Inside the mind of Erling Haaland: Everything and nothing

Inside the mind of Erling Haaland there is a searing, scorching, unplayable nothing. This may not sound like much of a compliment, not when we are considering the most prolific striker of his generation — a man who has taken a flamethrower to the history books — but it is precisely this destructive blankness that elevates the Manchester City and Norway centre-forward into football’s stratosphere.

Not convinced? This is what Haaland said to Alan Shearer, the Premier League’s record goalscorer, in an interview for The Athletic a couple of years ago when the pair of them bonded — communed, really — over the art and obsession of ball meeting net.

“As a striker, I think it’s really important that when you’re in the game to not think too much,” Haaland said. “If I’m going to go into my next game thinking about the chance I missed last game it’s not good. You have to go into the game hungry. It doesn’t matter what happened before: if you scored three goals, if you scored zero goals, if you haven’t scored in a while. You have to go into the game with the same mentality. And so I think about not thinking too much.”

During their conversation, the two men discussed goals in the language of addiction. “It’s something I cannot describe; you know what I’m talking about but a lot of people do not,” said Haaland, while Shearer talked about those “few seconds of lose-yourself giddiness, a magical drug that takes hold of you and doesn’t relent. You always want more.” Fluffed chances meant insomnia, but on the pitch? Barely a flicker.

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A manager who has faced Haaland, 24, on multiple occasions at the highest level is asked for some insight into his mentality. “I love his attitude to missing chances,” he replies, speaking anonymously in order to talk freely. “He never looks overly concerned.” In fact, missing rankles and festers — “It’s the worst feeling ever!” Haaland told Shearer — but his genius comes in how he swallows his disappointment and transforms it into fuel.

Missing is “kind of motivation, to score or to do something in the next game”, Haaland said. “It’s the same when you score two goals, ‘Oh, I want to do it again!’ So actually, no matter what happens it’s motivation and that’s what’s also good about it.”

It is an area that marks Haaland, Shearer and their ilk out as different. Away from football, they have their own lives and interests; Haaland’s predilection for drinking raw milk and chopping wood in the offseason feels like a distillation of rural Scandinavia. Believe it or not, they have the same issues and worries as the rest of us; shopping to buy, bills to pay, relationships to nurture. But in the bubble of a match, they somehow shut down.

At home, Haaland meditates, something he has referenced in that crossed-leg celebration of his — a lotus yoga pose — and it is here that the personal and professional meet. A clear mind, an empty mind, may help soothe the stresses of his job, but it also in his job where blankness, nothing, becomes an irrepressible force.

“For the truly great strikers, it’s like they have a thing in their heads where they manage to block things out,” says Jan Aage Fjortoft, the former Swindon Town, Middlesbrough and Norway forward, a close friend of Alf-Inge Haaland, Erling’s father, and now a professional “stalker” of the son through his television and media work.

“In football, if you miss a chance it’s common to think, ‘Oh s***’ and that is the beginning of missing your next chance. For the very best players, if they miss, in the next second they are already concentrating on the next chance that will turn up. They just demand the ball. They never hide. If most of us make a mistake, you kind of try to get away from the limelight, but these players just want the ball again.”

Shearer understands. He knows what makes Haaland tick. “There are so many things that resonate with me,” the former England captain, title-winner with Blackburn Rovers and record goalscorer for Newcastle United, says. “Whether it’s his desire to score goals, the way he positions himself, even that narky, aggressive part of his game … I think, ‘Yeah, I know exactly what’s going on in your head’.”

This is not narcissism on Shearer’s part. Game recognises game, and in the pantheon of centre-forwards Shearer was as good as they come, scoring his first top-level hat-trick at the age of 17, moving from Southampton to Blackburn for an English record fee, scoring 34, 37 and 37 goals in all competitions over consecutive seasons at Ewood Park, a Golden Boot winner at the 1996 European Championships, a world-record signing for Newcastle.

“Erling lives for goals,” Shearer says. “If he doesn’t score, which doesn’t happen very often, he sits awake at night wondering why, itching for the next game. When he makes a run and the ball doesn’t come, when there’s no cross or pass, he absolutely hates it. It makes him angry. When he gets one goal, there’s no let up, no relief. He wants another. He lives and breathes goals; they’re his sustenance, his oxygen.” Shearer sounds almost whimsical.

Haaland has come along and reset standards; 36 goals in 35 Premier League appearances for Manchester City in his debut season — a new record — and almost a goal a game since then, the quickest player to reach two, three, four and five hat-tricks, a pitiless, unquenchable, 6ft 4in phenomenon.

