Espen Undheim clings to a clip of 10-year-old Erling Haaland playing football at his first club Bryne FK. A pre-teen facsimile of the current Haaland captured for posterity in this grainy video clip, the Norway star doesn’t have the same signature hairstyle these days. Back then, he was very small — smaller than others his age — Undheim pointed out. But at the age of 10, Haaland has something he still has: his sense of timing and his positioning on the pitch.
Early on Monday, Haaland used these skills to elude Brazilian defenders and put two goals into the net, sending Norway into the quarterfinals of the FIFA World Cup. In doing so, Haaland propelled himself upwards in the race for the Golden Boot, where he is now tied at the top with Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe.
“You can see the runs he does now. I have videos of him when he was 10 and 11. You can see the same conditions and the same runs,” Undheim had told The Indian Express in 2025.
Undem was Haaland’s first coach, having worked at Norwegian football club Bryn FK for 25 years. The boy was eight years old at an after-school football program for boys at a humble club in the south of Norway.
At Bryan, not just Undem, everyone else remembered Haaland, who currently stands at 6’5″, was physically smaller than his peers at that age.
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“Now he has strength. He wasn’t as strong or big then. But he developed the ability to be in the right place,” said Sondre Norheim, who was Haaland’s teammate during his first-team days at Bayern.
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A stickler for positioning, Haaland is acutely aware of where his opponents are on the pitch. When Haaland was playing his first game for Norway, playing for the U15 team as a 14-year-old, he scored against Sweden from the kickoff because he noticed that the keeper was standing 12 meters outside his line.
Espen Undem speaks as he nears the club grounds in the background. (Express Photo Amit Kamath)
An older girl, who went on to play as a defender for some of the bigger clubs, and a male player who was 185cm tall, Undem told how Haaland was pushed during training sessions.
That’s why even at the age of 10, Haaland was obsessed with being in the right place. Whatever he lacked, he tried to make up for it with his brain.
“Even when he was nine, he would say, ‘I have to start first, I have to be a meter to the left.’ You don’t usually see this in kids that age. He was always thinking, ‘Where should I be now?’” recalls Undem of the boy who trained three days a week for four years before becoming a regular at the club by the age of 15. He was always hungry for goals.”
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That hunger drove the young Haaland to train more than anyone else. Before the team meets for a training session, Haaland trains alone for an hour. Just dribbling and shooting. On weekends, when everyone else was off, he would train for another four hours by himself. “He practically lived in our indoor arena. His mom gave him some food and water. And that was it,” Undem said.
Erling Haaland for Brian in his youth football days (Courtesy: Brian FK)
Haaland also hit the genetic lottery because of a footballer father and mother who were Norwegian national heptathlon champions, who passed to him in speed.
Under Undem, Holland expanded its technical capabilities. “He wasn’t a good technical player. You can still see it today. When he was a young player, he couldn’t use his right leg. That leg was completely dead. Only the left worked: shooting from the left, receiving from the left,” said Undem, who played with Haaland’s father Alf-Inge Haaland in his youth.
“When he was seven or eight years old, he was just getting in front of the goal. Not working back. We worked a lot on his body position. We made him think about shooting when the defender or the goalkeeper is on the wrong foot. We made him work on his second-last touch before he shoots.”
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As he grew older, Haaland’s height began to rise in line with his peers. But he was still bone, more bone than flesh. This changed when he moved to Norwegian club Molde at the age of 16. There, he grew by eight centimeters during his two years at Molde. He also put on weight and muscle thanks to Molde’s cook Torbjörg Haugen (affectionately called Tante by the players) and the club’s fitness coach Borre Stenslid.
“He grew a lot in two years at Molde. He needed a lot of food. He would even ask to take food home. I gave it to him, because I saw that he needed it,” Tante once told a German media outlet. DW.
“He was eating like a horse in those days. A skinny kid, but still just skin and bones,” Steinslid added. DW conversation
Haaland worked with Stenslid for hours in the gym every day and greatly enhanced his other abilities at his first club. The things he picked up during that stint are still in his routine, which now includes consuming 6000 calories a day.
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The end result, as teams at the World Cup are looking for, is a behemoth in front of goal that refuses to be pushed around.