Rasmus Hojlund has come a long way in a short time.
The man who has just 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.
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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, who has signed a five-year contract at Old Trafford with the option of a further year.
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.”
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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.
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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. Hindsight is even harsher on the initial fee of less than €2million (£1.7m; $2.2m at current exchange rates), even if a 15 per cent sell-on meant they received approximately £2.1million when he joined Atalanta.
When Hojlund’s father was asked whether his boy had received enough opportunities at Denmark’s joint-most successful club, he was unequivocal. “I absolutely do not think so,” Anders told Frihedsbrevet. “This is also Rasmus’ view.”
Hojlund had been tucked in under FC Copenhagen bedding as a child, Anders added. To leave so soon was the biggest disappointment of his young career. “I don’t think they gave him a real chance,” his father said.
The player’s own answers regarding his Copenhagen exit have always been slightly more diplomatic.
“They assessed that it was not me who should be trusted 110 per cent and that is their decision,” he said after making his senior Denmark debut last September, even intimating that some of his former Copenhagen team-mates expressed their regret at the club letting him go.
By then, Hojlund had already moved on again and was an Atalanta player. If he left Copenhagen with a point to prove, he did so in the space of just seven months.
Few people were more excited to see Sturm Graz’s new signing play for the first time than Gerhard Roth.
The renowned author was a lifelong supporter of his hometown club and sat on their board of trustees.
Even after Roth fell seriously ill and was admitted to hospital, he was exchanging messages with club officials and checking in on nuggets of news: especially anything regarding their new signing. “I’m looking forward to Hojlund, the hellhound,” he texted to Sturm’s president Christian Jauk.
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Roth did not get to watch Hojlund play for the club. He passed away, aged 79, in February last year — four days before the Dane made his debut.
A minute’s silence was held in Roth’s memory ahead of Sturm’s first home game after his passing.
If the mood was understandably sombre before kick-off against Rapid Vienna, it was lifted with just six minutes gone when Hojlund scored the opener. That was the third of four goals in his first three appearances, a blistering start to life in Austria’s second city which helped that new nickname stick.
“The hellhound already feels at home”, the headline had read in Kronen Zeitung, the country’s leading newspaper — with credit to Roth included — after Hojlund scored twice on his debut in a 2-2 draw away to WSG Tirol.
Hojlund’s performance that day left quite the impression on one of his opponents. “He will be worth every penny,” said Tirol defender Raffael Behounek. “He’s an absolute machine.”
Compared to the €75million United have paid up front, the amount Sturm spent may seem insignificant. It was anything but.
Hojlund was their most expensive signing for the best part of 20 years — since their Champions League exploits in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is the most successful example of a recruitment strategy focused on signing under-appreciated young talent and turning those players around for a profit.
“I still remember getting the name from my chief scout on WhatsApp, with a little message that this guy is interesting and had something special,” says sporting director Andreas Schicker.
“As a player, we were looking for what we pretty much found in him. A rough diamond, but we saw his speed, the way he attacks spaces behind the line, and he also had a very good physical constitution already despite his young age. He was such a powerful guy. He really lived to score goals.”
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Calls were made to Hojlund’s agency at the time to scope out interest and Zoom meetings were arranged with the player and his family.
“The process took a little while,” Schicker admits. “We tried to convince him of the project being a good step in his career on the sporting side. It wasn’t easy. It took talks with him and his family because it’s not easy as an 18-year-old boy to leave home for the first time. But thankfully we could convince him.”
Once he was in Graz, Hojlund’s drive, work ethic and self-belief shone through.
“He’s not a quiet guy. He already arrived with a very good self-esteem but in a positive way,” says Schicker. “He was not arrogant but he had really high self-confidence. To become that special kind of player, you somehow have to be a little bit special also in terms of personality.”
Hojlund arrived as a replacement for Kelvin Yeboah, whose 20 goals in 25 games for Sturm earned him a move to Italy with Genoa. When he also departed for Serie A the following summer, Hojlund’s replacement was 19-year-old Emanuel Emegha, who recently became one of Strasbourg’s first signings under the ownership of Clearlake Capital, the private equity firm which owns around 60 per cent of Premier League Chelsea.
Sturm hope Szymon Wlodarczyk, a 20-year-old new arrival from Gornik Zabrze in Poland’s top flight, will be their latest success story. A hat-trick on his competitive debut last month bodes well.
Hojlund is currently by far Schicker’s most successful export, though — perhaps even too successful given he was sold within seven months. “That wasn’t the plan, to be honest,” he laughs. “But it was the right step then for him to go to Bergamo and the current situation is proof of that.”
Sturm earned €3m from Hojlund’s move to United having included a sell-on clause in his €17m move to Atalanta. The Serie A club made an offer where it was “just not possible for us as a club to say no” — triple the value of Yeboah’s move to Genoa.
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Still, the man who snapped up the ‘hellhound’ for a meagre €2.2m is not surprised at the sums his talents have commanded from United.
