How Erling Haaland’s ‘incredible’ physique has powered him to the very top

What do you see when you look at the above picture of Erling Haaland, originally posted on his Instagram account last month?

For some, it’s an image that showcases just how extraordinary an athlete he is: the sheer size of the muscles in his legs. The definition that makes them look like they’re popping out from beneath his skin.

For others, it’s simply an illustration of how an elite athlete should look: lean and muscular. Nothing more, nothing less.

“It is what you should expect to see from a good athlete,” Anthony Turner, a professor of strength and conditioning at Middlesex University, tells The Athletic. “To varying degrees, if you put other professional footballers in that pose in that light, you probably could recreate that… Haaland is just maybe a bit more well-defined than others.”

“When you lift the leg up in that manner, every single muscle in that leg is firing,” says Phil Learney, a sports scientist and the founder of the Advanced Coaching Academy. “You see this with bodybuilders on stage — they lift their feet off the floor and all the muscles separate, then they slam their leg on the floor to keep that separation in place.”

Others, including Neil Parsley, a physical performance coach for Olympic athletes and footballers, are more impressed: “If there’s no real filter on that photograph then that is incredible… you can see virtually every muscle – you could do a physiology class on his legs. That muscle on his inner thigh, that’s his adductor muscles. You usually only see that on bodybuilders.”

Whatever your viewpoint, there is no denying that Haaland’s physique is impressive, especially when you consider where he started from.

“When he was young, he was fast but he wasn’t so fast and he was quite small,” said Tord Johnsen Salte, one of Haaland’s team-mates at Bryne, when speaking to The Athletic in May 2022.

“So he had to learn to adapt to being less physical than the others, he was so good at getting through on goal every time, even though he wasn’t faster than the defenders. Now he is a monster and can do both.”

Described then as a “skinny kid”, it was only once Haaland moved from his first club Bryne to Molde at the age of 16 that his physique started to change. He packed on 15 kilograms (2.3st) of muscle during his two years there, before being snapped up by Austrian Bundesliga champions Red Bull Salzburg in 2019.

Now 23 years old and staking a claim to become the greatest goalscorer the Premier League has seen, Haaland’s physical appearance is almost unrecognisable from what it was. One reason for that, which most agree on, is his genetic makeup, with a father who played more than 200 games as a professional footballer and a mother who was once the Norwegian heptathlon champion.

“Both sports require fast-twitch muscle fibres,” says Learney. “There’s an aerobic…