Erling Haaland’s viral World Cup sprint has spawned a wave of memes mocking his size versus his speed, but FIFA’s own tracking data shows the joke is rooted in something genuinely freakish. During Norway’s group game against Iraq, the Norwegian striker was clocked at 36.5 km/h chasing down defender Zaid Tahseen, a moment captured in a screenshot that’s since become the internet’s favourite “Haaland Running” reaction image.
That speed puts him among the fastest players at the tournament, only a shade behind pace merchants like Kylian Mbappé at 37.6 km/h and Australia’s breakout star Jordan Bos. What makes it stranger, and funnier to the meme-makers, is that Haaland is doing this at 6ft4 and roughly 90kg, a frame that by every conventional football logic should make him one of the slower players on the pitch, not one of the quickest.
The real story isn’t top speed at all, though. It’s acceleration. Sports science breakdowns of his sprint mechanics show Haaland covers the first 10 metres in around 1.80 seconds using just three strides, quicker off the mark than elite defenders like Virgil van Dijk (1.88s), William Saliba (1.85s) and Cristian Romero (1.82s). That burst is what actually produced the viral screenshot, Tahseen simply couldn’t match the initial explosion, and the gap between them became the exact frame that turned into a meme.
Biomechanically, this shouldn’t really work. Taller, heavier athletes typically take longer to build up ground force and momentum, but analysts point to Haaland’s unusually low centre of gravity through the hips and shortened ground-contact time on each stride as the reason he can accelerate like a much smaller sprinter. His running posture shifts noticeably in the opening steps of a sprint too, dropping and driving forward for extra stability, which is part of why his stride looks so stiff and almost robotic on camera, and that visual is exactly what the memes are exaggerating.
There’s an energy-management angle here as well. Haaland spends long stretches of matches walking rather than jogging, averaging around 4km of walking per Premier League game, conserving effort so he can unleash these three-step explosions at the exact moment they’re needed. It’s the same pattern that shows up in his World Cup sprint data, long spells of minimal movement punctuated by short, devastating bursts, which is precisely the contrast that makes the running meme land so well online.
FIFA’s tournament-wide speed rankings add useful context too. The official physical tracking data from the opening rounds had Jordan Bos briefly ahead of Haaland on raw top speed, with Jules Koundé later topping the overall charts, but none of the players above him in pure km/h terms are built anything like a 6ft4 striker. Pace at that size is rare enough that pundits have started describing him as football’s answer to a lab-built sprinter, built for short, violent bursts rather than sustained top-end speed.
None of this makes the meme any less funny, if anything it explains why it spread so fast. Internet culture tends to gravitate toward things that look physically wrong, and a giant striker moving like a 100m runner while chasing down a much smaller defender is exactly that kind of visual contradiction. The science backs up what fans were already laughing at, Haaland’s running style really shouldn’t be possible for someone his size, and yet the data confirms it clearly is.
Image credit: Jacek Stanislawek / CC BY-SA 4.0
In this article: Erling Haaland, FIFA World Cup, Norway men’s national association football team, Iraq men’s national football team, Zaid Tahseen, Kylian Mbappé, Jordan Bos, Australia men’s national soccer team, FIFA, Virgil van Dijk, William Saliba, Cristian Romero, Jules Koundé, Premier League. Generated by Wikidata Schema Link Builder.
