Despite having an advantage in the 2023 Golden Ball race, Haaland is lagging far behind his counterpart, Mbappe, on the national team front.

At the end of this month, the 2023 Golden Ball awards ceremony will be held in Paris, France. Here, France Football magazine will announce the winner of the Best Player of the Year title with strong candidates such as Messi, Haaland or Mbappe.

While Messi has a special advantage thanks to winning the 2022 World Cup, Haaland and Mbappe compete closely because their personal achievements are quite similar. Accordingly, Man City’s striker owned 56 goals last season, including both club and national team levels, while Mbappe’s number was 54.

Haaland outperformed Mbappe in the Golden Ball race thanks to the treble with Man City last season (photo: Sportskeeda)

However, Haaland completely outperformed Mbappe in terms of collective titles with the treble with Man City last season. PSG’s superstar has only one Ligue 1 championship.

Therefore, Haaland is considered Messi’s real rival for the 2023 Golden Ball. But that does not mean he is better than Mbappe, or even the opposite in another aspect.

Although Haaland flourished in the club shirt, he struggled quite a bit in the Norwegian national team shirt. Recently, he and his teammates were also dropped from the Euro 2024 qualifiers.

Haaland has never participated in a major national tournament in his career (photo: Getty)

In theory, Haaland’s Norway team still has a chance to go to Germany next year through the play-off round. However, this path is forecast to be even more difficult when the probability of continuing is only 3/12 teams.

Therefore, there is a high risk that Haaland and the Norwegian national team will become outsiders at Euro 2024. That will be a bad scenario for the Man City striker when this is the third major tournament in a row that he has not played. can participate (Euro 2020, World Cup 2022, Euro 2024).

Meanwhile, Mbappe, at the age of 23 like Haaland, played in the last two World Cups, Euro 2020 and Nations League 2021, winning two championships. It can be said that Mbappe’s teammate in the French national team is better than Haaland in the Norwegian national team, but the PSG superstar’s ability to carry the team at important moments is far superior.

Mbappe once showed a terrible ability to carry the team for France at the 2022 World Cup (photo: Getty)

That was shown by Mbappe scoring in two consecutive World Cup finals, becoming the top scorer of the 2022 World Cup at just 23 years old. Then, as soon as he turned 24, this striker became the captain of the French national team and just became the 4th best scorer in Les Bleus history (42).

As for Haaland, he scored 27 goals/28 matches for the national team but all were in qualifying rounds and friendlies, meaning against lower-rated teams. Therefore, this statistic seems to only be used to beautify the profile of the Man City striker but cannot motivate the Norwegian national team.