MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Patti Smith had been using Instagram to offer glimpses of her preparations for an upcoming tour across Europe and the United States, but the singer-songwriter paused the tour updates for a simple note of appreciation. Set to the Beatles’ “Revolution 9,” the experimental sound collage John Lennon once linked to the sounds of revolution, Smith wrote, “This is saying thank you for all the joy.” She did not spell out what, exactly, had inspired the post. The image did that for her.
There was Erling Haaland, photographed from behind in Norway’s bold red shirt, his blond hair tied half up and half down, nearly as recognizable as the name and number stretched across his back.
This summer’s World Cup has doubled as a showcase for the United States’ distinctive, often playful relationship with a sport it still tends to treat more casually than the rest of the world. “Take Me Home, Country Roads” found new life during the U.S. men’s national team’s run, and the Boston Globe even took out a full-page ad thanking Scotland’s Tartan Army. Yet few stories have traveled quite like Haaland’s. The Norway striker, already a Premier League and UEFA Champions League winner before this tournament, finished his first World Cup with seven goals as Norway reached the quarterfinals. Soccer fans hardly needed an introduction to the 25-year-old, and viewers can continue watching him chase Champions League success on Paramount+ throughout the season. But over the past few weeks, Haaland has crossed into a different tier of fame, becoming a star of the tournament in a way that has felt organic, even as marketing teams work tirelessly to manufacture similar moments for others.
For much of the tournament, the internet simply seemed delighted by him. Haaland leaves the World Cup as its most viral figure, riding a rare combination of devastating goal-scoring, unusual charisma and an instinctive fit for social media. Fans even flooded Patti Smith’s Instagram comments with affectionate reassurance, as if to explain to any newcomers that there would be much more to see from a player whose brilliance had already been established long before Norway kicked a ball. There was a sweetness to the reaction, the same earnest optimism that colored Haaland’s own reflections on finally playing in the competition he had dreamed about.
“It was completely crazy,” he said Saturday after Norway’s 2-1 loss to England. “It was like a surreal thing and I think it changes me as a person, too. I think I’ve become a bit more known, I would say, and such. And yes, it’s a bit difficult to think about right now when you think about the match and such but it’s pretty crazy to be a part of something completely special. Everyone has told me — people who have played — that you have to experience it and all that. That has been my goal and then you realize now that it’s the biggest thing. It’s completely crazy.”
The exact starting point of Haaland’s viral surge is difficult to identify, but the scale of it is no longer in doubt. He began the World Cup with 40 million Instagram followers and has climbed to 65 million, drawing in viewers who may not have fully understood just how unmatched his scoring instincts can be. After an uneven season by his own standards at Manchester City, he looked fully restored with Norway, again giving the impression of a player engineered to turn chances into goals. Still, the goals are only part of what has made him so magnetic.
“He has physical presence,” Arielle Castillo, a social media consultant who managed Manchester City’s U.S. digital operation for several years, told CBS Sports. “The thing that I’ve been saying the whole time is that he has very distinct star quality and aura and it’s not just his physical size but when he comes in a room, you really feel it, energetically, shift, and I think that is so powerful that it even comes across on TV.”
Haaland’s style also fits neatly with the kind of larger-than-life athletic persona that often resonates with casual American sports fans. He has something for almost every audience. Castillo described his professional traits as “cartoonish” in a way that appeals to children, while adults can appreciate his deadpan humor and oddball charm. Across group chats filled with both soccer obsessives and casual viewers, images of Haaland in a cowboy hat after Norway’s round-of-32 win over Ivory Coast spread quickly. So, too, did renewed attention around his years-old joke about “raw-dogging” a seven-hour flight during Manchester City’s 2024 preseason tour of the United States.
The virality is new enough, but Castillo said she noticed the tide turning in Haaland’s favor two years ago, when fans were flocking to their preseason stops in New York, Chapel Hill, N.C. and Orlando, Fla.
“When he joined and people who were fans of the club and fans of the Premier League knew he was a physical freak and a special specimen was coming and then 2024, that’s when I started to see little kids screaming, girls screaming,” she said. “Then it was more for Jack Grealish, but that’s when I started to feel something has really, really, really shifted here. The energy of people stalking outside of the hotel, coming to the training sessions, and so I thought at that point, the club won the Champions League, the treble, all that stuff. That’s the pinnacle of it, and then I already thought he was really big, and so it’s been really insane, the last three weeks.”
His playing abilities put him in the tier of Argentina’s Lionel Messi and France’s Kylian Mbappe, Haaland currently just one goal behind the World Cup’s joint top goalscorers as the semifinals await for those two. There’s a simplicity to his backstory, though, one that makes it easy for newcomers to embrace him – like Messi, his personal life is rarely ever tabloid fodder in any meaningful sense. He is, almost boringly, the son of a former soccer player, former Leeds United player Alf-Inge Haaland, who also happens to be really good at the same sport. In an age of reclusive, distant stars, though, Haaland openly has a personality – and one that people seem to gravitate towards quickly.
“When he won the Champions League, he was loving life because I think that emotionally, he still has a lot of ties to his dad’s history in England,” Castillo noted. “He was singing at our staff parties making fun of [Manchester] United. He’s happy to play a little bit of the troll role as well … A lot of [players] are very reserved because every single thing they do gets picked apart, and I feel like he doesn’t have that sense because I feel like his life is just so simple and unproblematic. He’s happy to just have fun.”
For the last few weeks, the world has been having fun with Haaland. He leaves the World Cup as its most viral star, somehow finding the perfect mix of on-field talent and social media savvy, to the point that people flocked to Patti Smith’s Instagram comments to encouragingly assure onlookers that we would see more of a star whose talents needed no further validation before Norway’s first game. There is an affable earnestly in the optimistic tone of these comments, though, much as there was in Haaland’s reflections on a dream first World Cup.
