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Erling Haaland’s job is infamously the trickiest, most elusive and most quixotic in the history of football. Not the most exposed: that’s goalkeepers and managers. Not the most en vogue: that’s currently the technically elegant, match- organizing midfielder. His job is scoring not only prolifically but goals under pressure, goals when your team is suffering, goals to win trophies. Goals where your touch is velvet, goals where your touch is vulgar. Off the post, off your instep, off a defender, off your forehead – off the scale.

Treble-winner Samuel Eto’o (Barça and Inter) used to say: “Goals are like rats … you chase them and they’ll simply disappear, like rats up a drainpipe.” Generations of attackers in post-match interviews would traditionally declare: “I just stuck out my leg and, luckily, it went in!” Almost no one dared analyse the art. Either because of superstition – “talk about goalscoring and the knack will vanish” – or perhaps to avoid the industrial espionage of defenders and keepers getting advance information and putting a goalscoring hoodoo on you. Whatever.

Even those all-time goal geniuses, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, perpetually avoid talking about ‘how’. You could compare it to the Magic Circle whose Latin motto is: indocilis private loqui – not appropriate to disclose secrets. Member magicians promise not to disclose secrets other than to bona fide students of the ancient art. Well, Haaland possesses this magic. He’s prodigious – currently scoring at a rate greater than anyone in living memory.

Nevertheless, what you’re about to read is the Norwegian’s personal X-ray of what he does, how he does it, what he thrives on, what inspires him – the most clinical and detailed exposition of the goalscoring art that I can remember. During the World Cup, Norway steamrollering their way to an all-time high, football fans watched him doing all the things he’ll now examine for the readers of Champions Journal.

He’ll talk about movement, timing, happiness, smiling, negativity, physical battles, psychological advantages, scruffy finishes, identity, motivation. Traditionalists will love the first subject – and his attitude. I remind him how many defenders admit trying not to bully Didier Drogba because of the following logic: “If he was calm you at least had a chance of not being monstered physically – but if you enraged him ... look out!”