano took it upon himself to do more than his own remit and lead by example.
While Carlos Raphael Moersen has taken on more negotiating responsibility when it comes to transfers and contract renewals, working alongside director of football Txiki Begiristain, Soriano made Haaland’s renewal his project. At one point late last year, he flew to Norway as part of the talks.
He is not inexperienced in these matters: Soriano was key in Kevin De Bruyne’s new contract in 2022, when the Belgian felt the need to enlist data companies to calculate his worth to the team, partly because Soriano was driving a hard bargain.
Haaland’s deal is seen as a central part of City’s ongoing attempts to restructure the club on the pitch, freshen up the squad and build for what could well be the final phase of the Guardiola era.
As part of that, City want to bring in at least three players this month after a run of just one victory in 13 matches at the end of 2024 left them well adrift in the title race. Many at the club were shocked that City won the league last year, suspecting that the current squad’s time together was coming to an end, but that convinced them that they could manage one more year together before a refresh in 2025.
As recently as early December, they were still planning to wait until the summer to overhaul the squad, but poor performances and continued injury absences forced their hand.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the timings, this kind of change was always going to come — and Haaland’s new deal was seen as a fundamental part of it.
City’s owners have strived to put the club at the top of European football, and as well as signing up Guardiola to a new two-year deal in November they felt that one of the best ways to cement their place at the top was to secure the future of Haaland, who they see one of the best talents in the game, and certainly one of the most marketable.
Haaland and Guardiola have both signed new contracts to stay at City (Neal Simpson/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
For all of City’s success, they have not had one global superstar to help market the club to new audiences, beyond the manager himself.
City have seen ticket sales and social media engagement rocket since Haaland’s arrival, as well as interest in the Norwegian booming in the Far East, and with official matches set to take place in the United States this summer, as part of the newly formatted Club World Cup, it is not hard to imagine further ventures overseas during the next decade. Haaland will be the face of the club for much, if not all, of that time.
He has become a major figure inside the dressing room, too. While previous key players such as David Silva and Sergio Aguero would usually stay quiet (even accounting for Aguero’s outgoing personality) and could sometimes go unnoticed around the training ground, Haaland’s presence is notable not just because of his massive physical frame.
Aside from regularly breaking into an English accent to gently mock his team-mates or members of staff, he is very direct and will call things as he sees them. That helps to explain more heated interactions on the pitch, like telling Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta to “stay humble” after a match in September.
As part of his desire to improve, he demands the most of others around the training ground, not dissimilar to Guardiola, but he is also generous: after winning the treble, he handed non-playing staff a case of expensive Champagne.
One thing that should be known about Haaland and his team is that they are always looking to innovate and the size of the contract, while not exactly new given Cole Palmer signed a nine-year deal at Chelsea last summer, is so big that it forces you to consider how the entire sport, if not the planet, will look in around 10 years.
Pimenta, who has taken on Mino Raiola’s stable of players since his death in 2022, has big plans for her biggest client. In an interview with The Guardian in 2023, Pimenta talked about “sell(ing) a digital Erling Haaland for €2,000 to 100m people in India, China, Brazil, and Mexico” and “getting to a point where I experience a football game with goggles, which triggers the same emotions as if I were there.”
It is clear that Haaland’s long-term future has been mapped out and when Pimenta predicted that his overall value could reach £1billion, she may have had this kind of contract length in mind. “I am not saying a transfer fee would reach this amount,” she said. “I mean the whole package you generate throughout your career: salary, transfer fees, broadcasting revenues, sponsors, ticket sales, and shirts. With a player like Erling, it gets to one billion.”
Although Haaland’s deal is undoubtedly massive, both in terms of value and length, it is not as comparable to those in U.S. sports as it may seem. UEFA and Premier League rules mean that sums cannot be amortised for more than five years and, unlike baseball, money cannot be earned after a contract has ended and even long after a player has retired.
The exact make-up of any release clauses has always been hard to establish. One in his previous deal was linked to the future of Guardiola and was then removed when the manager extended his contract in December 2022. As early as spring 2023, City had felt that they would have a good chance of getting Haaland to renew.
Any of the clauses in the old deal have been taken out of the new one. Whereas City set out in 2022 to ensure that Haaland would never feel the need to exercise them, there is even greater confidence now that any get-outs will not be needed.
As well as Haaland’s happiness in Manchester and Cheshire, one reason why none of the previous clauses were activated is that only one club could feasibly afford him, and they have not been in the market.
Within minutes of putting pen to paper last week, Pimenta was keen to thank Begiristain for his role in getting Haaland to City in the first place. “I think you’re key for all of this, Txiki,” she said, in a video released by the club, “because your conversations with Erling brought him here.”
At the end of 2021 and heading into the new year, Haaland had been leaning towards a move to Real Madrid, at a time when the Spanish side were deciding whether to sign him or Paris Saint-Germain’s Kylian Mbappe, but with a preference for the latter.
One of the reasons Haaland looked favourably on a move to Madrid was because he felt La Liga is less physically demanding and he could therefore prolong his career. Begiristain, though, told him that City would help protect his body by resting him where possible and doing everything they could behind the scenes to keep him fresh.
In Madrid, Begiristain argued, Haaland would have to play all the time, because of pressure from the president, Florentino Perez.
Sporting director Begiristain, furthest right, has played a key role in shaping modern-day City (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Two years later, Haaland was still being discussed as a possible signing for Madrid by senior figures, who wanted to be kept abreast of his contract situation.
It was at a time when Mbappe’s move from PSG was being put in place — but some at Madrid felt that Haaland would be a better fit, and also less controversial than the Frenchman. Mbappe had already publicly snubbed Madrid and carried a bad reputation with some, which Haaland, despite choosing City over Madrid, did not have.
Around Christmas 2023, the feeling at the top level of Madrid was that they could sign either Haaland or Mbappe the following summer.
In the end, Perez elected for Mbappe and no serious interest in Haaland materialised. Given the size of the commitment that Haaland has made to City, it would be reasonable to suggest that he might not have been up for the move anyway, no matter his previous desires.
It has been tempting to conclude that Haaland’s commitment to City suggests that he has no concerns about the outcome of the hearing into the 129 Premier League charges levelled against the club. The club’s message to football staff on the very day that the charges dropped in February 2023 was that they were confident they would clear their name and for everybody to focus on matters on the pitch. To this day, that is about as far as the conversation has gone.
Despite the length of negotiations ahead of Haaland’s contract being signed, news was generally kept under wraps. Every few months, there would be reports about City’s confidence in striking a new deal but few other details. Even members of Guardiola’s first-team staff were unaware of the deal, certainly the length of it, until news broke on Friday morning. Incidentally, that was also the case with Guardiola’s renewal in November, itself a shock in the sense that nobody had been expecting a two-year extension.
Haaland would not have known about Guardiola’s intentions to stay around the time that he had more or less decided to stay in September, because Guardiola himself had not known what he was planning to do.
While Guardiola’s continued presence is considered a big positive for Haaland, his comfort at the club extends far beyond the manager’s influence. That much is clear from the fact that he intends to stay at the club for so long into the future that it is difficult to imagine how the football landscape, let alone life at City, will look.
Haaland feels he is in exactly the right place.
(Top image: Demetrius Robinson for The Athletic, images: Getty Images)
