It is the year 2040, and the event is Erling Braut-Haaland's official announcement of his retirement from football, and his return to Norway to take care of the cows on his vast estate, as he had always dreamed of. At that moment, the Norwegian is 40 years old, but his physical performance is still steadfast in relation to his age, after four decades of healthy nutrition, morning sun sessions, and extreme attention to everything that enters his body.

Haaland retires after scoring 1,277 goals and making 103 others, and some believed that he would be able to play for a few more years, in which he would come closer to the equation of Messi and Ronaldo's combined goal tally, to become the man who broke the greatest statistical bilateral competition in the history of the game.

Back to the Future

Now take a minute to imagine how much bullying the Norwegian had been subjected to before he got to that point. Indeed, as well as his now-subtle epithets and bemoans of the days of glamorous individual skill that entertained soccer fans, even his acclaim bears an implicit bullying, as a medieval "Viking", in the apparent reference to his physique Its only or most important advantage, or as a robot that has been programmed to score goals without income from it.

One of the famous English sports sites has already used the last phrase, and another combined the two descriptions in a variation on the famous "Terminator" character of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this is what prompts us towards the first important correction in this story; Believe it or not, what Haaland does carries a great deal of skill, even if crowd impressions tell you otherwise.

The problem here lies in confusing two concepts with separate meanings. The first is fun, which is very relative, or at least that's how every fan who won their team with a goal from a lone attack in 90 minutes will tell you, and the second is a skill, which is also, surprisingly, a very relative value as well, but easier to measure of course.

Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines skill in several interpretations. The first is to use knowledge effectively and willingly in performing a task, and the second - which is the source of confusion in this case - explain skill as being professional in performing tasks, especially manual ones, and the third considers it the learned ability to perform a task efficiently.

Of course, all the keywords in the three definitions are very relative, because things such as effectiveness, professionalism, and efficiency are not measured by absolute standards, but rather in relation to others. The latter is a priori more 'effective', 'professional' or 'efficient'.

Find the Way

This linguistic tangle turns into complete chaos when another concept is added to all of the above - it never gets its right to talk - it is what the English know as "Style", a word that has many meanings in different contexts, but in football, it often means kinetic elegance. and harmonious muscular coordination.

For example, Brazilians have their own "Style"; Ronaldo de Lima, Ronaldinho Gaucho and many others learned football on the dance floors, or perhaps they learned to dance on the football fields, we don't know exactly, and for this reason, their bodies paint wonderful musical paintings while dribbling, receiving and shooting, with very deceitful movements, and with almost complete control of the torso and the four limbs, no clumsy gestures out of context, no ludicrous attempts at balance, in a subtle, measured dynamic that makes even their falls and stumbles impressive, not to mention Ronaldinho's long hair that gives his movement extra speciality.

This harmony achieves incomparable visual enjoyment, and it is one of the reasons that established the belief among many Egyptians that Mohamed Salah is not a "skilful" player in the popular sense. It is what Salah lacks in the view of many, and here another confusion occurred between elegance and skill.

Frequently dribbling two or three players, passing accurate interfaces, and being able to receive in the narrowest spaces, are things that only result from skill, so when some people talk about Salah’s lack of skill, what they actually mean is that his body movement technique does not emit the same magic that The Latino movement sends them, so his attempts seem fabricated from their point of view.

Nothing indicates this confusion as much as the constant comparisons between Mahrez and Salah in this context. Practically and numerically, Salah has completed more dribbles than his Algerian counterpart in the last four seasons in the Premier League, but for the same reason, Mahrez always seems to be a better dribbler, simply because he is more elegant even if he is not as effective.

If you have the words, there is always a chance to find the way. This was the belief of the Irish Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney, and in this context, the conflation of concepts such as pleasure, skill and elegance was based entirely on a lack of appropriate tools of expression, which is another thing that is usually underestimated, because we think it is insulting to admit the need to be skilled in our mother tongue or to question our vocabulary and our ability to express ourselves.

But, what does all of this mean in terms of the value of records? Does outscoring Cristiano or out-assisting Messi, or even both, mean that you are better? I will explore that in the next post.