Norway are in a World Cup quarter final for the first time in their history, and the man who dragged them there runs on cow liver, raw milk and a strict bedtime. Erling Haaland scored twice in the last eleven minutes to beat Brazil 2-1 in the round of 16, taking him to seven goals for the tournament, more than any other player, with England waiting in the last eight. He is 25, playing his first World Cup, and making it look routine. The football is freakish. The regimen behind it is stranger, more disciplined and, in places, surprisingly easy to copy.
The 6,000 calorie story, and what he actually eats
The most quoted number in football nutrition is Haaland's 6,000 calories a day, roughly two and a half times what a typical adult man needs. The figure has been repeated everywhere from Men's Health to national news wires, and it tracks with the workload of a 6ft 5in, 200 pound striker playing 50 plus matches a season. But the calories are the least interesting part. What matters is where they come from.
Almost none of it looks like sports nutrition. Breakfast is coffee with milk, eggs and sourdough bread. He shops at farm stores rather than supermarkets, coming home with ribeye, fillet, tomahawk and short rib, along with raw honey and raw milk. Later meals lean on quality protein, from pulled chicken tacos with vegetables made by Manchester City's chefs to sea bass, asparagus and egg fried rice. The plan was reportedly built with his father Alfie and a nutritionist, and the logic is simple: whole foods, sourced carefully, eaten in huge quantities.
His food rules: liver, heart and the magic potion
The habits that made headlines come from the 2022 documentary Haaland: The Big Decision, in which he showed off cuts of cow heart and liver and said: "You don't eat this, but I care about taking care of my body. I think eating quality food that is as local as possible is most important." He meant it. Organ meat from local grass fed cows remains a fixture of his diet, picked for nutrient density rather than shock value.
A few more rules from the same playbook. He avoids alcohol and drinks his water through a filtration system rather than straight from the tap. He buys raw, unpasteurised milk from farm shops, and teammates have described his kale infused milk blend, which he calls his "magic potion." Fish is a staple too. As an ambassador for Seafood from Norway, he put it plainly: "Fish is good for athletes because it has a good composition of proteins, healthy fats, and vitamins and minerals." Supplements, by contrast, are kept deliberately boring. At City the players' standard stack is vitamin D, probiotics and omega-3, and Haaland has taken to stirring collagen into his morning coffee.
The recovery obsession
Ask his teammates what separates him and they do not talk about finishing. "He does everything. Recovers; in the gym; 10 hours of treatment a day; ice baths; diet," Jack Grealish once said of him. The recovery menu includes ice baths, contrast sessions alternating sauna and cold, red light therapy and daily mobility work with his personal physio Mario Pafundi. At home he is reported to have installed his own cryotherapy chamber.
Sleep, though, is the real religion. "For me maybe the most important thing in life is sleep, not only a lot, but good sleep," he has said. In practice that means aiming for an early bedtime around 10:30pm, cutting screens in the evening, wearing orange tinted blue light blocking glasses after dark to protect melatonin, and tracking it all with an Oura ring. He has even experimented with mouth taping at night. Mornings start with a walk outside for daylight and fresh air to anchor his body clock. His own framing is disarmingly modest: "Why not, you know, for my life and also my career, why not try to optimize some easy small things as much as I can?"
What you can copy
You cannot copy the cryotherapy chamber or the private chef, and nobody is suggesting you start on raw milk and cow heart tomorrow. But most of Haaland's edge is cheap or free:
- Build meals around whole foods and quality protein, as local and unprocessed as you can manage.
- Set a hard bedtime and treat sleep as training, not what is left over after it.
- Wear blue light blocking glasses in the evening and get outside for morning light.
- Keep supplements simple: vitamin D, omega-3 and, if you like, collagen in your coffee.
- Use cold water, whether an ice bath or a cold shower, as a recovery ritual.
- Drink plenty of water, filtered if you prefer, and skip the alcohol.
On Saturday he laces up his signature Nike Phantom 6 boots against England for a place in the semi finals. Whatever happens in that game, the liver stays on the menu, the glasses go on at sunset, and the lights go out at 10:30.
The rest of his routine comes down to small, cheap habits repeated every single day, plus the boots he does it all in.