ERLING Haaland has been told the door is still open for him to move to non-league football – with his dad.
Seventh-tier side Ashton United hit the headlines when it made a loan offer to the Manchester City star for the duration of the World Cup.
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And co-chairman Jonathan Sayer has revealed it is still on the table after the Northern Premier League outfit never heard from the Blues.
If Alf Inge wants to head six miles east of the Etihad Stadium join him at Hurst Cross, at the age of 50, he can come too.
“The door is always open to Erling,” said Sayer. “To be honest, the door is open to his dad as well!
“I think he could do a job for us.
“The offer was genuine but we never heard anything from City, so it wasn’t a no.
“And at the game which would’ve been his debut, quite a few fans turned up wearing Erling Haaland masks.
“I’d like to think he was one but wearing a mask of himself!
“The impact has been positive. Our social media fallout almost doubled. So lots of new people found Ashton United.
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“We sold extra shirts, including some to places that aren’t so near here. There might have been one or two sent to Norway, we definitely sent a lot to America and a few to France.
“But the interest it generated was huge, we even had TV in Australia wanting to speak to us.”
Sayer has penned a book, Nowhere To Run, based on his first year as a non-league co-chairman alongside his dad David Burke.
He tells about listening to Ashton United’s match against Matlock while on honeymoon and admits to heading to the south coast for a Northern Premier League match against Basford after putting the wrong club in his sat nav!
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His day job is as an international-renowned playwright, The Play That Goes Wrong being his most familiar work.
Magicians Penn and Teller have a billboard at Hurst Cross while Game of Thrones star John Bradley attended the launch event at the club.
But some things that have occurred were just too strange to include, even though some passages are exaggerated real life occurrences.
Sayer, who hopes to turn the title of which he will donate 20 per cent of all sales to the club into a TV sitcom, added: “I suppose there have been.
“Some of the bits that have been exaggerated, friends haven’t picked up on. Some of the stuff that’s totally true, they’re like, ‘Nah, that didn’t happen. That can’t have happened.’
“But it did.
“A lot of the book keeps saying, ‘I was waiting for this big moment to arrive when it would feel like, ‘We’ve done it, we’ve done success, we’ve made it.’
“But I’ve learned it’s incrementally moving forward. Four years in, I can be like, ‘We’ve done some good stuff.’ When you’re in it, you just feel like it’s all a nightmare!”
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