"It annoys me a little bit that I didn't score with my last kick of the game." Erling Haaland had just netted nine times in a single World Cup match. He was still unhappy.
That's the detail that sticks. At 18 years old, playing for Norway's U20 side at the 2019 tournament in Poland, Haaland dismantled Honduras 12-0 — personally responsible for nine of those goals. Four before halftime. Five after. A missed chance in the final seconds that, apparently, still sits with him.
The record that puts everything else in context
Nine goals in one World Cup game. For context, the senior tournament record stands at five — Oleg Salenko for Russia against Cameroon at USA '94. Haaland's tally from a single afternoon is nearly double that. It's not just a record; it's a different category of performance entirely.
He was playing for Red Bull Salzburg at the time, already showing the finishing instincts that would later tear apart the Premier League and Champions League. What the Honduras game proved wasn't just that he could score — plenty of strikers pile on against outmatched opposition. It was the relentlessness. Nine in and still furious about the tenth.
Ironically, Norway didn't even make it out of the group stage. They lost their other two games and went home despite Haaland's record-breaking haul. Salenko had the same experience at the senior level in 1994 — five goals, a Golden Boot shared with Hristo Stoichkov, and an early flight home. History rhymes.
Now he's doing it at senior level too
Haaland scored twice in Norway's 4-1 opening win over Iraq in the senior World Cup's Group I. The record-setting continues, just on a bigger stage. Anyone pricing Norway's group stage progression would do well to anchor their model around one simple fact: their striker has been scoring at World Cups since he was a teenager and hasn't shown any sign of stopping.
The U20 record will stand indefinitely. Nine goals in one match isn't something you approach — it's something that exists as a statistical outlier, filed away alongside things that simply don't happen twice.
