Man United’s Rasmus Hojlund: From €2m Sub to a £73m super strike in 18 months

Rasmus Hojlund has come a long way in a short time.

The man who is shortly to become Manchester United’s new centre-forward will not turn 21 until February but is now preparing to play for his fourth club in 20 months. At the start of last year, Hojlund — pronounced ‘hoy-lund’, though with a soft ‘d’ in Denmark — was an 18-year-old perennial substitute struggling to persuade FC Copenhagen to give him more regular playing time.

United could pay a total package of €85million (£73m; $93m), which would be almost €1m for every senior appearance Hojlund has made in his club career to date. Even the initial €75m is a substantial outlay for a young player.

But this is a young player of substantial potential — as his sudden rise to prominence demonstrates.

About half an hour’s drive north of Copenhagen is the town of Horsholm, just inland from the Oresund Strait, which separates Denmark from Sweden.

It is a quiet and peaceful place. The schools are very good. “It’s an area that’s middle class — slightly above middle class,” says Christian Mouroux. “Kids do at least one sport, if not sometimes several.”

Mouroux is the director of sports at Horsholm Usserod Idraetsklub (HUI), the local amateur football club. With approximately 1,400 members involved across a range of age groups, HUI is one of the largest clubs of its kind in the country and is supported by around 150 volunteers. Among these were local parents Anders Hojlund and Kirsten Winther.

They are a sporting family. Anders enjoyed a football career largely in Denmark’s lower leagues, and Kirsten was a keen 100m sprinter. Given that they lived just around the corner from HUI’s facilities, it was inevitable that the club would also soon welcome the eldest of their three sons. “Rasmus started his career in football at HUI back when it wasn’t a career yet,” Mouroux says. “I believe he started around the age of three or four, back when it was all just fun and games.”

Anders was a coach at HUI, working closely with his boy. Kirsten was a team administrator — coordinating travel to games, communicating plans with other parents — but also Hojlund’s biggest motivator.

“It wasn’t only the father. Both of them pushed him forward,” says Mouroux. “Anders always jokes about how when the kids came home it was the mother that was not happy if they hadn’t played well.”

That didn’t happen too often. Manchester United’s new striker was one of the better players among his peers at HUI, with his physique proving a particular asset as he grew and moved through the age groups. Ability-wise though, he did not stand out above the rest.

“There were other players in that group just as good. Rasmus wasn’t particularly fast or had extraordinary technical capabilities,” says Mouroux. “He was just someone that loved to play football.

Rasmus is and has always been a hard worker. Every chance he could, he was to be found on the pitch outside of training hours. Sometimes alone, sometimes with his father and sometimes with his little brothers.”

Emil and Oscar, Hojlund’s younger twin siblings, began training at HUI a few years later. Together, the three became so football-obsessed that Anders — a carpenter by trade — renovated the basement of their house, transforming it into an indoor pitch so they could play when the rain swept in off the Oresund.

Not that getting wet bothered Hojlund too much. He had a gift for swimming, which was spotted while he was still taking lessons. He could be so quick off his mark when diving into the pool at the beginning of races that he would often beat the starting gun.

Football was his first love though and, if it was to be pursued, the swimming had to go. More formal training than his father and an amateur club could provide was also needed.

When Hojlund was 12, HUI’s partnership with Copenhagen-based top-flight side Brondby — one Anders had a say in setting up — meant joining their academy was a natural step. HUI have since struck up a similar arrangement with FC Copenhagen, where Hojlund moved after a few years.

It was at Copenhagen that Hojlund’s potential began to be realised, under the tutelage of under-19s coach Hjalte Norregaard. His breakthrough 2020-21 season at that level produced 16 goals in 23 appearances. It was enough to fast-track him into the first-team squad, but not the starting line-up.

Of his 32 senior games for Copenhagen, just three were starts. From his debut against Aarhus in October 2020 to his final match 14 months later, he was usually — as you might have guessed from the previous sentence — a substitute. In his 791 minutes for Copenhagen, there was not one full 90 played.

It is an indication of what has been interpreted in some quarters as a lack of belief in Hojlund among Copenhagen’s senior staff.

Despite those who had worked much more closely with him through the youth system arguing he should be granted more opportunities, his technical ability was questioned and his physical attributes overlooked when competing for a place at first-team level.

For that reason alone, it was not especially surprising when he left the following January for Austria’s Sturm Graz — although the decision on Copenhagen’s part to let a local academy graduate go has not aged well.