Coming off of back-to-back hattricks, Erling Haaland has quickly become the star of the show at Manchester City.
His competition? Young academy star and Premier League Young Player of the Season 2020-21 Phil Foden.
There was general excitement about the possibility of Erling Haaland partnering up with Phil Foden ever since he became a Manchester City player in an official capacity earlier this summer.
So, when rumours of a rift amongst its star boys began to circulate, concerns about how it would affect their futures and chemistry at the club grew.
After all, this would not be the first time teammates have fallen out over egos.
These rumours started when City played AFC Bournemouth and Foden chose not to pass the ball to Haaland when he was clearly in a better goal-scoring position.
A similar situation arose in the game against Newcastle.
Erling Haaland, despite getting an incredible number of goals, has barely had any touches on the ball at all.
Fans have been blaming Phil Foden for not passing the ball enough to him in order to minimise his output.
Foden’s Instagram posts were flooded with comments asking him to pass the ball to the Norwegian striker. To learn more about the rumours regarding the rift, read this article.
However, these rumours might just be rumours after all.
In Manchester City’s latest game against Nottingham Forest, the cameras caught Erling Haaland and Phil Foden talking and fooling around, burying the rumours about a rift.
The pair was subbed off after Haaland completed his hattrick and Foden provided him with an assist.
The apparent “rift” has quickly switched to “bromance”.
Some users are taking credit for this increase in chemistry, saying that the reason why Foden is passing the ball to him is that he has been subjected to so many messages and tweets about it.
It wasn’t a particularly good game for Foden, as can be seen in his SofaScore rating of just 6.8, but sitting on the bench we could see that his individual performance did not bother him much, as he looked very happy for the team.
This was the second game where a Foden pass had led to a Haaland goal, the first one being the game against Crystal Palace.
When asked about the passing situation, Haaland cheekily stated in an interview after the game with Crystal Palace that he was very happy to finally get passes from Foden, adding that “We played for each other. We played together.”
With Foden and Haaland both being just 22, it is safe to say City supporters can rest easy knowing that the club’s future is in great hands.
Alongside Haaland and Foden, there was a buzz in the air about new signing Julian Alvarez.
The front three of Foden, Haaland and Alvarez look to be very scary, as they already have 15 goals + assists between them, and it has only been 5 game weeks.
With Haaland scoring 9 of them, he looks ready to challenge the record for most goals in a Premier League season.
Now that Foden and Haaland have their newfound “bromance”, the goals are only going to go up.
And this is without taking into account that plethora of other players in the mouth-watering City side.