In his pomp, Shearer was categorised as robotic. As a player, he was beady-eyed and relentless, a caricature that was amplified by monotone, stolid interviews which prompted his team-mates at Blackburn to call him “Mr Mogadon”. They found it hilarious; the man they knew was fierce, yes, but also sharp, dry, funny and, as his work for The Athletic demonstrates, engaging and intelligent.

With Haaland, there was one post-match television interview during his time at Borussia Dortmund that went viral because of his monosyllabic responses. One Norwegian football journalist, who grew up in the same rustic town as Haaland, told The Athletic at the time that Bryne bred “rugged people who consider the exchange of verbal pleasantries unnecessary frippery”. Another said: “Not much value is placed on talking for talking’s sake here.”

A member of staff at Dortmund added: “He’s an incredibly funny and smart guy, but beware: if you pose a question that can be answered with ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’, he will.”

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“You’re a young guy, they put you in front of the cameras for the whole world to look at and then people say, ‘Oh, he’s arrogant because he said this and that’,” says Fjortoft. “But these are kids who are coming into the limelight, being put into this whole different world of entertainment. That can be misunderstood.

“When people say that Erling is a machine the most interesting thing is that he is totally the opposite to that. He is a human being who produces goals like a machine and that is something else.”

The Haaland that Fjortoft knows is not that. “I see a young kid, very caring about his friends and his family and humble — we use that word a lot,” he says. “He looks after people and he’s generous.”

The modern game is a global brand and Haaland is one of its most marketable icons; generous and humble do not quite cut it. “In international football today, you kind of have two cartoons,” says Fjortoft. “You have Kylian Mbappe, who is this super Mickey Mouse kind of guy, running all over the place. And then you have Erling, this big Viking who is like a video game character and I guess that is part of their popularity. But outside, he’s just a caring young man.”

In the immediacy of 90 frantic minutes, Haaland finds peace. He is meditating — at velocity. He does not play cold; he plays hot, full-tilt, on the edge — he can be physical and narky as Shearer puts it, but the great differential is his internal void. He casts out concerns, doubts, pressure, overbearing attention, the temporary sirens of triumph and disaster to focus solely on what comes next. He offers no fertile ground for uncertainty. He embraces emptiness.

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Lars Sivertsen agrees with Fjortoft. In fact, the characterisation of Haaland — the person — as unfeeling or inhuman irritates him.

“I often hear him referred to as a machine, as a monster, or as someone who was built in a lab,” he tells The Athletic, “and it really gets on my nerves, because it’s the most wrong you can possibly be — at least about his childhood. As an adult, of course, he focused on maximising his physique and looking for all the advantages he can find, but his youth was completely different.”

Sivertsen is a journalist and broadcaster. In 2023, he published a biography of Haaland, which describes his upbringing in detail. If the way a player thinks about the game is a consequence of his environment then, Sivertsen says, the Manchester City centre-forward is more unusual than many realise.

“Bryne is tiny, idyllic town with only 12,000 inhabitants. It’s a place where parents can let kids run off on their own. In many parts of their world, you have a clear distinction between grassroots football and elite clubs — even at youth level. But because Norway has a lot of small towns dotted around, its clubs have to be all of those things at once.

“So the local club in Bryne — Bryne FK — are a community club. They have just been promoted to the first division. When Erling was young, they were in the second tier, but their primary purpose was not to provide a pathway to stardom. A club like that exists to help kids to be active, to have a positive social environment and to enjoy themselves outside of school.”

Haaland was fortunate. His father was a footballer, of course, and his mother was an elite heptathlete. His great uncle was an international footballer, too. So, he had sport in his blood.

However, because his father’s career was curtailed by injury, the family ended up moving back to Bryne earlier than they might have done. That put Erling in position to profit.

“In a lot of these small-town clubs, the coaching will be done by parents or volunteers,” says Sivertsen. “When a really talented kid comes along, the hope is just that those coaches are able to educate and challenge them.

“Erling was fortunate. He was moved up a year and part of a group of 40 — 39 boys and one girl — who were coached by a very talented team of coaches led by Alf-Ingve Berntsen, who has a UEFA A-Licence.”

Berntsen had twin sons at Bryne and he coached their group to spend more time with them. He had ideas, too. He believed in mixing children of different abilities for as long as possible. In Sivertsen’s book, he describes how — during his eight years with that group — Berntsen and his fellow coaches would format teams to prevent the very best players from dominating matches or sessions, making sure that everybody enjoyed football, regardless of ability.

It taught those with the most talent to develop patience with players of less ability. It also delayed the fracturing of social groups, which are so fundamental in a town as small as Bryne.

