Culture
Conrad Harder: The prolific Sporting Lisbon teenager aiming to emulate Haaland
A coffee wagon that has been converted into a portable video analysis hub is making its way back into the FC Nordsjaelland (FCN) training base when the sudden thud of football on crossbar brings it to a halt.
It is the very specific sound of a Conrad Harder effort on goal, a missile that can be launched by his left foot, right foot or head — one that Manchester City will come face-to-face with on Tuesday when they take on his new side, Sporting Lisbon, in the Champions League.
On The Athletic’s visit to Nordsjaelland in the summer, analysts linger in the centre of the pitch to observe this crossing and finishing competition between Harder and reserve goalkeeper William Lykke, also 19, at the end of training.
𝐒𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 🔟✂️
𝐅𝐞𝐣𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 🔟🥳Conrad Harder 👏💥#sldk pic.twitter.com/D6dUQftGWP
— FC Nordsjælland 🐯 (@FCNordsjaelland) January 27, 2024
Former Chelsea and Ghana midfielder Michael Essien, now the assistant manager at Nordsjaelland, is on crossing duty and there is barely a delivery across the 20 minutes that is not devoured by Harder.
The Dane can do finesse but, when it comes to his preferred finishing style, it is Harder by name, harder by nature. Even the under-10 team’s training session was paused as the youngsters watched and gasped in disbelief.
There is no waiting for the ball to drop. Harder takes on every shot as early as possible. He strikes volleys as if seeing the ball like a watermelon and, when it is airborne, his hang-time is reminiscent of a certain Portuguese forward.
“My idol was Cristiano Ronaldo… but then Erling Haaland came along,” Harder tells The Athletic once the session is complete.
It is helpful that the teenager introduces Manchester City star Haaland into the conversation himself. As a tall Scandinavian striker with bulging thighs, bouncing blond hair and a left foot with the power to outpace Hawk-Eye’s ball-tracking technology, the comparison is inescapable. Five years Haaland’s junior, Harder does not want talk of the Norway international to become an albatross around his neck. “He is a really good player and I’m watching his game to try to learn and go in this direction,” Harder says.
“People compare a lot, especially with (Manchester United’s Danish forward Rasmus) Hojlund, who is also scoring goals now, but I don’t want to be one of them. I just want to be my own (man). That is the way I think.”
This conversation took place in July and, since then, the Danish striker has been involved in a transfer tug-of-war, rejecting Brighton & Hove Albion on deadline day to sign for Ruben Amorim’s Sporting in a €20million (£16.8m; $22.1m) transfer.
So far he has come off the bench in two of Sporting’s Champions League matches and on his league debut registered his first goal and assist against Avs FS. He added a brace against Portimonense in the Taca de Portugal last month.
From the sidelines, Harder looks huge, but up close his boyish appearance is startling. Nicknamed ‘Mosquito’ by Nordsjaelland team-mate Mario Dorgeles due to his fear of those insects when visiting the Right to Dream academy in Ghana two years ago, he conveys the aura of someone who already sees himself as a leader in the team.
During FCN’s small-sided training games with rolling substitutions, Harder’s competitive edge is obvious as he laments goalkeeping mistakes and harries defenders as if his life depends on it. He is more of an all-round player than a pure poacher but it is clear he lives for scoring goals, which is why he is described by some at FCN as “goal horny” — a Danish way of saying he is not overly happy when he does not put the ball in the back of the net.
Harder in action against Fenerbahce in last season’s Europa Conference League (Sergei Gapon/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Harder was having his breakout year with Nordsjaelland but, such is his talent, it was curtailed by that deadline-day transfer tussle between Brighton and Sporting, with Italy’s Napoli the other interested party earlier in the summer.
Clubs had been aware of his talent for some time, due to his goalscoring record for Nordsjaelland at youth level. He got 15 in 18 games for the under-17s, and 26 in 22 for the under-19s, but he still had to be patient before breaking into the first team.
Harder made his senior debut in the final game of the 2022-23 season and then made 33 appearances across all competitions in the last one — just nine from the start — scoring seven goals. In the early weeks of this season, he had started all six league games, scoring twice in a 2-2 draw with Midtjylland and producing a clever assist for what turned out to be the winner as they beat FC Copenhagen 3-2.
The plan was never for Harder to move on during the summer window. Indeed, Brighton were originally looking at next summer as the ideal time to pounce, but Sporting coming in so strongly forced them to act earlier.
This was to be Harder’s first season as a regular starter for Nordsjaelland, where he would be given space to develop and adjust to senior football. He even signed a new four-year contract in the summer, a step that underlined that intent, but money talks and, once the threshold of €20m was breached, the club had to accept he was off.
The pathway presented by Brighton was for him to go out on loan before becoming a first-team player. In their favour they had evidence of managing a phased integration from Danish football to the Premier League as they signed Simon Adingra from FCN in summer 2022 before sending him to Belgian sister side Union Saint-Gilloise for a season. He returned a more experienced player and is now an important part of the Brighton squad.
Although Viktor Gyokeres is the main man at Sporting, they could offer Harder an immediate role in the squad and, ultimately, that swayed his decision. It was earlier than those who have overseen his development would have liked him to make that step and there is the risk that such a leap this early into his career could be too much, but he backs himself and believes he will be a success in Portugal. The riches of Premier League football will always be on offer if that is the case.
Nordsjaelland have sold over £90m worth of African talent developed at their Right To Dream academy in Ghana, but Harder was the latest off the conveyor belt from their Danish academy, with Andreas Skov Olsen of Belgium’s Club Bruges and Brentford duo Mikkel Damsgaard and Mathias Jensen all previously moving for sizeable fees.
Adingra has excelled at Brighton (Jan Kruger/Getty Images)
Harder’s decision to move to Sporting was not the first tough call he has had to make. At 14, he decided to leave FC Copenhagen and move to Nordsjaelland.
“I didn’t develop as much as I wanted, so I wanted a new challenge and FCN was a good option for me,” Harder explains.
“I don’t know if there is a secret (in the way Nordsjaelland operate), but there are so many coaches around you all the time, working on the details at every training, it definitely helps. It is easy to go in the first-team squad, as you have been learning the same playing style the whole way.”
Harder may want to avoid too many comparisons with Haaland and Hojlund, but he does share an agent with the latter’s two younger twin brothers, Oscar and Emil, who play in Germany for Eintracht Frankfurt and Schalke respectively.
People at Nordsjaelland always knew he was destined for big things. They just did not expect that day to come so soon.
Whether Harder is ready is another question, but he does not come across as a teenager who will be daunted by a price tag or the shadows of Scandinavian strikers looming large.
(Top photo: Maciej Rogowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
Augusta, GA2 minutes agoSenate candidate Derek Dooley visits Lincolnton, Augusta
-
Washington, D.C7 minutes agoMan in critical condition after water rescue in Southwest DC
-
Cleveland, OH14 minutes agoKoby Altman Sounds Like Evan Mobley’s Future With Cavaliers Could Be in Question
-
Austin, TX17 minutes agoBarton Springs Bridge named one of Preservation Texas’ most endangered places for 2026
-
Alabama22 minutes agoA path to employment for Alabama individuals with a criminal background
-
Arizona32 minutes agoArizona GOP attorney general debate turns personal with insults, name-calling
-
Arkansas37 minutes agoArkansas men’s track and field sends 21 entries to NCAA Outdoor Championships | Whole Hog Sports
-
California44 minutes agoCalifornia just handed oil companies billions in free pollution permits
