🎤 The "Kygo Jo" rap song: a 15-year-old Haaland resurfaces
Long before he was breaking Premier League scoring records, a 15-year-old Erling Haaland recorded a rap song with two Norway under-17 teammates, Erik Botheim and Erik Tobias Sandberg. Calling themselves "Flow Kingz," with Haaland rapping under the stage name "Lyng," the trio released a homemade music video for a track called "Kygo Jo" — trading verses in Norwegian over a sunny, snappy beat, with Haaland shown tending a barbecue, jumping on a trampoline, and posing on a tiny car.
The video sat quietly online for a decade — until the 2026 World Cup, when clips of it exploded across TikTok and X. It has since passed 21 million views on YouTube, turning a teenage in-joke into one of the tournament's most-shared pieces of content.
🎧 Kygo's remix — a promise kept after the Brazil match
Fellow Norwegian star DJ and producer Kygo caught wind of the resurfaced song and made a public promise: if Haaland scored against Brazil in the Round of 16, he'd release his own version. Haaland delivered a brace in Norway's stunning 2-1 win over the five-time champions — and two days later, Kygo Jo (Kygo Remix) arrived, complete with epic buildups and bass drops over the original track.
The remix shot to number 1 on Spotify Norway. Haaland called it a "made it moment" — a teenage joke turned into a real collaboration with one of Norway's biggest music exports, timed perfectly to his country's greatest World Cup result.
😂 The meme roundup: Majin Buu and White Chicks
Majin Buu: Comparisons between Haaland and the towering, wild-haired Dragon Ball Z villain Majin Buu first appeared online back in 2021, but surged to new heights during the 2026 World Cup as his performances put him back in the spotlight. Fans flooded Twitter, Instagram and TikTok with edits of Haaland "firing energy blasts" and "turning defenders into chocolate." Haaland leaned into it himself, replying on Instagram: "I mean I don't disagree" — a post that racked up nearly 130,000 likes in days.
White Chicks: Ahead of Norway's Round of 16 clash with Brazil, fans superimposed Haaland and Brazil's Vinícius Júnior onto the famous dance scene from the 2004 comedy White Chicks, with the two players standing in for Terry Crews' and Marlon Wayans' characters lip-syncing to Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles." The edit went viral instantly. Haaland responded by suggesting he and Vinícius should film their own version; Terry Crews himself weighed in publicly, calling it "a perfect combination of entertainment meeting sports."
🔎 Google gave him his own search Easter egg
Typing "Erling Haaland" into Google during the tournament triggers a custom animation: a small icon appears on the results page, and clicking it fills the screen with Viking longships rowing across in rhythm with drumbeats — a nod to his Norwegian heritage and the Viking rowing-boat goal celebration that became synonymous with Norway's run. It's a level of recognition no other player received during the 2026 World Cup.
Why did Haaland become the internet's biggest football star this tournament?
It's the combination that made it work: a genuinely funny piece of real teenage history (not a manufactured moment), a beloved home-country collaborator in Kygo willing to play along, memes that were affectionate rather than mean-spirited, and a player self-aware enough to engage with all of it instead of ignoring it. On the pitch, Haaland delivered Norway's best-ever World Cup — their first-ever Quarter-final — finishing 3rd in the Golden Boot race with 7 goals. Off the pitch, he became something rarer: a football star whose reach extended into music charts, meme culture, and search engines all at once.