“He believed that telling a 13-year-old that he can’t train with his friends any more because he’s not very good at kicking a ball is just a terrible thing to do at that age,” Sivertsen says. “To this day, some of Erling’s best friends are from that group. Under a different coach who split them up, maybe that wouldn’t be the case?”

It’s an interesting anecdote with which to frame Haaland’s relationships with his professional team-mates — how he responds to misplaced passes and imperfect crosses. It also describes a much more social upbringing, which emphasised the fun in the sport, rather than just what could be gained from it.

“Rather than imagining Erling Haaland at that age as a tiny Ivan Drago (Rocky Balboa’s huge Russian enemy in the Rocky boxing franchise),” says Sivertsen, “you should imagine a kid riding his bicycle in an idyllic small town in Norway, having a kickabout with his friends of all different ability and training with coaches who were passionate about working with everyone.”

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To reiterate: Haaland is not free of emotion. He is not ice. One of the things that most stood out for Shearer from their interview was when Haaland said, “It’s good to have a little bit of pain … It’s good to feel a little bit. It’s important.” Haaland does feel. He does have emotion — his face is expressive — it is just that he is able to channel it and focus.

The pain he spoke about was in the context of physical confrontation and there was a moment in the Champions League last season, captured on camera, when Real Madrid’s Antonio Rudiger ducked his head into one of Haaland’s armpits and then the other. It was a strange, funny, hypnotic little dance, full of nudges and pushes and twitching elbows, with Rudiger doing all he could to snap Haaland out of his emptiness. Haaland’s eyes never left the ball.

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Talking to The Inside Scoop, Rudiger later described himself as an “old-school defender, who loves this battle with strikers, especially strikers like him (Haaland), because that guy is an absolute beast. I don’t know what he eats or what he does, but wow, the power he has.”

At the end of a niggly 2-2 draw with Arsenal in September, Haaland threw the ball at Gabriel’s head. Afterwards, he told reporters: “I don’t regret anything in life.”

“That’s something I could and would have done,” Shearer says. “When you’re playing on the edge it means you’re on the very tip and there’s a chance you could go over, but you have to be that way. Erling doesn’t mind if someone wants to battle him or fight him or scrap with him. In fact, he enjoys it. When it’s the best defenders against the best forward and they collide and come together, you have to play on the edge. It’s what makes the big players tick.

“I did the same. I loved that. I loved it when people talked about me before a game. If it was good, I thought, ‘Yeah, great, thank you, that gives me confidence’ and if it was bad, I’d think, ‘F*** you, I’ll show you what I can do’. I see so many traits in Erling that I understand because I was very, very similar in terms of mentality. And in my early days, physically as well.”

The leading manager we spoke to says of Haaland: “His physicality is incredible. He can do everything; he can sprint, head the ball, he has huge strength. He’s multi, multi-talented. He wants to score and isn’t bothered if it’s tap-ins. But what really gets me is that he looks so happy the majority of the time. And he doesn’t seem affected by pressure.”

That element of having fun is perhaps something that gets overlooked. Haaland is hulking. He looks menacing. We don’t think of video game Vikings as smiling and kind and generous. We think of pillage. Haaland combines both — a beast who can lay waste to defences with a grin plastered on his face.

“This is a footballer with a capital F,” says Fjortoft. “He loves the game very much. He’s passionate about it. I remember there were games at Dortmund when they had agreed before the game that he would come off after 60, 70 minutes — he was a young lad with a lot of pressure on him. I was sitting just behind the bench and when the time came and the manager called out to him, Erling just shook his head and played on. He always wanted that. He loves to be out there.”

There is a determined aspect to this, too. “I’m playing for the champions — the ones who won the Premier League — so of course there’s pressure, but in my head it’s about trying to go out on the pitch smiling as much as I can and to try to enjoy the game,” Haaland told Shearer. “Because life goes fast and suddenly my career is over. You saw that with my father: suddenly it’s over. So it’s about trying to enjoy every single minute of it.”

Haaland senior’s career came to a juddering end through injury during his own spell at Manchester City and, in this and everything else, Alf-Inge has been a huge influence on Erling — and still is. “Team Haaland” as Fjortoft calls them, meticulously plot out every step.

“I remember as young as I can that I wanted to become a footballer,” Erling told Shearer. “Because of my father I told myself early I wanted to become better than him … My dad kind of printed football in my head quite early, but he didn’t put any pressure on me about playing,” he says. “It was my choice. But it was quite obvious … Every time he came home from a trip he would bring me a new jersey!”

Like most superstars — that special breed who have the willpower and discipline to complement their talent — Haaland is a football nut; he watches it, feeds off, uses it. At an impressionable age, Shearer was told that ability and instinct were the easy bits, that there would always be better players than him (questionable, as it happens), and the only thing he could control was working harder than anyone else. Shearer built his reputation upon it.

