The Haaland haircut arrived with three words and a series of selfies: "Short hair, don't care." Manchester City's No 9 posted the images on Sunday morning, added a before-and-after video, and let the internet do the rest while his team prepared for the first league fixture of the 2026/27 season.
A buzzcut at breakfast, a 1-0 deficit by half-time
The cut was not a stealth job. Haaland built an entire vlog episode around it for a YouTube channel with more than four million subscribers, video-calling a run of familiar faces for their verdicts — among them Oasis singer Noel Gallagher and his former manager, Pep Guardiola.
Guardiola's reaction was the one that travelled. "No way!" he said on picking up. "You are lucky you have hair, I would love to have it!"
City's own account replied to the post with the striker's own catchphrase, "Nice". The club, in other words, was in on it before kick-off.
The context matters for anyone who has only watched Haaland in a City shirt. He is 26, and he has not worn his hair short since his three seasons at Borussia Dortmund before the 2022 move to Manchester. The blond hair became part of the iconography — including the moment he tore off his hairband during the 4-1 win over Arsenal at the Etihad in 2023, one of the defining nights of that title run.
Then the football started, and the timing did the comedy for everyone. City trailed Bournemouth 1-0 at half-time in their opening match. Anyone looking for a punchline was handed one inside 45 minutes.
The Salah precedent behind the Haaland haircut jokes
Fantasy managers did not invent this genre on Sunday. They inherited it from May 2024, when Mohamed Salah shaved off his trademark curls and trimmed his beard, posting a mirror selfie captioned with nothing but a grinning emoji.
The circumstances were almost eerily similar. Salah was 31, he had just closed a seventh season at Anfield with 25 goals in all competitions, Liverpool had finished third and won the Carabao Cup, and Jürgen Klopp had just said his goodbyes. A new manager was arriving. The haircut read as a line drawn under an era, not a style choice.
The reaction then had the same tone as now — Brentford's Neal Maupay, never one to let a moment pass, welcomed him to the shaved-head club within hours.
What the fantasy community remembers is what came next: the claim, repeated across threads this weekend, that Salah's post-buzzcut campaign produced the best goals-plus-assists season in Premier League history. That figure is being passed around without a source attached, and we would not stake a squad on it as stated. The verifiable part is narrower and still striking — a superstar shaved his head at the exact hinge between two managerial eras, and his output afterwards was good enough that nobody has stopped bringing it up two years later.
Salah is no longer a Premier League player, which is the other reason this landed the way it did. His absence from the game is precisely why Haaland's price is what it is.
22 August goals in 14 games, and £15.5m riding on them
Strip the barbershop out and the anxiety underneath is real, because Haaland's opening months are historically where fantasy seasons are won.
He has scored 22 Premier League goals in just 14 games played in August. He has finished as the top-scoring player in Fantasy after the first six Gameweeks in all four of his City seasons, averaging nine goals and 61.3 points across that stretch. Home fixtures against promoted Coventry City and Ipswich Town inside the first seven Gameweeks make him the obvious first Triple Captain of the campaign.
The price tag is the complication. At £15.5m he is the most expensive player the game has ever listed, up £1.5m on last season's £14.0m, and the alternative is not hypothetical.
| Player | 2026/27 price | 2025/26 points | Goals | Assists |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Erling Haaland (Man City) | £15.5m | 239 | 27 | 8 |
| Bruno Fernandes (Man Utd) | £12.0m | 235 | 9 | 24 |
| Gabriel (Arsenal) | £8.0m | 209 | 3 | 5 |
Prices are 2026/27 starting costs; points, goals and assists are 2025/26 totals.
Four points separated Haaland and Fernandes last season at a £3.5m difference in cost. Fernandes was the highest-scoring player in the game across the final 17 Gameweeks, producing 129 points at 7.6 per match, and Manchester United open against two promoted sides.
The budget maths is unforgiving. Owning Haaland and Fernandes leaves £72.5m for the remaining 13 players; adding Gabriel drops the average to roughly £5.4m each across the other 12. That is the tension the haircut jokes are really about. Managers who went without the record-priced striker want a reason to feel clever, and managers who paid up want reassurance that nothing has changed.
Maresca's missing midfield, not the clippers
The variable worth watching at the Etihad has nothing to do with hair.
This is City's first season since 2015/16 without Guardiola, with Enzo Maresca appointed at the end of June on a three-year contract. His reign opened with a 3-0 defeat to Arsenal in the Community Shield on 16 August. Rodri has gone to Barcelona. Savinho is closing in on a move to Tottenham. The only senior arrival so far is Elliot Anderson, signed from Nottingham Forest for a club-record £116m.
Maresca has been direct about the hole. "I'll try to find a new Rodri — it is what it is," he said, before running through the club's history of succession: David Silva to Kevin De Bruyne, Sergio Agüero to Haaland, Fernandinho to Rodri. "When they leave, you need to be good and recruit the next one."
That is the actual input into a striker's numbers. Haaland has scored roughly 150 goals in 173 Manchester City appearances, reaching his first hundred in 105 — a rate built on volume of service as much as finishing. Change who controls possession in front of him and the supply line moves. Change his hair and it does not.
Which is why the fun of Sunday is best enjoyed as fun. City trailed at the interval in their opening fixture, and the reason is sitting in Catalonia, not in a barber's bin.
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