Erling Haaland: How handball and potato farms in small-town Norway forged a superstar

Former Norway international, local football legend, great-great uncle to Erling Braut Haaland, and farmer of pigs and potatoes, Gabriel Hoyland is sitting on his blue 1961 Super Dexta tractor telling a story about the goalscoring prodigy about to sign for Manchester City.

We are just outside Bryne, a town of 12,000 in the beautiful south-west of Norway. The smell of pigs is in the air, the chilly white sand beaches are just a few miles away and from Gabriel’s farmhouse, you can see the floodlights of Bryne FK, the club at which he and his famous young nephew played. Erling’s private jet often lands at the nearby Stavanger airport. He has a yacht in Marbella. But he is a country boy at heart, one pursued by the richest clubs in the game and now finally convinced to join Pep Guardiola’s City, the billion-pound Abu Dhabi project. His roots are here in Bryne where he moved, aged three, when his father’s playing career in England ended in 2003.

Gabriel’s son Geir Dahle Hoyland, a footballer himself, is a friend of Erling and the pair still enjoy messing around on the farm. “While I was away recently they told me that they were taking the tractor out,” Gabriel says. “I told them ‘Forget it, I’m the only one who can handle that tractor’.” He sighs. “They didn’t listen. They also didn’t get any potatoes. Instead of digging them up you could say they had just pushed them down. When I got home what I could see in the field was a big hole.”

Like everyone else in Bryne, Gabriel, 67, has a quiet admiration for the 21-year-old star who comes from the town. Erling was born in Leeds where his father, Alf Inge Haaland, once played between stints at Nottingham Forest and Manchester City. Before that Alf was himself a Bryne FK player. 

When he returned from the Premier League to Norway in 2004 his investment would save the club from financial oblivion. The sporting prowess flows just as strongly from the side of Erling’s mother, Gry Marita Braut.

Gry was a heptathlete and the football gene runs strong on her side too. Her great-uncle Gabriel is a Bryne FK legend, with 596 games and 165 goals as well as 23 caps for Norway. He was an unused substitute against England at Wembley in 1980 and goes off to another part of the farmhouse to forage for the shirt he got in an exchange that night with another unused substitute. 

“It’s No 14,” he says, emerging with that original white Admiral jersey in his hands. Gabriel swapped with an England midfielder who only had four caps at the time - the 22-year-old Glenn Hoddle. “How many caps did he get in the end?” enquires Gabriel. “They used to say his style was not dissimilar to mine.”

Gabriel never left Bryne, playing there for 16 years in the club’s glory years when they twice finished second in the Norwegian top-flight. It was hard to get a move overseas in those days, and anyway, he says, it would have been difficult to leave the farm given his father’s health problems. Thirty years after he retired in 1986, Erling was to make his Bryne FK first team debut aged 15. Now at Borussia Dortmund, his third major club after Bryne, Erling has the precocity to become one of the all-time greats.

In 2001, Bryne agreed a performance-related £2.5 million deal to sell defender Ragnvald Soma to West Ham. The local boy, then Norway Under-21 captain, flopped badly in east London but Bryne had already spent the money they hoped to earn as Soma progressed. They were heading for bankruptcy and may well have gone that way had Erling’s father Alf not helped bail out the club. That was not the only benefit to Bryne of Alf’s return from the Premier League. He also opened the town’s first nightclub. Lastly, and just as important, his youngest son joined Bryne’s academy.

At the club, we meet the architect of Erling’s early career, the Bryne coach Alf Ingve Berntsen, 57, and his colleague Aleks Midtsian, 39, in whose Under-19s side, Erling first played at the age of 14. In the small clubhouse behind the main stadium of Bryne FK, whose men’s first team are currently bottom of the Norwegian second division, the discussion is how one best develops great potential. From a very early age there was no question that Erling was an exceptional talent – but they had seen those before at Bryne. The question was: how to help him flourish?

Berntsen is a deep thinker on the subject. He played for Norway Under-18s before a bad injury, and his brother Bjarne was a full Norway international who played in that 1980 game at Wembley. “Erling started playing when he was five and by the time he was seven he was too good for his own age-group,” Berntsen says. “He had to have more of a challenge but we did not want to take him away from his friends.”

What followed was a careful plan for the development of Erling that would allow him to stay with his peer group but also acquire the skills and the resilience necessary to make it as a professional. At the age of eight, the decision was made to move Erling, born in July 2000, into the cohort of 1999-born players, one year older. It was a strong group that eventually produced five professionals and staying in it meant that Erling could form lasting friendships.

“From the genetic point of view he was perfect,” Berntsen says. “The start-stop nature of football, being strong to compete and defend the ball - he could do that.” But just as crucial, he says, was Erling’s mentality. “It’s that which sets him apart,” Berntsen says. “I don’t think he cares who he plays against. He has an ability to learn and to go up new levels. For me that proves you are a good player.”

Erling was an exceptional handball player too, and was told by the famous Icelandic coach Thorir Hergeirsson, who lives in the area, and coaches the Norway women’s team, that he could have a career in that sport. The Bryne academy philosophy under Berntsen, also a schoolteacher, was that the club’s players should play different sports to improve their movement. 

“The handball court is smaller, the game is quicker and you have to think a bit faster,” says Berntsen. Also important was time to play football on Bryne’s indoor pitch during the winter months, independent of the coaches. Every Saturday it was available, and every Saturday, Erling and his friends would play for hours.

