Nepo babies come to football
Erling Haaland is a brilliant footballer with a fantastic dad. But the best thing is still that someone with his background can play on a team with Kalvin Phillips, with his.
It's not nepotism that puts Alfie Haaland's son at the point of Manchester City's deadly — although it was only painful against Illan Meslier — attack. Any footballer who looks like Erling, who thinks like Erling, who plays like Erling, would have the GDP price tag and the super world star reputation because he's just built too different to resist. And he scores a lot. But would Erling Haaland be all of those things if he wasn't Alf-Inge Haaland's son? He'd celebrate against Leeds if he wasn't born in Leeds, that we know. The rest is a question of how else he could have got it.
Nepotism babies were all the rage before Christmas, when New York magazine's cover feature declared 2022 the 'Year of the nepo baby'. For twelve trending months, people had been googling the stars of their favourite movies and shows and finding out, with either irritation or pleasure, how many of them had famous forebears. 'A short film called The Rightway — directed by Steven Spielberg’s daughter, starring Sean Penn’s son, and written by Stephen King’s son — spurred days of online controversy', the article notes. Other controversies went in reverse, 'millennials and Gen-Xers incredulous that someone had gotten to Judd Apatow through Maude Apatow'. Even if you don't think nepo babies are controversial or bad, there's been more of them around than there used to be back when Hollywood was young.
It's a theme that can be carried across to football, with Haaland & Son the more impressive headliner than the shenanigans at Inter Miami, say, where club president David Beckham and head coach Phil Neville deny any favouritism towards young squad players Romeo Beckham and Harvey Neville. And Leeds United have enough names to make us wonder if we're the most on-trend nepo baby club around. We've got Robin Koch, son of Kaiserslautern stalwart Harry. Leo Hjelde, son of Nottingham Forest's Jon Olav. Charlie Cresswell is son of former Leeds striker Richard; he has a younger brother, Alfie, in our youth team. Our League One winger Seb Carole's son, Keenan, plays for the Under-21s; and 1980s youth team hopeful Vince Brockie, who played alongside David Batty and Gary Speed, has a son, Devon, in our Under-16s. Archie and another kid brother, Harry, are carrying on the fine Gray dynasty begun by their great-uncle Eddie and grandad Frank, whose son Andy had two spells with Leeds, prodigal returns of two different kinds, before we switched our hopes to his sons.
What's common among this excess of dads, especially Papas Haaland, Hjelde, Cresswell, Koch and Gray, is that while none of them were peak stars of football, they all had a place among the first generation of Premier League or close enough footballers who could retire comfortably in wealth. The change of the 1990s into the 2000s, when these guys were playing, was a change in the commercial promise of football and what it meant to become a retired professional.