“The impression I get is that Erling’s focus is nothing other than football and scoring goals,” Shearer says. “That was me. I lived for goals. And I always understood that, if I was lucky, I might be in the game for 15-20 years and I was going to give absolutely everything to be as good as I could be, to get the best out of myself. I tried as hard as anybody has done. Not everybody can say that.”

Haaland said it to Shearer: “There’s something inside me that just … I think of football all the time, you know, getting better and what I can do better and these kind of things. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s there. I don’t know how I got it or whatever, but it’s there.”

“This is a guy that is using every spare minute to see how he’s making his body more resistant, doing all the stretches, being prepared,” Fjortoft says. “I have never met a player who 24/7 concentrates on how to improve.”

In the City dressing room — hardly a place for slackers — they make light of it. Kyle Walker, the England defender, called Haaland “high maintenance” on his BBC podcast (You’ll Never Beat Kyle Walker), but only in the sense that he is constantly seeking out massages, ice baths, treatment, nutritional juices. “He’s very professional,” Walker said. “He’s just looking after his body.”

As a team-mate, he is well-liked. “You’ve got strikers who score goals and strikers who are goal-getters and Erling is a goal-getter,” Fjortoft says. “His hunger for scoring is unbelievable, but he’s the only goal-getter in the history of football, I think, who is sometimes more happy when others score ahead of him. I guess that is part of his personality, because he is a popular man in the dressing room and not only because his goals give people medals. There’s no jealousy.”

Finally, there is a divergence with Shearer. Happier when others score ahead of him? Never happened.

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Self-improvement comes naturally. In fact, it had to. Size was not always a weapon for Haaland and that is another flaw in the ‘mini-Drago’ fallacy.

Very much a player of the internet age, YouTube chronicles his youth career in great detail. In that footage lies traits of the player who exists today: the speed, the quick creation of shooting angles, the left foot that could blast a brick wall to pieces.

But the size is not there. Watched chronologically, from his games in local sports halls to the Norwegian youth teams, Haaland goes from being just another boy, distinguishable only by his facial features, to a gangly youth, whose legs seem too long and whose body lacks the breadth to protect his talent.

As it turned out, that helped. Haaland’s growth spurt came late, meaning that he was never one of those youth players able to barrel over his team-mates and bully his way to goals. He learnt the intricacies of forward play and — remarkably — some of the runs he made to separate himself from defenders as a child, seen in those compilations, have been seen in the Bundesliga and Premier League, too.

The cliches are easy: the Viking, the raider, the player who takes by force rather than finesse. They are seductive but false. The real anecdotes describe a player intent on finding the gaps in the game, rather than someone determined to run roughshod over it. When to make runs. How to stay onside. How to protect the ball and prevent shots from being blocked.

Still, perhaps the best Haaland story does involve a show of force — and a quirk of his personality.

In the early autumn of 2019, he was running white-hot for Jesse Marsch’s RB Salzburg. He was dominating the Austrian Bundesliga in an unprecedented way — 11 goals in seven games. Ridiculous. And it was his last dance away from the mainstream.

Everyone remembers what happened next. In late September, in the first Champions League season of his career, Haaland scored a first-half hat-trick in Salzburg’s 6-2 win over Genk and went supernova. Given the meticulousness associated with the planning of his career, today that seems like just another plot point on a smooth curve towards the top of the game — something that was bound to happen and which could just be taken in stride.

Maybe so, but 24 hours earlier Haaland was just another teenager who had been too excited to sleep. The stories are anecdotal, but footage shot by Haaland can still be found: the night before he was driving around Salzburg listening to the Champions League anthem at maximum volume — on repeat.

He was still a boy, yes, and he probably was already destined for the stratosphere, but this was no cool, calm collision with destiny, or a career that developed with unfeeling certainty.

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The most obvious bit: inside Haaland’s skull is an exquisite football brain which, taken with his instinct, mental strength, extraordinary aptitude and robustness makes for the complete package.

“You can write a book about what makes him so special,” Fjortoft says. “With Erling, it’s this combination of so many different skills. First of all, he has the physical attributes of being strong, being quick and those kind of things.

“Secondly, his football mind is unbelievable. I’ve said this so many times, but he’s the only player in the world I know who never goes offside. The timing of his runs is extraordinary.

“His movement shows his team-mates where the space is. It’s like he’s drawing a picture with his body language, using it to communicate. Good players understand that. And then when they put the ball in the right place he will be there ahead of the defender.”

There and thinking nothing, feeling everything, the goal in his sights.

(Additional contributor: Seb Stafford-Bloor)

(Photos: Getty Images/Design: Meech Robinson)