Erling Haaland: The Internet's Newest Superstar
Erling Haaland is chasing the Golden Boot. He may leave this World Cup with something else entirely: ownership of the internet.
The Norway striker arrived with a ready-made fanbase in his homeland and in Manchester’s blue half, already a superstar at Manchester City. Leeds United have long claimed him as one of their own too – born in the city while his father Alf-Inge played at Elland Road, raised on stories of Yorkshire grit and Premier League survival.
Now the World Cup has handed him a far bigger stage, and the rest of the planet has caught up. Not just with the goals. With the circus.
The algorithm’s favourite footballer
In early July, “Haaland” crashed into the UK’s top 10 overall searches on TikTok, a space usually reserved for pop stars, reality shows and the latest fleeting trend. His name surged by more than 300% week on week, making him the most searched World Cup player in that spell.
Then the wave grew taller. Searches for “Haaland best moments” rocketed by 1,300% in the same period. Since the tournament kicked off, fans have pumped out more than 14,000 posts tagged #Haaland or #ErlingHaaland, an increase of almost 500% month on month.
His total footprint is vast: 1.4 million posts about him across the platform. Yet the digital mountain he’s climbing is clear. #Messi stands at 25 million posts, #Ronaldo at 22.3 million. Haaland is still the upstart in their world, the new algorithm darling trying to gatecrash a decade-long duopoly.
Santa in Manchester, memes in the sky
The thing with Haaland is that the content never really stops.
Last Christmas, he pulled on a Santa suit in Manchester for a YouTube video, wandering the city to hand out gifts to children. It was pure theatre: a 6ft 4in goal machine disguised as Father Christmas, leaning into the absurdity of his own fame.
His Instagram stories have done the rest. One post about “raw dogging” a flight – no food, no water, no entertainment – spread like wildfire, the sort of offbeat, unfiltered line that lands perfectly in the social-media age.
During this World Cup, his feeds have gone into overdrive. Instagram and TikTok are full of his clips and edits, while 4.7 million people now follow his Snapchat stories, waiting for the next joke, the next behind-the-scenes moment, the next glimpse of the man behind the numbers.
Haaland hasn’t stayed aloof from any of it. He dives into the comments, plays along with the memes. When an Instagram user posted a picture of a green onion and asked: “Am I losing it or does this green onion look like Haaland?”, the striker replied with a meme of a dog hurriedly winding up a car window – the universal sign for hiding from chaos.
The fastest-growing giant on Instagram
The numbers behind the personality are staggering. During the tournament his Instagram following has leapt from 40 million to 60 million, making him the fastest-growing major player on the platform.
His Reels have been viewed more than 683 million times since the World Cup began. That’s not a fanbase; that’s an ecosystem.
He feeds it relentlessly. A mocked-up selfie with Shrek captioned “Selfie with my twin”. A shot of him undercover as a tourist in New York, cap pulled low, sunglasses on, trying and failing to blend in. A shopping trip in Texas where the Viking helmet gives way to a cowboy hat.
Even Google has joined the show. Type his name into the search bar and an animation of rowers in Viking helmets glides across the screen. Haaland has become a trigger for digital Easter eggs.
The viral clips are not all jokes. One widely shared video shows him carefully folding his shirt and handing it to a kit man after a match, while teammates fling their jerseys on the floor. It’s a small act, but in the era of microscopic scrutiny, those details travel fast.
Bromance, Bellingham and the FYP takeover
His friendship with Jude Bellingham, forged at Borussia Dortmund, has become one of the World Cup’s favourite subplots. The sight of the Norway striker and England midfielder joking together has delighted fans, with some comparing them to the rival hockey stars from HBO’s Heated Rivalry as Norway prepare to face England on Saturday.
The Haaland effect stretches beyond his own name. Bellingham has 1.3 million TikTok posts attached to him, comfortably ahead of England captain Harry Kane’s 277,600. The younger generation knows who their leading men are.
One 18-year-old TikTok creator from the Netherlands, who admits she “didn’t know Haaland before this World Cup”, made a video about the pair that has been shared more than 100,000 times. She only really watches football when her national team plays at major tournaments. This time, her For You page dragged her deeper.
Haaland’s “funny moments” and Snapchat stories hooked her. His “vibe”, as she put it, and the easy “bromance” with Bellingham turned a casual observer into a content creator, another node in the network orbiting around him.
A viral doppelgänger
The Haaland phenomenon has even created its own lookalike star.
Russian model Anastasia Kostromitina went viral after her mother posted a video of her mimicking Haaland’s poses. The resemblance is striking: long blond hair, sharp blue eyes, tall frame. The internet did the rest.
At first, she admitted, the comparisons confused her. Then she embraced them. Being likened to “such an amazing athlete” is, in her words, “not bad at all”. She calls him humble, praises his talent and seems happy to share a digital spotlight with him.
“One of us”: City fans watch the world catch up
Back in Manchester, City supporters are watching all this with a sense of inevitability. To them, the world is simply discovering the player – and the personality – they have lived with for years.
“He is a great asset for our club,” says Dante Friend from the 1894 fan group. They see him as plugged into the fabric of the fanbase: active on social media, following supporter accounts, chatting with key figures behind the scenes. To them, he isn’t a distant superstar. He’s “one of us”.
Kevin Parker, general secretary of the Manchester City official supporters club, talks about the duality. On the pitch, he calls Haaland “an unbelievable footballer, right up there with the best strikers, goalscorers in the world”. Off it, he believes City fans have long seen “a different sort of footballer”.
Not different because of his finishing, but because of his personality. He comes across as “genuinely likable”, Parker says, and the World Cup has simply allowed everyone else to see what City fans have witnessed across three seasons.
From his point of view, it is “absolutely fantastic”. In a tournament clouded at times by anger at Fifa and criticism of off-field decisions, Haaland, he says, “gives football such a positive vibe… everything that Erling does, it’s just positive, positive.”
Howard Cohen, chair of the Manchester City Disabled Supporters Association, remembers the early doubts. When Haaland first arrived, some media painted him as quiet, reserved, almost distant. That image did not last long.
“He’s really come out of his shell very quickly,” Cohen says. In reality, he was never that shy figure. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and that matters. For someone in public life, and especially for a footballer, the ability to laugh at yourself carries weight.
It’s that side of Haaland – the memes, the jokes, the Santa suit, the folded shirts and the Viking rowers drifting across a Google screen – that has helped him pick up support “around the world” and “provide entertainment for people”.
The goals put him in the running for the Golden Boot. The rest of it, the noise and the warmth and the endless stream of content, is doing something else entirely: reshaping what it means to be football’s next global superstar in an age where the game never really stops, even when the whistle blows.
