You ruined my boys The day Erling Haaland was annoyed he only scored nine

Publish date: 2024-06-15

“I’ll have to sit down and think a little bit about it, and maybe I’ll work out what happened.”

It’s the sort of quote you would expect after a result like this. Twelve-nil is, after all, the sort of scoreline to prompt root-and-branch reviews, to inspire great introspection and even trauma. Particularly when a single player is responsible for nine of those goals.

That quote, though, didn’t come from someone on the losing side of this one. It came from the player who scored those nine goals. He was annoyed that he hadn’t scored more.

Erling Haaland wasn’t exactly a household name in May 2019. You might have heard of him then, probably because of his father, Alf-Inge, and the decent chunk of goals he scored under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer at Molde.

But the eyes of the planet were not exactly on the Norway’s final group game of the Under-20s World Cup against Honduras, particularly since they had lost their opening two games of the tournament, Haaland failing to find the net in both.

“I hadn’t a clue he’d become the coveted star he is today,” says Steve Banyard, a seasoned youth tournament observer who was on commentary duty in Poland that day. “But the Under-20 World Cup has often produced stars. Aguero, Messi, Ronaldinho; all these sorts of guys came through. I remember watching Harry Kane in 2013.”

And so it has proved with Haaland, this hulking man-child, colossal even as a teenager, a steamroller with a Bugatti engine who introduced himself to the world that day, fully-formed in more ways than one.

Haaland is now the most sought-after young player in the world, set to be the subject of an undignified auction in the summer in which a club is likely to ignore the economic realities of football in 2021 and hand over a vast sum for his services.

But they will do so in the knowledge that however much they pay could turn out to be a bargain because Haaland is capable of the absolutely extraordinary — and that day against Honduras was arguably the first time he showed that.

“The journey started in that game,” Leo Ostigard, Norway’s captain that day, tells The Athletic.

Norway 1-0 Honduras, seventh minute, Haaland tucks home from inside the box after being teed up by Jens Petter Hauge, now at Milan.

Norway went into this game imbued by a spirit of “nothing to lose”. Those opening two defeats, to Uruguay and New Zealand, meant they had half a foot out of the tournament and couldn’t qualify automatically from their group, but could still squeak through as a top-ranked third-place team if they won by more than five goals and other results went their way.

Haaland was rusty before this game. This was at the end of a season that had simultaneously left him both tired and lacking in match practice — he had moved from Molde to Red Bull Salzburg at the end of the Norwegian season but barely played for the Austrian club’s first team in his first few months, finally making his debut in May. He scored in his first start, obviously.

“He came to the World Cup unsure of himself, I think,” Paco Johansen, Norway’s head coach, tells The Athletic. “This was the end of a one-and-a-half-year season. Also, we were only together with the whole squad for two days before the first game.”

Norway 2-0 Honduras, 20th minute, Haaland collects a nice ball over the top from Christian Borchgrevink and hammers the ball between the legs of Honduras goalkeeper Jose Garcia.

Haaland had a goal disallowed two minutes after his opener, the sort of frantic opening Hakon Wibe-Lund, one of the Norwegian coaching staff who had a close working relationship with Haaland, suspected. “It’s about knowing the player,” he tells The Athletic. “He was in a place where I was aware he didn’t need to be pushed with more feedback about why he wasn’t scoring. From the first kick of the ball, you see he’s there.”

Wibe-Lund had seen this focus before from Haaland. A year earlier, when Norway’s Under-19s were trying to qualify for the Under-19s European Championship, they were thrashed 6-1 by Holland, meaning they had to beat Germany then Scotland to make it through. Haaland scored five goals across those two games as Norway won 5-2 and 5-4 to qualify.

“That was the first time I saw him do it against real opposition,” says Wibe-Lund. “When he’s in that mode, he’s unstoppable. I sensed it before the Honduras game because I’d seen it before. I didn’t think he would score nine goals but he’s very easy to read. You know when he’s going to perform at his best. My thought was: “Good luck to the opposition.”

Norway 3-0 Honduras, 30th minute, Tobias Christiansen skims a corner over from the left and Leo Ostigard batters a header into the ground, then into the net.

It already wasn’t looking great for Jose Luis Rodriguez. He’s the head of Futbol Consultants, one of the biggest player agencies in Central America that represented four of the players in the Honduras team.

He was at the game in the hope of attracting some interest in his clients, who would hopefully put in some eye-catching performances — which, in a sense, they did. Just not the sort to get them a juicy move.

