Erling Haaland has scored three hat-tricks in three consecutive home games for Manchester City. AFP Photo

Paul Kennedy

I’m calling for an investigation. An in-depth probe where no stone is left unturned.

The Premier League, UK government, FIFA, football’s world governing body, and the detectives from Law and Order SVU, need to put their heads together quickly because I believe there is a massive injustice in the world of football right now.

Manchester City have, since the beginning of the season, been fielding an illegal player because I’ve no doubt whatsoever that their Norwegian striker Erling Haaland is in fact not human.

He must have been created in a laboratory, sculpted from granite with a state-of-the-art advanced microchip for a brain.

He is clearly being controlled by a team of scientists sitting in front of a bank of computers who are manipulating his every move on the pitch.

Let’s face facts here, he is a well-oiled, finely-tuned machine. If the Terminator played footballer it would be Erling Haaland.

In the Champions League on Wednesday, he scored another two goals, and only played for half the game.

This brace added to his three back-to-back Premier League hat-tricks in City’s last three home matches. He is racing away with the golden boot prize having already scored 14 league goals in just eight games.

His tally to date is seven goals more than Harry Kane has managed, and the Spurs striker is the second leading goal scorer in the league.

I read a stat yesterday that’s both shocking and terrifying at the same time. Out of all the goals Manchester City have ever scored, in all competitions since the club was formed in 1880, Haarland has one per cent of them. And he has only been playing for City for two months.

It’s bonkers. He is just so, so good.

He is the fastest player to score three hat tricks in a season by some distance, smashing Michael Owen’s record of doing so in 48 games.

He is well on his way to breaking Liverpool forward Mohammed Salah’s record of 32 goals in a 38-game Premier League season, and at his current rate of scoring is also on course to beat Dixie Dean’s 95-year-old record of 60 top-flight goals in England over 39 games.

Simply put, he is invincible. I don’t see how any defender, anywhere in the world, will ever be able to contain him.

It’s almost laughable to think at the beginning of the season pundits were trying to predict whether it would be Haaland or Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez who would have the most impact in the Premier League.

Well that’s an argument that can clearly be put to bed.

So whether he is man or machine is still to be determined. But one thing’s for sure, City have a super human striker on their books who right now is making mincemeat out of the Premier League. VNS