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After opening their FIFA U-20 World Cup Poland 2019™ campaign with two straight defeats, Norway entered their final match against Honduras needing to win, score a bucket load of goals, and pray other results went their way to have a chance of scraping through to the knockouts in third place.
Erling Haaland, who was still yet to break his tournament duck, set them on their way in the seventh minute by tapping in a Jens Petter Hauge cross. He raced clear to smash home a second in the 20th minute, and completed his hat-trick with a penalty soon after. Another goal before the half made it 5-0 and left him two off Adailton’s single-game record of six from Brazil’s 10-3 win over Korea Republic at Malaysia 1997.
Results elsewhere – in which Norway needed a number of sides to be trailing – weren’t going their way. Undeterred, Hauge and Haaland both netted before the 50th minute, with the towering forward’s sixth goal coming soon after. He broke Adailton’s record with a neat near-post flick, and powered home two more in the dying embers to see out a record-breaking 12-0 win.
Despite their huge victory, Norway exited the tournament with a handsome goal difference but one point off qualification. For Haaland, his nine-goal bonanza – which single-handedly earned him the adidas Golden Boot – was a record across any 11-a-side FIFA tournament but, remarkably, it wasn’t enough for the goal-greedy teen.
“It annoys me a little bit that I didn’t score with my last kick of the game,” he said following the match. “I’ll have to sit down and think a little bit about it and maybe I’ll work out what happened.”
In the weeks leading up to those finals, Haaland had just scored his first goal for FC Salzburg, who he moved to from Molde that January. Upon his return from Poland, the English-born forward plundered 28 goals in just 22 for the Austrians, including a memorable hat-trick on his UEFA Champions League debut against Genk.
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Those numbers attracted the interest of Borussia Dortmund, who snapped up the then-19-year-old in December 2019. He went on to score 86 goals in just 89 matches for the Black and Yellow before moving on to Manchester City in 2022.
There, he continued to guzzle goals at a rate of knots, sending records aplenty tumbling in his wake, while helping the Cityzens to two Premier League titles and their maiden Champions League success in 2023.
Senior international football has been no different; Haaland has scored goals for fun and rewritten the record books in the process. He netted his 33rd and 34th strikes in his 36th cap against Slovenia in October 2024, breaking the near-100-year-old scoring record set by Jorgen Juve.
Now on 48 goals in just 45 matches at the time of writing, Haaland recently hit five in a 11-1 demolition of Moldova in UEFA qualifying for the FIFA Word Cup 26™. Those who know him best, though, say his record-setting career hasn’t changed him from the U-20 days.
“The journey started in that game (against Honduras),” Leo Ostigard, who captained Norway in Poland, told The Athletic in 2021. “Because I know him so well, I sometimes forget he’s one of the best strikers in the world. 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.”
