You have to watch Erling Haaland and Jadon Sancho before they break up

Erling Haaland made a pair of brief cameos off the bench in his first two matches at Borussia Dortmund. Following his €20 million arrival from Red Bull Salzburg, BVB clearly wanted to take some pressure off the 19-year-old and bring him along slowly. But there was one problem with that idea: He is way too good.

Haaland scored five goals in just 59 minutes of play over those two appearances, promptly leading Dortmund to sell incumbent striker Paco Alcácer. And with the young Norwegian installed as the starter, Dortmund dominated Union Berlin in a 5-0 victory over the weekend, in which Haaland scored twice.

A run of seven goals in three appearances would be good enough to steal the spotlight from any teammate, but it’s incredible how quickly Haaland’s hype train ripped past Jadon Sancho’s. The English winger, also just 19, has turned in a ridiculous 12 goals and 13 assists from 18 matches this season. Sancho is by far the most productive teenager in any of Europe’s top five leagues. The pair of them are, beyond any reasonable argument, the two top performing teenagers in soccer at present.

Watching Haaland and Sancho play and learn together is a rare treat, one that we might not witness for another decade. There’s no guarantee we’ll ever see two teenagers who have been touted as future Ballon d’Or contenders play together again, and certainly not on a team as big as Dortmund, which trusts those players to lead the club to trophies.

We have to catch them together while we can; Sancho is going to be the subject of nine-figure bids this summer, one of which will inevitably be accepted by Dortmund.

Besides the spectacular goals and assists, the best part about watching Haaland and Sancho together is seeing them learn from their mistakes in real time. Both players are exceptional in their roles, but with one significant missing piece in each of their games. For Haaland, it’s that he hasn’t yet learned how to use his physical talents, and often looks clumsy. Despite his young age, he appears to have already mastered the mental game. Sancho is the opposite; his technique and body control are outstanding, but he makes decisions a beat too slow. They’re both nearly perfect, but differently flawed.

The 6’4 Haaland looks like a baby giraffe at times. He’s bigger, stronger and faster than almost every defender he goes up against, but sometimes he doesn’t quite know how to use his feet. He makes the right decisions about when to play with his back to goal and when to make runs behind the defense, but he also blows touches that should be easy for a top class striker. His technical ability is still catching up to his brain.

The amount of information that Haaland processes in a split second, and the decisions he makes as a result are seriously impressive. He has an incredible understanding of how he should move to lose defenders and create space to make it easier for teammates to find him with a pass.

On his first goal against Union Berlin, Haaland quickly figures out which area in the six-yard box isn’t well-covered, and where his teammate’s cross is likely to bounce. He scores a tap-in because he swiftly makes a correct decision and executes a tricky movement. If he had reacted just a half-second later, he would have failed to get on the end of the cross, and we would have said he was unlucky. No one would have called it a striker’s error.

For most of the match, Sancho and Haaland didn’t have much of a connection. For as incredible as Sancho is at beating defenders one-on-one, as well as placing perfect shots and passes, he doesn’t always make prompt decisions. This led to, on multiple occasions, Sancho either running into Haaland or failing to make an early pass when Haaland was about to beat a defender.

Sancho isn’t a dumb player by any stretch. He usually arrives at correct decisions. He just sees them a bit late, which often results in turnovers like it did several times against Union Berlin.

But as the game went on, Sancho and Haaland developed an understanding. The passes got a little crisper, the spacing got a little better and they stopped running into each other. In the 66th minute, Sancho drew the attention of multiple defenders, made the right pass into space for Haaland early, and the big striker drew a penalty.

This partnership will, unfortunately, only have about four months to develop. Sancho’s sale this summer to one of the richest clubs in the world appears inevitable. But that might be enough time for us to get to see something special. After all, the pair needed just 66 minutes on Saturday to go from complete disconnection to perfect combination.

Both players are going to improve rapidly in the coming months at the things they need to work on individually, but also at playing with each other. Their budding relationship is the most exciting thing happening anywhere in soccer, and you should make a point to see it before it disappears.