Slate Magazine69%
2026 World Cup: Soccer’s biggest sweetheart is now its biggest star. 59%
By Luke Winkie79%
7/10/2026, 3:25:05 PM
Keywords: Sports, World Cup, Europe, Social Media, Tiktok, Celebrities, Men, Internet Culture, Soccer, Redux, Section Culture, Adnode Culture Sports
BS Summary: This article contains 1 faulty reasoning type, including Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Attempt to Sell a Product or Service as the most egregious example at 1.9% saturation with 25 hits. Analysis detected 25 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,313 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 57.8% and a BS Rank of 59% (5,806 of 14,149 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 59.00% of the article peer group.
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To fans of the English Premier League, 25-year-old Erling Haaland needs no introduction.
At 6-foot-5 and 208 pounds, he is one of the most devastating strikers in the world, pulverizing the ball with barbarian strength to the tune of 27 goals last season.
Haaland possesses explosive agility and a borderline omniscient gift for reading the field.
Videos show him idling in glum stasis until a cross is lobbed over the box; Haaland jolts to life, predicting its arc down to the millimeter, ricocheting the ball home with buckling topspin.
He is also already galactically famous, with 57 million followers on Instagram, spread across Europe, South America, and elsewhere.
But during this most recent World Cup campaign, where Haaland is representing his native Norway on a Cinderella run, he has cultivated a different group of fans entirely.
These fans exist far outside traditional soccer circles, almost all of them are women, and many haven’t watched much of Haaland on the pitch.
Instead, they’ve fallen in love with Manchester City’s marauding striker because, beyond his athletic bona fides, he is a lovable goof.
“To this day I don’t think I’ve watched a video showing off, like, Haaland’s best goals,” said Patty Reddi, a 31-year-old who works in tech sales and counts herself as one of Haaland’s newest die-hards.
“Instead, I’m just up at 2 a.m. on TikTok scrolling through videos of him doing commercials for energy drinks in China.”
Like so many internet stories of the 2020s, Haaland’s crossover appeal is a story that starts with the opaque and unknowable algorithm of TikTok.
As the 2026 World Cup ramped up, and Haaland’s Norwegian team proved to be a serious competitor, edging out Brazil in the round of 16, clipped highlights taken from the striker’s Snapchat stories began to go viral.
That’s because rather than the usual hustle-grindset pablum athletes tend to spout from their social media pulpits—LeBron bragging about his 4 a.m. workouts; Tom Brady doing ascetic, low-calorie meal prep—Haaland was winningly disarming, and fluent in the chatty, bubbly language of memes.
One of his more memorable Snapchats features Haaland posing for a selfie with a low-res Shrek standing over his shoulder, captioned, “Selfie with my twin.”
Elsewhere, Haaland proudly touts the fact that he “ raw-dogged” a seven-hour flight .
(“No food, no sleep, no water, only map,” he wrote, over an image of him keeping perfect posture in an aisle seat.
“#Easy.”)
But the most iconic Haaland Snapchat saga—and the one that catapulted him into the meme stratosphere—occurred in 2025, when Manchester City was participating in the FIFA Club World Cup.
Haaland and his team were traveling to Orlando, Florida, and when Haaland posted about the trip, he misspelled the city as “Ornaldo.”
Moments later, on his Snapchat story, Haaland corrected the record with a memorably resonant koan.
“Not even allowed to write something wrong now in this perfect world,” he wrote .
“Sorry to all the perfect brothers and sisters out there.”
That post resurfaced during Norway’s imperial run in the World Cup, and it epitomized the essence of Haalandism: A man whose ferocious talent coexists beautifully with his inner dorkiness, neither quality betraying the other.
“He’s so scary on the field.
And he’s so hilarious on the internet.
You’re just like, ‘Who is this man?’
” said Nicole Sievers, a 31-year-old who hosts an F1 podcast, and, like everyone else I spoke to for this story, had barely followed Haaland until this tournament.
“He’s so endearing.
He’s bewitched me.
I want to know every single thing about him,” continued Sievers.
“He takes his craft seriously, but also not seriously.
We’re in an era where we’re all craving authenticity, and it makes it easy to root for him.”
Amalia Trigo, a friend of mine who is from Argentina but has a soft spot for Haaland, puts it another way: “Sometimes I feel like in the Euro soccer social media scene there is some manospheric energy with young fans and players, but he kinda steers clear of that.”
The more I spoke to this new collection of Haaland adherents, the more it became clear to me that their devotion requires the kind of forensic analysis and intense lore cultivation you usually expect from, say, the rabid stan armies of pop stars.
For instance: A good friend of mine told me that she is currently deeply immersed into what the upstart Haaland legion calls “Cleated Rivalry”— a canon of TikTok montages featuring both Haaland and English midfielder Jude Bellingham, who played together on the Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund and shared a wonderfully chaste bromance; two top athletes pecking each other on the cheek during post-game interviews, or collapsing into cuddle puddles after one of them scored a goal.
(“My Instagram Reels are full of them loving on each other,” she said to me.
“I now know that they played together in Germany, despite not knowing who either of them were before.”)
Others have delved even deeper into the arcane corners of the Haaland apocrypha.
Multiple people told me that they are charmed by his vast collection of Birkin bags, valued at approximately $500,000, which he can be spotted with on every road trip.
This reveals yet another contradiction: Haaland might play with brutish strength, but the man has taste.
Some people I spoke to are simply enamored with the sheer size and makeup of Haaland’s gestalt; he is, it must be said, an odd-looking man, ghostly pale with luscious pink lips, his white-gold hair pulled back into a tight ponytail.
“He has a Pixar face and a Viking body,” said another old friend of mine, who is making Norway-themed shirts for the Haaland’s clash with England on Saturday, despite possessing no Scandinavian heritage to speak of.
Of course, you can also find folks who are terrified by Haaland’s physique.
I was not surprised to hear from Imogen West-Knights—Slate’s resident Englishwoman—who, no matter his doofy Snapchats, senses great menace from the man named Erling.
“I find him actively scary,” she said.
“I think it’s my ancestors speaking to me.
A large Viking is approaching.”
This gets us to the last remaining important question about Haaland’s newfound North American appeal, which, I will restate, seems to be almost exclusively to women.
Does thirst factor in at all?
Nobody would call Haaland a conventionally attractive man, but I do wonder if his eccentricity might be enhancing his ogreish physique.
As my wife put it: “He’s silly, but he can also protect.”
Sievers seems to agree with her.
“At first glance, I’m not super attracted to the guy.
But this is where the female and male gaze comes into play.
The more you understand someone’s personality, the easier it is to fall in love with him,” she said.
“And after seeing him so many times, I’m starting to get it.
Everyone has Instagram face.
Everyone is getting work done.
And it is so refreshing to see someone who looks different from everyone else.”
Maybe that is the lesson we can all take with us from the Haaland renaissance, regardless of whether Norway wins or loses comes Saturday.
Who knows if this coterie of fans, forged in the fires of TikTok, will stick around and become Manchester City supporters in the months and years ahead.
But let his reign be proof that there is no such thing as an ideal male physique.
No matter how many rich, jacked, gorgeous men gallivant around the World Cup, it is the goofballs and weirdos who win out in the end.
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