Erling Haaland: The Most Viral Footballer of the World Cup

Erling Haaland is chasing the Golden Boot at this World Cup, but he has already run away with another title. He is the tournament’s most viral footballer, the striker who has turned the biggest stage in the game into his own personal content studio.

He arrived with a built‑in fanbase: an entire nation in Norway, the blue half of Manchester, and a noisy pocket of Leeds United supporters who still claim him as their own. Born in Leeds while his father Alf-Inge Haaland was playing at Elland Road, he grew up following the Yorkshire club even as his professional path led him to Manchester City.

Now, with Norway into the quarter-finals, Haaland has gone from cult hero to global fixation. Not just for the goals. For the noise that follows him everywhere he goes online.

The algorithm’s favourite No 9

At the start of July, the numbers on TikTok exploded. Searches for “Haaland” surged into the UK’s overall top 10 on the platform, up more than 300% week on week. For that spell, no World Cup player generated more search traffic.

The appetite sharpened quickly. “Haaland best moments” searches jumped by 1,300% in the same period. Since the tournament kicked off, more than 14,000 posts using #Haaland or #ErlingHaaland have appeared, an increase of almost 500% month on month.

He is not yet at the stratospheric levels of the sport’s two long-time online giants. There are 1.4m posts about him in total, dwarfed by #Messi on 25m and #Ronaldo on 22.3m. But the direction of travel is obvious. Haaland is closing fast.

His rise has been building for a while. Last Christmas, he pulled on a Santa suit in Manchester for a YouTube video, handing out presents to children. On Instagram, he has long mixed self-deprecation with absurdity: one post about “raw dogging” a flight with no food, water or entertainment ricocheted around the internet.

During this World Cup, that blend has found its perfect platform. His Instagram and TikTok output has taken off, while 4.7 million subscribers track his Snapchat stories. The player isn’t hiding from any of it; he leans in, replies, laughs along.

When an Instagram user posted a picture of a green onion with the caption, “Am I losing it or does this green onion look like Haaland?”, the striker responded with a meme of a dog hurriedly winding up a car window – the universal sign for ducking out of view. The joke landed because it felt entirely in tune with the character people think they know.

Viking memes and Shrek selfies

The growth in his following is staggering. During the tournament, Haaland’s Instagram audience has leapt from 40m to 60m, making him the fastest-growing major player on the platform. His Reels have drawn more than 683m views since the World Cup began.

He feeds that demand with a steady stream of surreal, highly shareable images. A mocked-up selfie with the cartoon ogre Shrek, captioned “Selfie with my twin”. A shot of him disguised as a tourist in New York, head down under a baseball cap and sunglasses. A stroll through Texas with a cowboy hat replacing his now-iconic Viking helmet.

Even Google has joined the act. Type his name into the search bar and an animation of rowers in Viking helmets glides across the screen, as if the internet itself has decided to lean into the mythology.

The viral clips aren’t all jokes. Some of the most shared moments show Haaland at his most ordinary and respectful. One video of him carefully folding his shirt and handing it to a kit man, while teammates fling theirs on the floor, has been replayed millions of times. In a tournament full of high stakes and hot tempers, a small act of consideration has cut through.

The bromance generation

Haaland’s friendship with Jude Bellingham has given the internet another storyline to devour. The pair, who bonded at Borussia Dortmund, now find themselves on opposite sides as Norway prepare to face England on Saturday. That hasn’t stopped fans comparing them to the two rival hockey players from HBO’s Heated Rivalry – fierce on the pitch, inseparable off it.

The numbers around Bellingham hint at Haaland’s wider pull. There are 1.3m posts about the England midfielder on TikTok, far more than those about England captain Harry Kane, who sits at 277,600. Bellingham is a phenomenon in his own right, but Haaland’s gravitational field clearly helps.

It is not just hardened football obsessives driving this. An 18-year-old TikTok creator from the Netherlands, whose video about Haaland and Bellingham has been shared more than 100,000 times, admitted she “didn’t know Haaland before this World Cup”.

She watches mainly when her own country plays, when the World Cup or Euros turn football into a national event. This year, something different happened: Haaland “took over” her For You page. The funny moments, the Snapchat stories, the easy chemistry with Bellingham – that was enough to turn a casual viewer into a content creator.

“I just like Erling Haaland’s vibe,” she said. The line could have come from any corner of the internet this month.

A viral doppelgänger

The Haaland effect has even spilled into unexpected corners of pop culture. Russian model Anastasia Kostromitina suddenly found herself going viral after her mother posted a video of her mimicking Haaland’s poses, prompted by people pointing out the likeness.

She shares his long blond hair, piercing blue eyes and towering frame. The comparison, she has said, is “not bad at all”.

“At first, when people compared me to him I was a little bit confused,” she admitted. “But then I realised that being compared to such an amazing athlete is not offensive at all.” She calls him humble and a great athlete. In the age of the algorithm, even your lookalike can become part of a footballer’s story.

“One of us”: the Manchester view

Back in Manchester, none of this feels new. For City supporters, this is simply the rest of the world catching up.

“He is a great asset for our club,” says Dante Friend of the 1894 fan group. They see a superstar who does not float above them but mixes in their world. “He’s very active on social media, he follows the fan accounts, he’s in touch with some of the main fans behind the scenes, so we really feel he’s one of us.”

Kevin Parker, general secretary of the Manchester City official supporters club, goes further. “He’s an unbelievable footballer, right up there with the best strikers, goalscorers in the world,” he says, but City fans have long viewed him as “a different sort of footballer” – not just for his finishing, but for his personality.

“He just seems a genuinely likable sort of guy,” Parker adds. The World Cup has simply put that on a bigger screen. “Because of how big the World Cup stage is, other people around the world are getting the benefit of seeing what we’ve seen for three seasons.”

For him, Haaland is a counterweight to the darker noise around the tournament. “I think he gives football such a positive vibe,” Parker says. In a World Cup dogged by criticism of Fifa and its decisions, Haaland’s every post, every joke, every small gesture feels, in Parker’s words, “just positive, positive.”

Howard Cohen, chair of the Manchester City Disabled Supporters Association, remembers how some early coverage painted Haaland as distant and introverted. That image has not survived contact with reality.

“When he first came [to Manchester City], there was a public image projected, certainly in some of the media, of him being quite quiet and reserved,” Cohen says. “He’s really come out of his shell very quickly. He was clearly never that sort of quiet, reserved figure in reality, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

For Cohen, that matters. “I think that’s important for anybody in public life, but particularly for footballers,” he says. People love that he can “have a laugh with everybody and enjoy himself.”

The result is a player who scores goals at a historic rate and simultaneously dominates feeds, timelines and search bars. “He’s certainly picking up plenty of support around the world, and providing entertainment for people,” Cohen says. “And that’s what football should be about, after all.”

The Golden Boot race will be settled on the pitch in the coming days. The battle for the world’s attention, though, looks decided already. In an era where footballers are brands and moments are currency, Erling Haaland is the man everyone is watching – on the grass, on their phones, and everywhere in between.