Haaland dramatically ‘banned’ from Man City captaincy as Maresca enforces ‘bizarre’ rule | OneFootball

Enzo Maresca made a light-hearted joke about why Erling Haaland, who wasn’t Man City captain under Pep Guardiola, probably won’t be Man City captain under him either.

This is ‘unusual’ and ‘bizarre’ and even apparently amounts to Haaland being forbidden or banned from taking the captaincy according to some of the more excitable reactions from a press pack in increasingly obvious and urgent need for the Premier League season to get underway so they can get back to getting very hot heads about real things that matter like VAR and which of the new managers is a fraud or whether Arsenal have conceded a penalty yet.

In further evidence that we’ve all had enough transfer window now for one summer, there’s been an escalation in the number of transfers Man United are apparently going to complete ‘this week’.

Captain marvel

Lots of excitement around today about the fact Erling Haaland won’t be Manchester City’s full-time captain.

Enzo Maresca, in clearly jovial mood, explained why Haaland will remain part of the leadership group but not the first-choice on-field captain.

The Express among many, many others carry those quotes:

Pretty straightforward then. Pretty clear. And remember: we’re talking here about a player in Haaland who has never been Man City’s first-choice captain. There is no demotion here. He’s not having the armband taken away. He’s just not going to be the new captain after Bernardo Silva’s departure, because his specific set of skills are incompatible with what Maresca wants from his captain.

Worth reiterating that Maresca is clearly joshing about here as well. Tone doesn’t always come across in the written word, but it’s clear this is basically a riff on the fact Haaland quite famously scores many goals. There is precisely zero sense that this is a problem for either him or Haaland, no sense of a falling out, no indication at all that anything is other than grand between the pair.

And yet the headlines are just… weird.

The Express themselves go with:

And that’s among the calmer ones. It is a bit unusual, we’ll allow that, but again: there’s really no suggestion that this is being used to ‘deny’ Haaland something that would otherwise be his. It’s not like he was the only or overwhelmingly standout candidate for the gig.

Yet the response just gets odder and odder the more you look.

The Sun go dramatic:

SportBible pretend that Haaland has been ‘forbidden’ from becoming City captain and go with this headline…

We’d suggest ‘ever’ is doing some heavy lifting when it in fact at best means ‘for as long as Maresca remains Man City manager’ which, based on current Premier League trends, could be about four months.

The back page of the Daily Mirror, meanwhile, goes with

Which is a frankly astonishing interpretation of what Maresca actually said. We do really like the idea that Haaland has been BANNED from the captaincy, though, with the conclusion of the story inside the paper doubling down on that:

Maresca has been a football manager in England for a while now and is already on his second Big Six gig, so it won’t exactly come as a shock. But it’s a reminder nonetheless how even the most innocuous, throwaway gag in the presence of the football press pack can be spun up into a crisis before the day is out. Especially when it includes an f-bomb.

Behind the eight ball

Mediawatch’s fascination with Reach’s current fondness for the ‘this week’ transfer trope shows no signs of abating. Certainly not this week anyway.

Yesterday morning we were being told by the Express that Man United could do seven deals this week. We were sceptical, given last week’s lack of success with the same target but let it never be said there is any laurel-resting going on here.

For by yesterday afternoon the Mirror were hitting us with this:

It’s like the razor wars isn’t it? Except instead of Gillette and Wilkinson Sword slapping more and more blades on razors, it’s websites from the same company slapping more and more bollocks rumours into their football transfer stories.

As you like it

But while it’s always exciting to see a new headline trend emerge and flourish – and the stats must show the immediacy of ‘this week’ combined with an outlandish number of transfers to be completed gets clicks out the wazoo to justify the amount of salt required to swallow the nonsense stories that trend is generating – we’ll always have room in our hearts and our page for the old favourites.

And top of that list is still probably the sheer awesome deceptive power of the humble ‘as’ in the hands of a skilled headline bullsh*t artist.

Take this from the Mirror, for instance.

Very easy, even if you’ve seen this trope a hundred times before, to get caught out here. All too easy to stumble like the naïve summer child you are into thinking that ‘Kenan Yildiz’ and ‘forward’ are one and the same.

Of course they’re not. Obviously. It wouldn’t be in Mediawatch if they were, for one thing.

No, the ‘stance clear’ on Yildiz is in fact the exact opposite that would be suggested by bolting on the idea that the club are in talks for a ‘forward’.

The clear stance is in fact that he is not for sale. The forward Arsenal are ‘in talks’ over a move for is Gabriel Martinelli. The sharpest among you will have spotted he is in fact already an Arsenal player, and you’d be correct to note that. They might be selling him to Galatasaray is the news here.

News one could argue, if one were so inclined, whose significance might have just been bumped up a touch here in order to utilise it in such a conveniently misleading headline.

We’re sure it’s not that, though. We’re sure it’s just rotten luck that taking these two unrelated and low-wattage Arsenal stories and giving them a cut-and-shut headline accidentally makes it look like one very bright and shiny tale indeed.