Haaland Brought The Birkins And Norway Brought The Viking Row
Footballers used to arrive at tournaments with headphones, a wash bag and the same nervous airport tracksuit as everyone else. Erling Haaland appears to have packed an Hermès archive instead.
Norway’s striker is already hard to miss at six-foot-five, scoring goals like it bores him slightly, looking like someone designed him after watching too much Viking cinema. At this World Cup he has become a talking point before the whistle even blows, and not for his pressing stats.
The bags. Not just any bags either. Hermès HACs, Birkins, Louis Vuitton Keepalls, a Chanel suitcase and the kind of rare leather luggage that makes fashion TikTok stop scrolling and start zooming in like it is reviewing a controversial red card.
The star piece appears to be his Hermès “Endless Road” HAC 50, a taller Birkin cousin with a patchwork mountain-road print. There is also a limited-edition Caban Togo Multipockets HAC Birkin 50, a Kelly 35 Togo Black, an Evercalf Toile Cargo HAC 40 and a Goyard piece in Manchester City blue.
Haaland is not dressing like a footballer trying to become a fashion guy. He looks like a footballer who decided the team bus needed better accessories and moved on with his life.
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The reaction landed exactly where you’d expect. Fashion people are delighted. Some football fans are confused. Others have decided a man carrying a handbag is a national emergency, which says more about them than it does about Haaland.
Animal-rights group PETA has also entered the chat, criticising the use of animal skins in luxury bags and accusing the collection of sending the wrong message.
So yes, the luggage has become its own subplot. But it is only half the Norway story at this tournament.
While Haaland is turning arrival footage into fashion content, Norway’s supporters have stumbled into one of the most infectious crowd rituals anyone has seen in years.
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The Viking Row.
Fans sit in long lines, lean back in unison, pull their arms as if rowing through open water and chant “ro,” the Norwegian word for row, while a drum builds the tempo underneath. It sounds completely absurd until you see a full stadium doing it in unison. Then it clicks immediately.
After Norway beat Ivory Coast 2-1 in Dallas on an 86th-minute Haaland winner, captain Martin Ødegaard walked to the stands, took the drum from the supporters, placed it on the pitch and led the players through the whole thing.
Norway had just won its first World Cup knockout match. The celebration was ready for the internet before anyone had to ask.
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The Viking Row has long since stopped belonging only to Norway fans. It has appeared on a Boston escalator, inside a New York subway car, in Times Square and at a Mets game. In Dallas, police officers on the tarmac did it as Norway’s plane arrived.
That kind of spread means the moment has left football behind entirely.
The bags and the rowing chant should not really sit in the same story. One is luxury fashion, the other is collective silliness powered by a drum.
Together they have made Norway one of the most watchable sideshows of the tournament, a team people are following even when they have no particular reason to care about the result.
The football still matters most. Norway will need more than good luggage and crowd choreography to go deep. But World Cups are not remembered purely through scorelines.
They are remembered through the images that travel further than anyone planned, a six-foot-five striker wheeling through an airport carrying an Hermès HAC, and a stadium full of people pretending to row a Viking ship through downtown Dallas.
Norway waited nearly three decades to return to this tournament. They seem to be making the most of the welcome back.
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