Erling Haaland's contract with Manchester City is a rare deal in sport

A 24-year-old at the peak of his powers, who regularly makes people wonder just how he does what he does, signs a contract so long and definitive that it feels like a lifetime deal.

He is a phenomenon, who neither looks nor plays quite like anyone else in the sport.

Because this is 2025, we are talking about Erling Haaland and Manchester City. If we could rewind to June 2020, we could have been talking about Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Haaland and Manchester City have agreed to a deal that will keep the soccer star playing at Etihad Stadium through the 2033-34 season. Terms of the contract are unclear, but people familiar with the deal say it is among the most lucrative sports contracts ever.

The contract has a more American slant than what you might traditionally expect from the English Premier League and its four-time reigning champions, Manchester City.

Megadeals are plentiful in North America. But Mahomes' 10-year, $450 million extension five years ago, similar to Haaland's in its duration and career timing, sent eyebrows skyward. In a place where Juan Soto just recently took baseball's market peak to 15 years and $765 million, Mahomes' contract was still remarkable for its time.

It takes a lot for an elite athlete to consider committing so comprehensively to one place and even more faith, perhaps, for a team to lock in both an astronomical sum of money and a hefty chunk of its future.

This kind of thing doesn't get offered to everybody. Only a celebrated handful of athletes can perform feats that prompt their employer to gaze into the future and see only glory, be it Mahomes' creative ingenuity and ability to produce offense from nothing, or Haaland's terrifying combination of strength, speed, body control and finishing ability.

There are personal factors at play, too. Haaland clearly has a special affinity for Manchester that traces to the time his father, Alf Inge Haaland, spent there as a player. Mahomes was raised in Texas but settled effortlessly in Kansas City and has gone so far as to invest in sports franchises in the area.

Contracts of such length often, but not always, require a certain strength of relationship, some sort of genuine closeness, amid a sports world awash with money.

A significant factor in this deal was Haaland's rapport with manager Pep Guardiola and City Chair Khaldoon Al Mubarak. The same might be said for Mahomes' bond with coach Andy Reid and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt.

Mahomes had won just one Super Bowl when he inked his deal, and he has added two more since. In his 31 months in Manchester, Haaland has already clinched two Premier League titles and a Champions League winners' medal.

The most interesting part of this deal may be whether it sparks a series of copycat moves in the Premier League. Players such as Cole Palmer at Chelsea have already committed to nine years, but Haaland is a star among stars and now may be a precursor for more top players in the earlier half of their 20s seeking contracts that stretch for most of their careers.

Mimicry in deal-making is certainly how it works in American sports, and it did with Mahomes, especially on the financial side. Heading into the 2024 season, Mahomes had gone from being far and away the highest-paid player in the league to tied as the 12th-highest-paid quarterback, per annual salary, in the space of a few years.

Manchester City supporters are sitting on a comfortable and fairly exclusive island right now, a rare fan base that can presume with some confidence that their chief goal scorer will be sticking around into the 2030s. They may have some more company soon.

And if decade-long deals become commonplace, don't be surprised if they also start getting more creative.

Shohei Ohtani, MLB's brightest star, gets only $2 million of his $70 million annual salary from the Los Angeles Dodgers upfront, with the rest over many years stretching beyond the end of his career. Magic Johnson was once offered a 25-year, $25 million deal by former Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss, though that was later revealed to be a publicity stunt.

Most infamous of the bunch, perhaps, is Bobby Bonilla, now 61, who will collect a $1.19 million annual paycheck from the New York Mets for 10 more years because the team thought it better to spread out the amount owed to him at 8% interest.

Haaland's deal -- remarkably long, extravagantly expensive, but probably worth every penny -- seems to offer a far safer investment than that.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.