But even Rodriguez knew there was only one player anyone would pay attention to that day. “I was thinking, ‘This guy, man: he’s a machine’,” he tells The Athletic.

Norway 4-0 Honduras, 36th minute, Haaland again gets behind the defence but is wiped out by the onrushing and already desperate Garcia. He slides the penalty right into the corner after a little stutter step. Hat-trick.

This wasn’t the first significant goalscoring feat that Haaland had achieved. Earlier that season, he had notched all of Molde’s goals as they beat Brann 4-0, completing the scoring by the 21st minute. The fourth goal was a penalty: with a hat-trick and a pretty respectable day’s work already under his belt, you might think he’d give someone else a go. Nope. No sharing for the then 17-year-old goal guzzler. He wanted more.

“His hunger for goals is enormous,” says Johansen, recalling the time he saw Haaland in a youth game a couple of years earlier. “I noticed him straight away, how we celebrated goals for himself and his team. He celebrated every goal like was in the World Cup.”

Norway 5-0 Honduras, 43rd minute, Hauge finds Haaland in space in the box, he cushions a shin-height pass and launches a half-volley into the roof of the net. Garcia doesn’t move.

Not everyone was quite so taken with this burgeoning thrashing. Jesper Mathisen, a former player and now a prominent TV pundit in Norway, smelled a rat, suggesting on Twitter that some shady betting shenanigans may have been behind the piling on of the goals.

“For me, there is no doubt,” Mathisen said after the game. “I have seen a lot of fixed matches and this is probably the clearest.”

It was clear only to him, though. Honduran officials refuted the allegations, FIFA investigated and found no evidence of suspicious betting patterns or anything untoward, and the idea didn’t occur to any of the Norwegian players until Mathisen’s allegations surfaced afterwards. “Sometimes when you’re 5-0 down, you don’t play the best because you know the game is finished,” says Ostigard.

Banyard saw no evidence of anything untoward either, attributing the scale of the defeat to a plain old crushing of morale. “The heads dropped pretty early on. They’d lost their spirit, their will, all their enthusiasm had gone.”

Norway 6-0 Honduras, 46th minute, Kristian Thorsvedt robs a napping Honduras captain Wesly Decas and pulls back to the edge of the box, where Hauge arrives to slam home an emphatic finish.

Aside from Garcia, because, for the goalkeeper, these defeats are always traumatic, the player with the worst memories from this game is probably Decas, the man who was supposed to be marking Haaland. “Every time Haaland scores in the Champions League and Bundesliga,” Rodriguez told Norwegian newspaper VG, “Decas is reminded of his worst experience on a football pitch. It still hurts.”

Norway 7-0 Honduras, 50th minute, Haaland drops back to the edge of the box, Hauge finds him and he drives forward with a sort of crazed, frantic air, and thumps the ball into the bottom corner. It’s as if his team has been banging on the door of stubborn opposition for 89 minutes, and he finally gets the chance to break the deadlock.

“Because I know him so well, I sometimes forget he’s one of the best strikers in the world,” says Ostigard. “He’s quite weird but a really nice guy. A funny guy. He’s the same (now, as he was as a kid). When someone becomes a superstar, they can easily change their personality, but he’s just the same.”

Norway 8-0 Honduras, 67th minute, Thorsvedt chops a cross back from the byline for Haaland, who stretches out his right leg and almost scoops the ball from behind him and into the net. As an aside, the despairing attempt by Darwin Diego to stop the ball from going in might be one piece of evidence against those outlandish match-fixing allegations.

We’re getting into the realms of the mercy rule, now. Norway already had more than the five-goal winning margin they needed. It was well before this point that Sir Alex Ferguson admitted he wished Manchester United had stopped when they beat Arsenal 8-2.

“My philosophy is to attack and score goals,” says Johansen, “so it would be against my philosophy to stop scoring. But on the other hand, I really understand what Sir Alex means.”

For one Honduras player, Axel Gomez, a form of mercy was granted after he was sent off, the referee deeming a flailing arm that caught Borchgrevink in the face to be deliberate. Still, at least he could seek solace in an empty dressing room for the last half an hour.

Norway 9-0 Honduras, 77th minute. A surefire sign that Honduras heads had well and truly gone, Haaland is left unmarked at the near post to turn home a cross from the left, squeezed in beyond the hapless, beleaguered Garcia. This goal, Haaland’s seventh, was the record-breaker, eclipsing the Under-20s record of six in a game set by Brazil’s Adailton in 1997.

It is of course worth considering the lasting effects of a game like this on the opponents. A 12-0 defeat would be traumatic for grizzled veterans but for a bunch of teenagers just starting out in the often cruel world of football, the scars could last.

