“Farmers didn’t play football,” says the lifelong supporter Geir Magnus Sandve of the fact that his beloved Bryne FK were not founded until 1926. These are momentous times for the Norwegian football club in the agricultural south-western region of Jæren. Last season they were promoted back to the Eliteserien, the top division, for the first time in 22 years in front of a capacity crowd of 5,000 and excitement is building before the start of the season at the end of March. Fans hope they can return to heights not seen since they won the cup in Oslo in 1987 – which would have been considered the club’s crowning achievement were it not for the rise of Erling Haaland.
In the brittle, banter-fuelled world of English football, it might feel as if Haaland’s star is waning this season. It is easy to forget he is second only to Mohamed Salah in the Premier League Golden Boot after winning it in the previous two seasons. At the age of 24 he is the all-time Norwegian national team top scorer (38 in 39 matches), and a Champions League, Premier League and Austrian league winner. The school playground of my six-year-old son, Ernest, is no longer consumed by the great Messi-Ronaldo debate but instead is alive to the shouts of “HAAAAARRR-LAND”.
It’s a thrill, then, to take Ernest and the rest of my family to Norway’s latest attraction: the Haaland safari. Bryne FK have even arranged for us to stay in the “Haaland suite” of the local Hotell Jæren, where a mural on the wall of the living space depicts Erling at different stages of his career, starting as the milk-haired boy playing for Bryne FK. My wife, Hayley, and I walk with our children from the hotel through cold blasts of North Sea air to meet the club’s marketing manager, Bjørn Hagerup Røken, and his brother Frode Hagerup, who is on the board and works in local tourism – at the windswept Bryne stadium.
With them are some pension‑age fans, including Sandve, who volunteer to take tourists around on the Haaland safari among other tasks from cleaning the stadium to stocking the shop. “We know the club,” says another, Endre Refsnes. “And we love the club.”
This summer, tourists from the British cruise ship Iona that docks in Stavanger have a choice: visit the natural wonder of this area of Norway, Preikestolen (the pulpit rock), or be led around a frayed football ground and the other Haaland safari stopping points for which participants are charged 750 Norwegian kroner (£54). The tour, available in English and Norwegian, started as a bit of fun a couple of years ago but it is becoming part of a serious stab at putting Bryne FK and by extension the town itself on the map. Frode says Manacor, Mallorca, where Rafael Nadal is from, and Madeira, the home of Cristiano Ronaldo, are models.
We start at Jærhallen, an indoor training facility rebuilt a few years ago and opened by a surprise visit from Haaland (local kids training at the time didn’t believe it was him). It was initially built to keep players dry because this area of Norway is milder but also wetter. It is open every day for anyone to come and hone their skills – and it is free. Inside, a recently signed young player from Nigeria is pinging balls across the hall.
Haaland is the son of the tough-tackling former Nottingham Forest, Leeds and Manchester City midfielder Alf-Inge Haaland, and lived in England until the family returned to their homestead of Bryne in 2003. He was fast-tracked to play for Bryne at 15, famed for a turn of pace, intelligent runs and lethal finishing after thriving under the tutelage of the youth coach Alf Ingve Berntsen, whose inclusive, person-focused approach led to outstanding results. Endre shows us the drylaveggen, rebuilt in tribute to the wooden wall where young Erling would try to hit the exact same point over and over again. The word “dryla” is common only in Norway’s south-west. “It typically refers to hitting or kicking something with tremendous force,” writes Lars Sivertsen, in his biography of Haaland. “The most accurate and phonetically pleasing English translation is probably ‘to wallop’ something …”
Before we leave the Jærhallen, Endre points out the enormous pictures of Haaland and Tuva Hansen, who plays for Bayern Munich’s women’s team, alongside a caption in Norwegian: “We will sow the joy of football, nurture talent, and harvest miracles.” This might make Haaland sound like a freakishly big prize-winning vegetable. But it isn’t just sloganeering. The club’s philosophy ties in with the agricultural character of the Jæren region. Work to turning the rock-strewn hillsides into arable land using only spades, before heavy machinery, was backbreaking, and contributed to the mythos of Jæren as a place where hard work was a prerequisite.
Bryne FK have a section of the stadium where farmers can drive their tractors in to watch the game. When the club played Viking FK in the 2001 cup final in Oslo, the Norwegian press reported how a convoy of tractors had travelled laden with cucumbers, cabbage and broccoli to deliver to people they met along the way, before parading through the capital, turning it a sea of red and white. Yet the fans’ plan to use sheep bells to create a menacing din during the game didn’t work, and Bryne lost 3-0.
Haaland, despite his superyacht-mooching multimillionaire footballer image, still connects with this side of Bryne. His posts about drinking his “magic potion”, milk fresh from the farm, have given local dairies a boost. Growing up, Haaland drove tractors on the farm of his uncle Gabriel Hoyland, a former star player for Bryne who these days is a potato farmer with a passion for Burnley FC. A picture of Haaland on his uncle’s blue tractor a few seasons back has become so iconic in these parts that I am advised to visit the same style of tractor – a Super Dexta made by Fordsons in the 1960s – in a dedicated space at the fascinating Vitengarden museum. When I visit the next day, there are some old boys looking at the older models as if ogling classic sports cars.
We arrive at the club shop. A cluster of Manchester City shirts hang among the red and white merch – the locals buy City shirts, but not so much the tourists, who want an authentic home shirt. Like all Norwegian clubs, Bryne are owned by the members, but commerce is still vital to their existence and they have a natural entrepreneurial streak to woo business: in the 1980s they were the first Norwegian club to create a VIP area. Now Bryne are back in the top division, investment is needed, but Bjørn says they still have to be “smart in the transfer market”. The rise of Haaland internationally has coincided with a revival of fortunes for Bryne FK. When Haaland was sold to City, the club were compensated to the tune of 10m NOK (£710,900). Some hope Real Madrid will one day swoop for him, meaning another payday for the club, particularly now he has signed a nine-year contract.
We head out of the club shop and take a look at the playing surface. “We are only one of few teams in Norway in the top level that are playing on natural grass,” says Sandve. The groundsman is – what else? – a farmer, “so he knows how to do it”, says Endre. The grass will soon be put to the test, when Bryne kick off the new season against last year’s champions, Bodø/Glimt, on 30 March.
After playing Where’s Erling? while looking at old youth-team squad photos in the clubhouse, we head into town, passing the high school Haaland went to en route to Forum Jæren, the tallest building in Bryne. From the top you can see the sea, the mountains, the whole town. We look down at the mural of Haaland on the side of a former dairy by the Bryne-born street artist Pøbel, who used a fire extinguisher filled with yellow paint to create it. It is the first thing visitors on the train see as they arrive. We pass a more modest piece, a tribute to Alf-Inge Haaland, designed by Frode’s 12-year-old son, before we head to the last attraction – a mural depicting a cartoon Erling affecting his trademark meditation celebration, positioned next to Wen Hua House, his favourite Chinese restaurant, where you can buy a Haaland special (sweet and sour chicken and rice).
It is hard to tally the small, parochial details of Haaland’s hometown with his gargantuan stature around the world. I notice for the rest of the trip that every shop sells Haaland-branded ice lollies, and talk to Ståle Økland, a former politician and writer whose father, Arne Larsen Økland, played as a star striker for Bryne in the 1970s and 80s. “I remember I was in Japan last year,” he says. “We were up in the mountains hiking. When we met some of the locals, they asked us where we came from, and we said Norway. And the first thing they said was: ‘Haaland.’”
