Manchester Derby mind games! Man U’s Wayne Rooney easily downs Man City’s Erling Haaland

The FIFA World Cup 2026 is proving quite rightly that mind games play a very big role in football.

And those who don’t recognize them easily fall victim thereby.

Kylian Mbappe is one such person.

He became so distracted by them that when he took a penalty against Morocco, he fluffed it very easily. Though he atoned for it by still scoring a world-class goal that won the game, there’s no assurance that he has shaken off the psychological effects on him of the mind game he was baited with that has to do with raci*m.

Another victim is Emerse Fae, the Ivory Coast coach who chose to be susceptible to a mind game by German football legend, Bastian Schweinsteiger, who commented that Fae’s brand of football is wild and unorthodox and he paid the price when his team crashed out of the World Cup in the next game after Schweinsteiger’s purportedly controversial comments.

And now the latest victim is Norway, Manchester City and World Cup star Erling Haaland.

A goal-scoring machine and one of the top scorers at the World Cup with five goals, comments by England and Manchester United legend, Wayne Rooney, that Norway wouldn’t get to the quarter-finals of the World Cup, definitely played a great part in psyching him out that since Norway even got to the quarter-finals, they had overachieved thereby, so when they played England in their quarter-final game, he went so horribly missing that they crashed out.

Oh well, as a professional footballer who should know better, he only has himself to blame for falling to Rooney’s mind games which can also be said to be a Manchester Derby.