Erling Haaland came to England with a reputation for goals and grumpiness. This is how he has changed
Erling Haaland is the hottest ticket in town. Whether it is because he sits just behind Lionel Messi in the World Cup goalscoring charts with seven, or for his human side when joking around with the child mascots in the tunnel before matches at the tournament, the Norway striker is emerging as the biggest draw of the summer.
He has been invited to be a guest on the Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, a sure sign of his popularity in the United States, but the logistics of trying to help his country win the World Cup will probably rule that out.
Could Norway actually win it? When Haaland appeared on the cover of Time magazine last year, he said his country had a 0.5 per cent chance, and that felt about right. They are far from favourites now, but as quarter-finalists, you cannot fully rule them out, either.
The fact that Haaland was on that Time cover, one of a handful of footballers to ever achieve that crossover, shows his rising stock. People beyond football have been captivated by one of world sport’s most engaging characters.
It has not always been like this, though — far from it.
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When Haaland signed for Manchester City in July 2022, he carried a reputation for being a serious guy with not a lot to say. He was even known for being rude, thanks largely to a section of an interview when he gave a string of one-word answers.
At the end of that year, he watched Messi and Kylian Mbappe slug it out for the World Cup title in Qatar from beneath the glass ceiling that Norway’s national team never looked likely to smash through. They had not been at a World Cup since the 1998 edition in France, four years after Haaland’s dad, Alf-Inge, played in their midfield at the U.S.-hosted 1994 tournament.
Haaland scored 16 goals to help his side qualify for these finals, and that run has not stopped in North America — he has scored in each of his past 14 competitive games for Norway, netting 27 times in those matches. His two goals against Brazil on Sunday, sealing an unexpected passage into the quarter-finals, have catapulted him to another level of fame.
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He was already regarded as a superstar when he signed for City from Borussia Dortmund — Real Madrid also wanted him then, and probably always will — and he was already highly marketable. But in hindsight, he felt off-limits.
He has always scored goals, always looked like your stereotypical Viking, and, since a growth spurt at age 15, always been tall, broad and fast. But there was not the depth to his image that there is now.
On the City beat, he generally did one big media appearance per season. He first spoke to journalists at the very end of his first year, before the Champions League final that he helped City reach. He was part of the club’s media day, and it was treated as if Elvis Presley were coming along to give seven minutes of his time.
The first couple of times he spoke at press conferences before Champions League games, it was considered so rare and interesting that The Athletic published special articles on the experience of hearing the guy talk.
To some extent, the change in Haaland is simply down to growing up. He was 19 and 20 when he was thrust in front of microphones at Dortmund and asked to offer his thoughts, but if he had any, he did not really want to share them. Now, he is a 25-year-old man who has won everything worth winning at club level, including three out of a possible four Premier League Golden Boot awards, and in January 2025, signed a nine-and-a-half-year contract with City.
He has captained them on occasion, and was trusted by the club’s recently-departed manager Pep Guardiola. With Norway, he is among friends, as many of the team came through the nation’s youth ranks together. In December, he became a father, adding a different perspective on life.
But for a while now, Haaland and the people around him have wanted to change the perception that he is some robot who scores goals and has little personality.
Those close to him knew he was a ‘goofball’, to use the American parlance, and City fans were already familiar with him from the club’s own in-house content, but that did not travel much further.
There can be no greater proof of those goofy credentials than the rap video he and two of his Norway youth team-mates put on YouTube in 2016 — they called themselves the Flow Kingz and the recording shows them messing around at a kids’ playground. He is not hugely different now, it was just a question of him showing it.
Haaland, according to sources close to him who wished to remain anonymous to protect relationships, recognised that, and wanted to offer fans more than can be achieved through routine pre- or post-match football interviews.
When he was growing up and watching Premier League football as a young boy, he would have loved the opportunity to see inside a player’s house, to learn about their routine, to see what they are really like, and that is what he wants to offer people through his own YouTube channel.
That launched in October last year with a behind-the-scenes look at his home life, showing him buying steaks and cooking them on a barbecue, and going through his recovery process with massages and ice baths. Since then, he has surprised fans by turning up at their houses in Halloween fancy-dress and shared videos of his golf game. He developed a keen interest in that sport over the past 18 months, often duffing the first tee shot before smashing the second one 300 yards.
The channel was already big enough to attract a partnership with an upcoming blockbuster film, The Odyssey, before the World Cup started. Haaland’s people wanted to source a sponsor to fund the process of following Haaland around the United States on Norway duty, and the agreement was made by his agent, Rafaela Pimenta.