In club football Erling and his team-mates first played three against three games, building up gradually to nine against nine. He did not play 11-a-side until he was 12. It meant all players had more touches of the ball. In competitive games against other clubs, Bryne split the 1999-born group into two teams of equal ability. Their strongest XI would have won easily but Berntsen, whose twin sons Sander and Adrian played in the same age group, wanted Erling and his team-mates to be challenged.  

In the meantime, Erling was at school in Bryne, a 10-year-old so sure of his destiny as a professional footballer that he told his teacher that schoolwork would have to take second place. “I said ‘Okay, if you are going to be a footballer you owe me a ticket to one of your games,” said Erling’s year five teacher, Andreas Vollsund. Erling made good on the deal and last month Vollsund, 36, who is now the regional mayor, was in Dortmund to see an Erling hat-trick against Bochum in April. “Last year he came to see me in my office and gave me a shirt,” Vollsund says. “It was very nice to see him. He wrote on the shirt that I should increase local government funding for sport”.

By 14, Erling’s development was so rapid that he began to train with Bryne Under-19s. “We put him in the team because the Norway Under-15s coach was in town and wanted to see him play,” Midtsian says. “Inevitably, he scored.”

It was around that age that Erling’s extraordinary growth spurt began. “From 14-and-a-half, to 16-and-a-half, when he left Bryne, he grew 25 centimetres,” Berntsen says. “I used to say to him, ‘I feel like I can actually see you growing’.” That brought many aches and pains but Berntsen could see that along with the technical, tactical and psychological strengths that Erling had developed, the physical aspect was not far off. His older brother Astor was already a big lad. “Could we all tell that Erling would be a Champions League goalscorer? It would be b------- to say that,” Berntsen says. “But even by then we were quite sure he would have an international career.”

As for Erling’s parents, they were happy for Bryne to get on with the job. “Not once did Alf interfere”, Berntsen says. “It’s very unusual to have, as in Erling’s case, the whole package. We also wanted to teach him the importance of being on time, of behaving well on the pitch. We taught them all, ‘Be nice to your friends’. From that group we have Erling and five professional footballers and we also have plumbers, electricians, mechanics, those who are studying abroad. I am very proud of Erling but I am very proud of all the other 40 as well.”

At the age of 15, Erling made his Bryne FK first-team debut, playing in the second tier of professional football. He made 16 appearances, although it was hard at first and he has never, unlike his great-great uncle, scored a goal for the club’s first team. He did score plenty for the second team that played in Norway’s fourth tier. At the same time he had become a star of Norway’s junior national teams. Playing for the Under-15s against Sweden he scored directly from the kick-off. At 19, he scored nine in one game against Honduras for Norway Under-20s.

He left Bryne FK, aged 16-and-a-half. He chose Molde in part because the manager then was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, his father’s former international team-mate. “He could have moved 20 minutes up the road to Viking Stavanger but he wanted to challenge himself,” Berntsen says. “Molde is an hour-and-a-half flight away. Erling is robust and self-dependent.” At Molde, Berntsen estimates that the skinny teenage Erling added 20kgs of muscle and, as the goals came, all of Europe was watching him.

“He moved to Salzburg when he was 18 and he did not play in the first team [for Red Bull] at first,” Berntsen says. “Then there was the hat-trick on his Champions League debut. I was off camping on a school trip that week and when at last I turned my phone on the messages were coming in over and over.”

Mino Raiola, Erling’s longstanding agent, died just under two weeks ago and now it will fall to Alf to help oversee his son’s career. He is now separated from Erling's mother, Gry, and has two more children with a new partner, but the pair are grandparents to their daughter Gabrielle’s child. 

Alf has an office in Bryne and both parents are less keen on the media attention. Bryne is not a place where people are ostentatious about wealth. A mural of Erling on the wall of an old dairy opposite the train station - still a work in progress when The Telegraph visited - is adorned with a quotation in the regional style from the young striker about letting his performances speak for themselves.

It is being painted by the renowned local artist Pobel, a Norwegian Banksy, who has worked all over the world. Pobel starts work every night at 1.30am, painting with a repurposed fire extinguisher, and finishes as the first cars come into town around 5.30am. He agrees to be in our photographer’s picture so long as his anonymity is preserved. 

Some locals have complained about the paint on the pavement but Pøbel says that was intentional – symbolic of Erling's energy. “It’s about a young guy who was dedicated to his dream and has realised his goal,” Pøbel says. “I think that’s inspiring and it could apply to anyone.”

There is also another Bryne resident producing original Erling-inspired work. In a wood behind his house, we find Kjetil Barane, 52, with his chainsaws and rotary tools carving the trunk of an 82-year-old Norwegian spruce. He is on a commission to create a larger-than-life carving of Erling for a local business. 

“He’s a local hero,” says Barane, who is less famous than Pobel but just as passionate about his work. It will take him two and a half months to complete. The last wood sculpture he produced was of the King of Norway.

As a child growing up in Bryne, having come back from Norway, Erling had a soft spot for the three English teams his father played for but he supported Arsenal, and would wear the kit to training. His real love, however – or so everyone in Bryne says – is Bryne FK. 

Back in the clubhouse, the current Under-19s are gathering for training. The dressing rooms are off a corridor that features pictures for each year, of every team, at every age-group. Hundreds of smiling boys and girls in red shirts. 

As I look for Erling among the faces, a couple of the players come out for a chat and to help me find him. They consider him one of their own.