Two of the most valuable feet on the planet are burning. It’s a stifling mid-June afternoon and Erling Haaland, the superstar Manchester City striker from Norway who looks like Thor but sometimes celebrates goals by meditating in the lotus pose, is walking on the piping hot sand in Boca Raton, Fla. The heat is so intense that I start skittering to the wet sand in desperate need of relief, but Haaland, who has insisted on removing his sandals, simply saunters to a cooler stretch of seashore. “No pain,” he says, flashing a smile.
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Manchester City has landed in the U.S. for the FIFA Club World Cup and set up base camp at an oceanfront Boca hotel. Haaland’s tired from an extended training session that morning, but he’s still in a jovial mood—Man City won its opening game in Philadelphia the day before. Minutes before our walk on the beach, Haaland had spotted team photographer Tom Flathers in the hotel lobby with three stitches above his right eyebrow from when a ball launched by Man City forward Omar Marmoush struck him during a practice session a few days earlier.
“If that was me,” says Haaland, “he would have 10.”
Or 10,000. The speed of Haaland’s shots, and hulking 6-ft. 4-in. body, have created a goal-scoring machine the likes of which the world has never seen. Haaland holds the record for most goals in an English Premier League season, won the Golden Boot for most goals in the Premier League two years in a row, scored a hat trick (three goals) in his European Champions League debut—on three shots—and is the only player besides Lionel Messi to score five goals in a Champions League knockout game. He once scored nine goals—yes, nine—in an under-20 competition for Norway. On June 26, during Manchester City’s 5-2 victory over Juventus in the Club World Cup—the 370th game of Haaland’s professional and national-team career—he scored his 300th goal. It took Kylian Mbappé 409 games, Messi 418, and Cristiano Ronaldo 554 to reach this majestic milestone. Haaland turned 25 on July 21.
In soccer, tradition holds that when players score a hat trick, they receive a match ball, signed by their teammates, as a keepsake. Haaland’s hat tricks are so routine that last August, after he notched another one for Man City, a teammate scrawled “f-ck off” on the memento.
“He’s a human exclamation point,” says Roger Bennett, founder and CEO of the Men in Blazers Media Network, the soccer-podcast company. “A man who can deliver just cunning, clinical acts of violence repeatedly, consistently, remorselessly with the world watching.” Haaland signed on with Manchester City from Germany’s Borussia Dortmund in 2022, scored three hat tricks early in the season, and helped Man City become just the second English team in history to win the treble (championships in the Premier League, the FA Cup—an annual English domestic club knockout competition— and the Champions League, the annual event crowning Europe’s top club). “I had not seen anyone arrive in the elite league in the world and just utterly bend it to his will,” says Bennett.
Man City won Premier League titles in Haaland’s first two seasons, in 2023 and 2024, which also gave the Sky Blues a record four consecutive season championships. But inconsistency and injuries—to Haaland and others—caused the team to slip to third place in 2025 and suffer its earliest Champions League exit in a dozen years. So starting on Aug. 16, when Man City opens its 2025–2026 campaign against Wolverhampton Wanderers, Haaland and his mates will seek to reclaim Premier League supremacy while also competing for another Champions League title. What’s more, this fall Haaland will lead Norway into the latter stages of World Cup qualifying. He expects to return to North America next summer for his country’s first World Cup appearance in nearly three decades.
So Haaland has a momentous 12 months ahead of him. With more Man City success, and a shine on the World Cup stage, he will succeed Messi, 38, and Ronaldo, 40, as the face of the world’s most popular sport. His outings already double as pilgrimages. At the game in Philly, Americans from New Hampshire, Colorado, Michigan, and elsewhere turned out in Haaland jerseys. A 9-year-old boy from New Jersey told me he talks about Haaland so much that his 4-month-old brother has started saying, “Errrrrrr.” Kenny Coleman, 10, traveled with his parents from Sydney to see his favorite player: Coleman wraps the back of his flowing blond hair in a bun, just like Haaland, and at the Man City party at an Irish bar the night before the game, the fans started shouting “Baby Erling!” at him.
Walking along the water, all feet safely clear of scorching grains, I show Haaland a cell-phone snapshot of Baby Erling. Haaland’s aware of the absurdity. Some soccer-loving kid from a farming community in Norway—not Argentina or England or Spain or Brazil or some other more populous football power—is now inspiring the world over. “Never in a million years would I think a guy from Australia would walk in the USA and try to look like me,” Haaland says. “No.”