The Odyssey, by acclaimed director Christopher Nolan, sponsored the first two episodes of his World Cup diaries and would have enjoyed massive exposure — there have been more than 10 million views across three editions. This summer, total views on his channel passed 100m.
Haaland and his team’s desire to give people the full experience explains their approach to shooting pre-World Cup content with English comedian James Corden for U.S. TV network Fox. The striker gave two hours of his time to get fully involved, which included playing table tennis and shuffleboard and decorating a cake.
That said, the closest you can get to the real Haaland is to follow him on Snapchat, where he, basically, ‘s***posts’ (intentionally, and perhaps ironically, sharing low-quality content) and appears to have less of a filter than he does elsewhere.
As the Time interview that accompanied his cover-shot suggests, his stock was already high Stateside. Last summer, at the Club World Cup, fans in Philadelphia rushed to the front of the stands to watch him warming up for City.
Over the past few days, his camp has been told that social-media algorithms are being geared towards Haaland content, because that is where the demand is among users. They have been told his boom in popularity has been likened to when Travis Kelce began dating Taylor Swift and then his Kansas City Chiefs team won that season’s Super Bowl.
Pimenta has already said she believes Haaland could one day be worth £1billion ($1.3bn) and, having cracked America, they have started to move into the Chinese market. Just before the World Cup, he appeared in a commercial for herbal drink brand Walovi, and set up accounts on the Douyin and Weibo social media platforms.
His marketability is nothing new — he became the ‘Barbarian King’ in popular mobile game Clash of Clans in 2024 — but he could be entering a new chapter of his career, given how well his summer has gone to date.
In many ways, he is still the same as he always was. He believes in the marginal gains he was taught by his coaches while playing for his hometown club in Norway — he wears spectacles that filter the light, he only looks at his phone at certain times of day, he buys tomahawk steaks from a local farm and drinks raw milk.
Funnily enough, he was probably more approachable in his early days in Manchester.
Then, he was photographed in a Sainsbury’s supermarket, buying stuff to kit out his new city-centre flat, and there was a video of him walking to one of his favourite Italian restaurants in neighbouring Salford. Now, he is too big — physically and figuratively — to go into town, and he has moved out to the quieter suburbs of neighbouring Cheshire, like many top footballers based in the north-west of England, to set up a home for his young family.
His playing style, too, is something everybody in Manchester is familiar with, but is perhaps captivating to new audiences.
It was subtly nodded to in Nike’s big commercial for the tournament, in which Haaland stars despite it featuring an endless list of appearances and cameos, including Mbappe, Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Travis Scott and Kim Kardashian.
Haaland is still the main figure and he sits, unmoved, next to a body double — played by Channing Tatum — for the most part, as the chaos develops elsewhere. It is only in the final scene, when all of the main football stars of the advert, and a small child, chase down the ball and try to score, that he suddenly springs into life. Even Vinicius Junior and Ronaldo himself step aside, providing shocked expressions to add drama, as Haaland, in slow motion, appears from nowhere to tower above the kid and fire a volley into the net.
There is a video, shot from the stands of MetLife Stadium during the game on Sunday, that is not much different: he is strolling around the pitch as usual, head down, showing no inclination to touch the ball, until it is about to be played into the box. Then, he takes a few steps to build up his speed, jumps and powers above Brazil centre-back Gabriel to crash in one of the best headers of his career.
“People maybe talk that I don’t touch the ball enough and this and that, but I don’t care about this. I know what I have to do and it is exactly what I will keep doing,” he said in September 2022, in the spiky way he had back then. “My dream is to touch the ball five times and score five goals. That’s my biggest dream.”
There is still a searing honesty about Haaland sometimes, as he highlighted during the group stage, when he said he did not care about Norway’s game with France, for which he was rested, because the French would probably win the match, and then the whole tournament.
Erling Haaland carries his team-mates aloft after the win against Brazil (Al Bello/Getty Images)
He is doing his best to change that prediction. The fact he is shining alongside Messi and Mbappe, who are playing for two of the world’s strongest teams, should not be taken for granted, even if he seems to be taking it all in his stride. When he slammed home his second against Brazil, he strutted around with two team-mates on his back.
It is not that Haaland is carrying his country — they are a good team in their own right, which is why they’ll play England on Saturday in Miami with a place in the semi-finals at stake — but he is certainly the star man, and the figurehead. That is nothing new, but neither he nor Norway have ever experienced anything like this.
