We are on safari in Norway… the Erling Haaland safari to be precise.
“You can score a goal where Erling Haaland scored a goal,” tour guide Geir Magnus Sandve tells us.
Twice a week, Sandve and his colleagues show people around Bryne FK, the hometown football club where Haaland played from the age of five.
The tours started after the 25-year-old Norwegian striker made history by winning the treble – three major trophies in a single season – with Manchester City in 2023.
Three years on, Haaland continues to make history, but this time with the Norwegian men’s football team, who will play in their first-ever World Cup quarterfinals, against England on Saturday.
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Sandve’s colleague, Endre Refnes, a volunteer in his 70s, tells us: “Tourists want to know lots of things and we try and answer them.”
In the dressing room, we are shown pictures of six-year-old Haaland – a little boy, short in height and slight in frame. A far cry from the 6ft 4 giant of a centre-forward we are more familiar with.
“He was very little until he was about 12 or 13, and then at about 15 or 16 he went away to Molde, and his mother was a cook, and she was feeding him,” Refnes says.
“He grew about 20cm in height in about one, one-and-a-half years. And then the muscle came.”
We also speak to his youth team coach, Espen Undheim, who tells me how unique Haaland was, even at the age of nine.
“What was special about him was his hunger for always being a striker,” says Undheim. “He always tried to find the gap between defenders, to be in the right position in front of the goal.”
“His mindset was, ‘Where can I be for scoring goals?’ No one else had the same kind of instinct, and I have never seen it since.”
Bryne, a town of less than 20,000 people, has giant murals of Haaland everywhere – whenever the striker moves to a new club, a new mural is painted.
One of him in a Borussia Dortmund shirt is plastered across the side of a building almost 50ft high.
It goes without saying that a trip to the murals is an integral part of the Haaland safari.
The locals are delighted with the worldwide interest.
“He went to school with my son for 10 years, just a normal boy, and now he’s a global superstar,” one woman tells us.
“We love him and we own him, all of us in Bryne, he is ours,” beams another.
When Haaland lines up against England on Saturday, Bryne’s stadium will be full with supporters watching the match on a big screen.
Every one of them is willing to write their very own Viking into history.
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