In Bryne, Haaland’s agricultural hometown of some 13,000 in southwest Norway, visitors can go on the “Haaland safari.” For 750 kroner, or about 75 bucks, a guide will show you the giant mural of Haaland, in a Dortmund shirt, on the side of an old dairy, and another painting of Haaland in a Man City kit, in the lotus pose. You can visit the timeworn stadium of his first club team, Bryne FK, where for years fans could pull up in tractors to watch the action. Bryne FK awards the stars of its matches prizes like cartons of eggs, a half-ton of carrots, and cauliflower. Cruise ships docking in Stavanger, the coastal city about a 30-minute train ride to the north, send tourists down to Bryne. The locals are betting on a boost to the local economy. “I hope in the future,” says Frode Hagerup, a Bryne FK board member, “Erling takes us from two hotels to three hotels.”
If anyone reared in Bryne was going to put the town on the map, it was going to be Haaland. His father Alfie played for Manchester City and two other Premier League clubs: Erling was actually born in England, before Alfie moved back to Bryne with his family in 2004, following his retirement from professional soccer. Erling’s mother Gry Marita Braut was a Norwegian youth national heptathlon champion. His great-uncle, pig and potato farmer Gabriel Hoyland, is the greatest player in Bryne FK history. “I remember when I scored one goal, it was such a good feeling in me that I was like, ‘I want to become an expert on this,’” says Haaland. “Get this feeling again and again.”
Though Haaland’s youth coach Alf Ingve Bernsten gave players the weekends off, Haaland and his buddies would spend hours on Saturdays and Sundays playing on their own at Bryne’s indoor facility. “It was very important that they learn by themselves,” says Bernsten. “If I was a coach that stood on the side and yelled at him, ‘Now you have to go there, left, right,’ he will only react after my shouting. The whole process will collapse.”
At just 15, Haaland suited up for Bryne FK in the Norwegian pro league. But he hadn’t grown into his current frame. In 16 games, he failed to score against older, stronger players. “I just felt that everyone was watching me, and if I didn’t play good, it was the end of the world,” says Haaland. Playing in Norway as a teen was more stressful than performing before millions at Man City. “It shouldn’t be like that,” he says. “But in the end, everything is in your head.”
Despite Haaland’s failure to produce for Bryne, a higher-division Norwegian club, Molde FK, saw his potential. Alfie also thought moving away from home, at 16, would help his son mature. “That was part of the education,” says Alfie. Haaland recalls thinking, “‘F-ck, I’m alone now. I actually have to go buy groceries. I have to clean my clothes,’ which I had never done before. So I remember calling my sister asking, ‘OK, how do I do this?’”
Haaland says his mother, a teacher, was upset that he dropped out of school to pursue soccer. “She was so mad,” he says. “I’ve never been that scared. That’s proper fear.” (When asked if she is still upset, Haaland replies, “I think she’s all right now.”)
He got into meditation, a practice he continues to this day, while in Molde, and started celebrating goals with the lotus pose. But in his first 26 appearances for Molde, Haaland scored just four times. And in the week leading up to a July 2018 game against first-place Brann, Haaland performed terribly in practice. “I was soooo bad,” he says. Molde’s manager, Norwegian legend Ole Gunnar Solskjaer—whose goal off a David Beckham corner kick clinched the treble for Manchester United in 1999—had used Haaland as a substitute the previous three fixtures. So Haaland was surprised when he was picked to start. “I’m like, ‘F-ck, I don’t know what I’ve done in training this week, because I didn’t do anything good. But OK, let’s have it.’” Haaland, still just 17, scored four goals in the first 21 minutes of the game. “It’s a life-changing moment,” he says. “From there, it was keep going and attacking whatever it is to attack.”
Haaland wasn’t long for Norway. After two seasons in Molde, he moved to Austria to play for Red Bull Salzburg. It took some time for him to get acclimated: Not only was it his first time living abroad, he appeared in just two games for Salzburg in the first half of 2019. “You miss speaking Norwegian, you miss your family, you miss your friends,” says Haaland. “The trainer would just scream to me in German, and I was like, ‘I don’t understand you.’ I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’”
That offseason, however, Haaland had his nine-goal outburst against Honduras and welcomed the arrival of a new manager—American Jesse Marsch, currently the head coach of Canada, who has a reputation as an upbeat, player-friendly personality. Haaland went on an absolute tear, scoring 11 goals in seven games—including a pair of hat tricks—before making his Champions League debut in September 2019 against Genk, the Belgian side. The night before that game, he drove around Salzburg, listening to the Champions League anthem to hype himself up.