“Imagine how we feel,” said Honduras coach Carlos Tabora after the game. “We apologise to the Honduran people, to the fans. It is a sad moment. I ask the parents and the clubs of the boys to take care of them because it is a generation that must be taken care of.”

Rodriguez adds: “The reaction was really bad. The media attacked the players, the federation, the coach.” Although nearly two years down the line, things have softened a little. “It’s become a topic that not everyone likes to talk about. Even the media try not to mention it a lot.”

Norway 10-0 Honduras, 82nd minute. The very essence of a player “getting in on the act”, Eman Markovic collects a Christensen through-ball and slides home, four minutes after coming on as a substitute.

“In the second half, we got the feeling they were giving up,” says Ostigard. “It was not easy for them. When it’s 10-0, you feel a bit sorry for them.”

The Honduras players involved, perhaps understandably, are still not keen to talk about the game. Interview requests for this piece were either ignored or, to put it diplomatically, turned down. “They will not relive the nightmare,” Rodriguez told VG. “It is still an open wound. I think it will take many years before they get over it. It was pure pain. For the players, it was horrible. Back home, the whole country was talking shit about them.”

But at least a couple of them have achieved some form of redemption: Decas, right-back Jonathan Nunez and midfielder Joseph Rosales were all part of the Honduras Under-23 team that beat the USA in the Olympic qualifiers in March, so they should be heading to Tokyo with the chance for a little redemption on an international stage.

And the really good news is: Norway and Erling Haaland won’t be there.

Norway 11-0 Honduras, 88th minute. Haaland takes advantage of some extremely heavy legs and even heavier hearts, charging past a couple of Honduras defenders and battering one in from a tightish angle.

Again, it’s tough not to marvel at Haaland, relentlessly driving for more, more, more goals, battering a bunch of already defeated Hondurans. If this had been a more high-profile, widely-televised game, social media would be full of that Simpsons meme where the kid says, “Stop, stop, he’s already dead.”

“To say to him ‘stop scoring’ — that would be so totally against this nature,” says Johansen. “I could have subbed him off. But in this one game, he could be the World Cup top scorer. That’s big for a player. This was the World Cup for players born in 1999, and he was born in 2000. He’s playing one year above him and he’s won the Golden Boot.”

A man being dissatisfied with scoring nine goals in a single game — a sensational return for a full tournament, in some situations a respectable tally for a whole season and a number it took Sheffield United 18 games to muster in 2020-21 — does raise an interesting question about whether someone like Haaland will ever actually be happy. What would satisfy a striker who isn’t sated by a treble hat-trick? Would 10 have done it? 13? 20? Would someone like him only go home happy with his day’s work if he scored with every single shot he took?

Norway 12-0 Honduras, 90th minute. Christensen almost sets himself up for a shot but miscontrols slightly, allowing a loitering Haaland to nip in, steal the ball and score his ninth.

Maybe a normal person would have stepped back and not virtually tackled his own player in the 90th minute, in the hunt for another goal — but as we’ve established, Haaland is not a normal person.

“I’ve never seen it so extreme before,” says Wibe-Lund. “The focus for the specific tasks (of scoring goals) is the most extreme I’ve ever seen.”

To illustrate the point, Haaland said afterwards: “’It annoys me a little bit that I didn’t score with my last kick of the game.”

Instead, the final flourish was another sending off, Everson Lopez planting his studs just north of Markovic’s knee. And with that, it was over. More than one Honduras player was in tears. The Norwegian players and coaching staff tried to offer some words of comfort. There’s quite a tender picture of a weeping Elison Rivas being consoled by Ulrik Fredriksen.

The next day, Rodriguez ran into Haaland at the airport. He told VG: “I said, ‘You ruined my boys’. He replied: ‘I was annoyed because I could’ve scored 11 goals’. He’s a fucking machine. I just thought, ‘Holy shit’.”

The nine goals won Haaland the Golden Boot but for all the good it did Norway’s tournament prospects, he might as well not have bothered. The following day, Panama beat Saudi Arabia and took the final best third-placed team spot, so Norway went home.

It was just the start for Haaland, though. This game loosened the ketchup bottle and when he returned to club football, the goals came pouring out. He went on a cartoonish run of 24 goals in 20 Red Bull Salzburg games, including four separate hat-tricks, eventually leading to his transfer to Borussia Dortmund. And you know what happened after that.

You can watch the highlights of the game here

(Photo: FIFA TV)

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You ruined my boys The day Erling Haaland was annoyed he only scored nine