“He has a great future at the highest European level ahead of him,” Schicker adds. “His mindset, his personality and his skills, with all his speed, power, depth, force and quality before the goal, makes him a total package.”
It is both a credit to Sturm Graz’s recruitment and a mark of their place in European football’s food chain that Hojlund’s spell in Austria was so short.
He joined Atalanta last August, arriving as the sixth-most-expensive signing in the Bergamo club’s history and one of the first major tests of a reshuffle behind the scenes.
Giovanni Sartori, the sporting director credited with building Atalanta into a competitive Serie A side in recent seasons through canny recruitment, had left after a falling-out with coach Gian Piero Gasperini. His replacements were Tony D’Amico, who joined from fellow Italian side Verona, and Lee Congerton, a close colleague of Brendan Rodgers during their time at Celtic and then Leicester City.
Congerton’s influence in bringing in the young Dane was later praised by Gasperini. Even though Atalanta’s 65-year-old head coach is not known for being easily impressed, Hojlund blew him away.
“He’s extraordinary,” Gasperini said. “You could see straight away that he was very gifted. It’s not easy to sign these kinds of players.” There was a nod to Sturm’s recruitment strategy, too. “You ask yourself: how come Sturm Graz got him out of Denmark before anybody else?”
Still, Atalanta’s failure to qualify for any form of European competition having finished eighth in 2021-22 meant opportunities were few and far between to begin with. An injury to long-time striker Duvan Zapata led to a first start, away to Monza on September 5, and a first goal that day in a 2-0 win, but Hojlund had to keep biding his time.
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It was only after the World Cup that he began to establish himself, scoring in four consecutive January games, though the moment he truly began to capture imaginations in Bergamo and more widely across Italian football was a miss rather than a goal.
It was what came before the shot, straight into the legs of Lazio goalkeeper Ivan Provedel on February 11, that really caught the eye — after a rapid sprint from the edge of his own penalty area that left Patric Gil in his wake, Hojlund knocked the ball past Elseid Hysaj as though he was not there, then beat Luis Alberto for good measure, covering 80 yards in eight seconds.
He may not have been especially well known for his speed in his early days training at HUI but, over time, it has developed into a devastating weapon.
“Technically, he’s always showing us different things,” Gasperini has said, in apparent disagreement with those sceptics back in Copenhagen. That dedication to improvement cannot be underestimated, with the Atalanta coach adding: “Rasmus gives his all in training all week. There are times when I have to hold him back.”
Atalanta were always aware that when young strikers of Hojlund’s profile emerge, the top European clubs soon show up in pursuit. After his hat-trick against Finland in March’s Euro 2024 qualifiers — in what was his first start for his country — and two more against Kazakhstan four days later set speculation raging, Gasperini felt Hojlund lost his way slightly.
“The rumours turned his head and the compliments dazzled him a bit,” he said. Two goals in his ensuing final nine Atalanta games — after seven in the 14 leading into that March international break — appeared to support Gasperini’s hypothesis. “He’s going to have to learn how to handle them and fast. He’s young and can’t think he has nothing else to learn.”
Even that slight rebuke came with a tribute to Hojlund’s potential.
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“The ladder he’s on is infinite,” Gasperini added.
And it has now led him to Old Trafford.
Including the add-ons United may eventually pay, his three moves to date could eventually combine for more than €100million.
That would normally be a boon to a club such as HUI, whose entire setup can be transformed by the solidarity payments to the clubs that train youngsters who later become superstars. Unfortunately, Hojlund’s departure from his first club came ever so slightly too early. Had he stayed and turned out even once for their under-13s side, a percentage of this fee would be set to land in HUI’s bank account.
“The type of compensation… it is life-changing for the club,” says Mouroux. “There’s no doubt it’s a pity from our side, it’s a shame, but I say that with humbleness and positivity.
“There’s no negativity towards anyone,” he stresses. “For Rasmus, it was the right time (to go).”
Hojlund’s younger brothers, Emil and Oscar, have followed in his footsteps and are now in FC Copenhagen’s academy. “If you ask me, they have just as big potential as Rasmus,” says Mouroux. They both played with HUI until under-14s level. The prospect of a windfall at some point down the line is not lost back in their hometown.
And any disappointment at what might have been financially this summer is far outweighed by the pride felt in HUI’s part in Hojlund’s story so far, as well as the admiration of his perseverance to get to this point.
“It’s really hard-earned,” says Mouroux. “We love to use him as an example in the club because it’s what hopefully will drive others to try to reach for the same stars.”
Hojlund’s parents still live in Horsholm, meaning he is regularly spotted back there. United’s new striker still visits his very first club, too, making use of HUI’s facilities for individual training sessions.
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“He was just here during the summer,” Mouroux says. “He walks the streets and the young kids drive by and give him a wave.”
Hojlund is a role model back in the quiet, peaceful, good schools of Horsholm, the sport-obsessed town where all this started. And each time he returns, there is only more excitement about where his journey is going next.
Additional contributors: James Horncastle and Adam Leventhal
(Top photo: Giuseppe Maffia/NurPhoto via Getty Images; HUI)