Norway's forward Erling Haaland (9) has seven goals through four World Cup games and leads his team into Saturday's quarter-final match against England.MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP/Getty Images
After Norway’s Erling Haaland won a match in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, he gathered up a few teammates and a cameraman and headed over to western supply store. He made a video there about dressing up as a cowboy, and took a few pictures for Instagram.
Hours later, Dallas affiliates had swarmed the store to interview the owners.
“He was in this chair,” said a muscly guy in creased jeans. A FOX camera zoomed in on the chair.
“These are the steps,” said the ABC reporter in another report – the steps Haaland’s bum had touched in one of the pictures – and another camera zoomed in. The stations of the cross get less coverage.
It’s not unusual for a big media event like the World Cup to make some relative nobody a star. It’s not often that it takes someone who’s already a star and makes them something more than that. In the space of a month, Haaland has done five years worth of brand acceleration. He is now verging on the most famous face in the world.
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Haaland already had the whole hero’s journey story – born to a famous father, prodigious in childhood, hyped in his youth, hugely successful today with one of the world’s biggest clubs.
Now he is rewriting the rules of sports celebrity in real time.
For most of this century, our athletic icons have been remote, imperious figures. Think Roger Federer, Lionel Messi or Tiger Woods.
Though they all became famous in the age of the internet, none of them did much to harness its full power. They left that to marketing specialists. Cristiano Ronaldo has 674-million Instagram followers. The last few things he put on his feed were a few hero shots, a backstage video and an ad for his fitness tracker.
Haaland doesn't seem to be afraid to not have answers to the questions thrown at him in news conferences like this one, earlier this week.Marta Lavandier/The Associated Press
Haaland is so online he’s practically digital. Whenever he’s bored, he’ll do a snapchat, answering all comers.
Sample Q: “Are you a boy or a girl?”
A: “My dad is a boy and my mom is a girl. I am a mix.”
Is it possible that people have grown tired of athletes who loom above us, no matter how benignly? It does get tiring watching LeBron James work out like a Navy SEAL, or listening to Tom Brady scold us about the inflammatory response caused by careless tomato consumption.
The athletic icons we’ve grown used to are in constant lecture mode. Who can blame them? Since early youth, they’re daily bombarded with big, unanswerable questions. It’s no wonder many of them turn into tiresome bores convinced everyone is fascinated by everything they have to say.
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Haaland is a new sort of star. He will often answer questions with bafflement. He is the rarest sort of successful person – one who isn’t terrified of not knowing the answer.
His affect isn’t just relaxed. It’s perilously close to goofy. Perhaps you too have seen the recurring images of his favourite pose – tipped forward in a simian stance, arms hanging loosely at his sides, chin jutting, walking with great purpose to nowhere. Every star is at pains to prove how unseriously they can take themselves – usually in a professionally edited video.
Haaland is more like an unruly, but loveable 9-year-old who’s been let loose in a stadium with an iPhone. This must be why people are responding to him so. It helps when you’ve scored seven goals and personally humiliated Brazil.
Norway play England in the quarter-finals on Saturday. The likeliest outcome is an English win. But if Haaland drives his team to victory in that one, we will have jumped another level. Then we’re starting to talk about him in the space reserved for truly great No. 9s like Ronaldo and Gerd Muller.
Haaland's goal celebrations often show that he doesn't take himself seriously. That may fly because his talent outweighs his easygoing nature, Cathal Kelly writes.JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images
However, sports is only the lever. Haaland’s way of being in the world is the pivot.
Every sporting age is defined by its greats. Men’s tennis was famously unruly in the eighties and nineties, until Federer and Rafael Nadal arrived. They made it genteel. You could follow their lead (most did) or buck the trend (Nick Kyrgios), but you could not redefine the norm. The two guys on top were too dominating to allow you the space.
Messi and Ronaldo turned soccer into fine art. James made basketball a war of physical attrition. Woods turned golf crowds into tailgaters. If there is an undeniable best, he/she sets the tone for the whole sport.
Ronaldo is all but gone, and Messi is well into his third act. A question coming into the World Cup was, ‘Who wants to take the lead?’ Clearly, it’s Haaland. People who don’t know or care about football are talking about him, including the most coveted audience of all – sports-agnostic Gen Zers.
He is currently unavoidable on social media. You can watch his origin story being reconsidered and re-perfected in real time.
The special sauce that allows a person to go from famous to ubiquitous can’t be manufactured or duplicated. Whatever it is, Haaland has a truckload of it.
Does this mean that the new emblematic sports star is a kooky free spirit? Someone unhindered by vanity, or any apparent concerns at all?
I doubt it. Because while Federer’s self-possession could be mimicked by people who didn’t possess it, Haaland’s looseness cannot. High-level sports is antithetical to fun. It looks too much like weakness. And we haven’t even started talking about his natural ability.
If you showed up on a team acting the way Haaland does without the benefit of Haaland’s talent, you’d be an oddball at best, an outcast at worst. There is no mainstreaming that.
What Haaland is doing is proving that, as long as your greed is under control, you don’t have to be any particular way. If you’re brave enough, you can even be yourself.