He scored in the first two minutes and notched three first-half goals in a 6-2 rout. “That’s when things really kind of started to explode in my life,” says Haaland.
By that point, Solskjaer had taken over Manchester United, and the club showed interest. “When a coach you had before wants you, of course you listen,” says Haaland. But in December 2019, Haaland signed on with Dortmund, a club known for cultivating young talent. He again took a step up in competition, and in Germany he continued to produce at a prolific pace, scoring 86 goals in 89 games. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he let his hair grow out and started wrapping it in his now signature bun. Why? “Because my father didn’t want me to do it,” he says. “But if you do it, you have to perform. You cannot be with the bun and don’t perform.”
Haaland’s Dortmund contract contained a release clause that kicked in after the 2022 season. Real Madrid and others came calling. He lost sleep over his decision. Haaland used to wear a Man City kit to youth practices in Norway. He donned a Man City shirt that said dad as a toddler. But even more than sentiment, Man City’s need for a pure striker up front appealed to Haaland, who signed a five-year deal with the team. “I felt that this was the last missing piece in the puzzle,” says Haaland. “Even though they did so well, I still felt I was so wanted here. And this also gave me kind of a boost and a confidence to come in and just smash everything.”
He’s done just that. In March, Haaland placed a penalty shot in the right side of the net against Brighton, making him the first player in Premier League history to reach 100 goal contributions (84 goals and 16 assists) in under 100 games. “Er-ling!” the Etihad Stadium announcer cried out. “Haa-land!” the crowd of almost 53,000 responded. “It’s an absolute dream to be playing alongside him,” says Man City winger Savinho, from Brazil.
Initially, there were concerns. “It was always a culture where no one was bigger than the club,” says Man City defender Nathan Ake, of the Netherlands, who joined in 2020. “It is a proper team. And when you make statement signings like that, maybe people think, ‘Is the dynamic going to change?’”
Strikers, by nature, must behave selfishly. “The ball has to be on your mind,” says Manchester City CEO Ferran Soriano, who was vice chairman and CEO of Barcelona during Messi’s days in La Liga. Soriano compares Haaland with Ronaldo. “You can see a teammate scoring a goal, and him not celebrating,” Soriano says of Ronaldo. “Because he thinks, ‘I should have scored.’ And it’s not that he’s a bad person. But that’s the mentality. Erling is different. Erling scores a lot of goals, but he also enjoys when other teammates do it. That is impressive.”
To the delight of Man City players, Haaland can hold his own in trash-talking sessions. “We have an interesting kind of banter at the training ground, where we just hammer each other,” says Ake. “He fit in with that straightaway.”
For Ake and others, Haaland’s oddball biohacking habits serve as fodder. He cherishes ice baths. He wears glasses that filter out blue light, which can disrupt sleep, before bed. He sometimes eats cow heart. “For me, to eat as natural and as clean as possible is an important thing,” Haaland says. He gets it from a farm near his home in England. Haaland has a cow-heart guy.
Man City’s marketing arm at first fretted about Haaland’s reputation for giving churlish interviews. While with Dortmund, he often offered uninterested one- or two-word answers to reporters’ questions. A YouTube compilation of Haaland media interactions, “Erling Haaland wasn’t made for interviews”—#cringe is in the subtitle—has 2 million views. Critics like Piers Morgan called him arrogant. “I’d say he isn’t programmed for basic manners,” Morgan wrote on Twitter in 2020.
Haaland’s more engaging with the press these days. “Yes, I’m more older and mature, that’s for sure,” says Haaland, who welcomed his first child in December. But he also blames the media for some of his less-than-effusive responses. “You would ask, ‘How was the weather today?’ I would answer, ‘It’s good,’” he says. “You get what you ask for. That was my whole point of all of this. You ask stupid questions, you will get a stupid answer back.”
At the risk of sounding stupid, I ask Haaland if he’s the best player in the world right now. “No,” he says. “I’m one of them.” Messi and Ronaldo have reigned atop global soccer for nearly two decades. Haaland can’t imagine himself—or his modern-day colleagues—reaching their rarefied air. “Their records, no one is ever going to take them,” he says. “Not even me.”