I opened a video that had nearly a hundred million views. Erling Haaland, Manchester City's striker, was being compared to a spring onion in a thirty-second edit. In the comments, the same word kept coming back: «babygirl».
In fandom lexicon, a babygirl is often a famous man who, despite an imposing physique, a threatening air, or a villain's role, inspires a kind of almost protective affection. The term had already been circulating in k-pop and TV-series fandoms before spreading to actors like Pedro Pascal and Colin Farrell. In Haaland it found a near-perfect subject.
On the pitch he is six foot five of Scandinavian power: seven goals at his first World Cup, two of them against Brazil, knocked out in the round of sixteen. Off the pitch he photographs himself with Snapchat's pink ears and bunny nose, poses with a white towel draped over his head, and shows up in Texas in a cowboy hat and boots. His luggage includes printed silk pyjamas. After Norway's elimination against England he went to dance to Flo Rida at a club in Miami.
The word «babygirl» performs above all a separation: it divides the body from the person. Haaland's body is an industrial fact, built to solve the problem of scoring with the same efficiency one would bring to a logistics problem. The person that body projects online is, instead, a twenty-five-year-old who communicates through crooked selfies, minimal captions, and gifs.
When the spring-onion video went viral, Haaland responded with a gif of a dog slowly rolling up a car window. It was the right reply: engaged enough to show he'd understood the meme, detached enough not to ruin it. He knows the code better than most of the people using it in the comments.
The same happened after the win against Brazil. Haaland photographed himself in the dressing room and wrote only: «Well well well». Over the course of the tournament, searches for his name on TikTok rose by more than 300 per cent in the United Kingdom; searches for «Haaland best moments» by 1,300 per cent. His Instagram profile went from roughly forty to more than sixty million followers. Twenty million new people in a matter of weeks is not just a sports metric: it signals the transformation of a footballer into a cultural figure.
His relationship with Jude Bellingham also helped make Haaland readable outside football. The two played together at Borussia Dortmund between 2020 and 2022, and videos from that period — Bellingham leaping into his arms, Haaland holding him tight, heads and bodies drawing close during goal celebrations — began recirculating ahead of the quarter-final between Norway and England.
Fandom treated them as the protagonists of a story already written: former teammates turned rivals, friendship, rivalry, separation and reunion. On Archive of Our Own, the major international fanfiction platform, the tag dedicated to men's football was flooded with thousands of new works during the World Cup. The interpretations reached as far as omegaverse — the subgenre built on an alternative biology and on hierarchies between alphas, betas, and omegas: is Jude an omega? Will Haaland manage to resist his pheromones for ninety minutes? The question was genuinely asked.
Haaland did not directly participate in the fanfiction, but he made no attempt to police the way the public tells his story either. When asked about his new popularity in the United States, he said Americans struck him as «kind of hilarious». Funny, a bit absurd. Once again, the most fitting response: acknowledging the joke without explaining it.
The internet, meanwhile, kept the second track open. There is the Haaland with the gaping mouth and the bull neck, the one with a skull warped by photo edits, the one staring into nothing at a press conference who became a reaction image for any awkward situation. Tom the cat, Bugs Bunny, and various dogs have been redrawn with his blond hair swept back. The haircut has by now achieved the autonomy of a symbol: it detaches from the body and travels to other hosts.
The two images do not contradict each other. They reinforce each other. The monster who posts the bunny filter is more interesting than the monster alone and the bunny alone. «Babygirl» only works when there is a wide enough gap between a man's public appearance and the behaviour attributed to him. Haaland possesses one of the widest gaps available: he is simultaneously a goal machine and a guy who responds to spring-onion memes with a gif.
Above all, he has had the intelligence not to close that gap. He has not explained the persona, not claimed credit for his own self-deprecation, and has not tried to turn «babygirl» into an official marketing operation. He has let the two versions coexist.
The dogs in blonde wigs were already online, racking up tens of thousands of likes, while he was still celebrating. The word was circulating without needing his permission. But every time someone used it, they carried with them that window slowly rolling up and that single line written in the dressing room. Internet words die when they get explained. Haaland, at least that much, seems to have understood.