"Even as a kid, I could see that he had an intuition for scoring." Espen Undheim coached Erling Haaland at Bryne FK when the striker was around eight years old — a beanpole of a kid, nowhere near the physical force he'd become, but already doing one thing obsessively: finding ways to get the ball in the net.
That compulsion never left him. Haaland has been the Premier League's top scorer in three of his four seasons at Manchester City. He hit 100 league goals in just 111 appearances — faster than anyone in the history of the division. And now, at 25, he's about to play at his first World Cup, after firing Norway to the tournament for the first time since 1998.
Anger as fuel
What stands out from his former coaches' accounts isn't the talent — it's the temper. Undheim recalls a young Haaland furious with teammates who didn't pass, furious with himself when he missed chances he felt he should've taken. That hasn't changed. Even this season, winning the FA Cup, Haaland was reportedly livid that a teammate didn't find him in the final attack of the game.
It's a thin line between edge and dysfunction. But Haaland has always known where that line is.
Leif Gunnar Smerud, who coached Norway's youth teams and first encountered Haaland at talent camps for 14 and 15-year-olds, puts it plainly: "We looked for players who really had the passion, almost more than the talent, and he had that bit." He also makes a point worth sitting with — Haaland wasn't the obvious standout at that age. Good, yes. The anointed one? Not yet.
Why being small actually helped
For years, Haaland was physically outmatched. He was nearly exclusively left-footed as a child, had to work to develop his right, and couldn't rely on size or strength to bully his way through youth football. Smerud argues that worked in his favour.
"Players that don't have too much size when they are kids, they have to be smart," he says. "He had to work on his timing and his positioning, movement and technique." By the time the physical transformation came in his mid-teens — and it came fast — he had the brain of a technically-refined player inside the body of someone defenders genuinely don't want to deal with.
Nine goals in a single World Cup Under-20 game against Honduras in 2019 announced him to the world. He followed it up with 28 goals in 22 games at RB Salzburg, then Borussia Dortmund, then City. The trajectory never dipped.
Norway face France, Senegal and Iraq at this summer's tournament. Their opener against Iraq on June 16 will be Haaland's World Cup debut. Back in Bryne, they're reportedly planning to pack 1,000 youth players into the indoor arena where Haaland spent his childhood — the same one that now has a painting of him fifty metres high on its wall.
"He is the same guy," Smerud says. "He loves his hometown, he loves the people there, and if he loses their respect, I don't think anything else matters more to him."
