What do you do with the Man of the Match at the highest level of football? Rewards are challenging: top-level athletes are not interested in champagne. Watches are also popular but only of limited use: after all, even the best footballers have only two wrists. In Yokohama, they have come up with a solution.
In a friendly match of his club Manchester City against local Yokohama F. Marinos, Erling Haaland did what he has been doing for a few years: he came, saw, and scored two goals. As a result, his team won the friendly match against the Japanese side 5-3, and the Norwegian striker was crowned Man of the Match. What did the Japanese organizers have in store for him? A lifetime supply of free sushi might have been a nice idea – after all, Haaland also hails from a country known for its fishing.
However, the goal-scoring machine of Manchester City received something different: a check for one million Japanese yen. Undoubtedly well-intended, but the amount, equivalent to just over six thousand euros, is unlikely to make a big impression on Haaland. With his salary of over 450,000 euros per week, expressing it solely in terms of minutes played, he would need to be on the field for a little over a minute to earn that amount.
"It can always be worse. Franco Armani had to wear a Burger King fast-food crown while playing for River Plate when he was named Man of the Match. NEC's Magnus Mattsson looked very gloomy when he was rewarded for his hard work with a check to choose cryptocurrencies. The saddest Man of the Match award ever, at least from the winner's perspective, must have fallen into the hands of Connor Sammon. The striker, once active in the Premier League, posed with a furious look with the pizza that a sponsor had provided him after a match with Scottish club Partick Thistle.
