Holland brought Birkins and Norway brought Viking Row.

Football players would arrive at tournaments with headphones, wash bags and, like everyone else, nervous airport tracksuits. It appears that Erling Haaland has packed an Hermès collection instead.

The six-foot-five Norwegian striker is already hard to miss, the goalscoring looks like it’s boring him a bit, looking like someone designed it after watching too many Vikings movies. In this World Cup, he has become the talk of the town even before the whistle, and not just for his vital statistics.

bag. Not just any bag either. Hermes HAC, Birkins, Louis Vuitton Keepalls, A chanel suitcase And the kind of rare leather stuff that makes you stop scrolling fashion TikToks and start zooming in as if it’s reviewing a controversial red card.

The star piece appears to be his Hermès “Endless Road” HAC50, a taller Birkin cousin with a patchwork mountain-road print. There’s also a limited-edition Caban Togo Multipockets HAC Birkin 50, a Kelly 35 Togo Black, an Evercafe Toile Cargo HAC 40 and a Goyard piece in Manchester City Blue.

Haaland isn’t dressing like a footballer trying to be a fashion guy. He looks like a footballer who decided the team bus needed better stuff and moved on with his life.

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bag game takes hold

The reaction was exactly where you’d expect. People associated with fashion are happy. Some football fans are confused. Others have decided that carrying a man’s handbag is a national emergency, which says more about them than it does about Haaland.

Animal-rights group PETA has also joined the chat, criticizing the use of animal skins in luxury bags and accusing it of sending the wrong message.

So yes, the stuff becomes its own subplot. But that’s only half of Norway’s story at this tournament.

While Haaland is turning arrival footage into fashion material, Norway supporters are stuck in one of the most infectious crowd rituals seen in years.

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Viking Row.

Fans sit in long rows, leaning back together, stretching their arms as if sailing across open water and chanting “rø”, the Norwegian word for row, while a drum below makes the motion. It sounds completely absurd until you see a packed stadium doing it simultaneously. Then it clicks immediately.

Norway beat Ivory Coast 2-1 in Dallas thanks to Holland’s 86th-minute winner, after which captain Martin Odegaard went into the stands, took a drum from supporters, placed it on the pitch and led the players throughout the affair.

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Norway got its moment

Viking Row has long ceased to concern only Norwegian fans. It has appeared on a Boston escalator, inside a New York subway car, in Times Square, and at a Mets game. In Dallas, police officers on the street did just as the Norwegian plane arrived.

Such a proliferation means that this moment has completely overtaken football.

The bag and rowing mantras shouldn’t really sit in the same story. One is luxury fashion, the other is drum-driven mass stupidity.

Together they have made Norway one of the most watched sideshows of the tournament, a team people follow even when they have no particular reason to care about the result.

Football still matters most. Norway will need more than good props and crowd choreography to go deep. But the World Cup is not remembered only through the scoreline.

He is remembered through images that travel far beyond anyone’s plans, a six-foot-five-inch Stryker walking through an airport carrying a Hermes HAC, and a stadium full of people pretending to pilot a Viking ship through downtown Dallas.

Norway had to wait for almost three decades to return to this tournament. Looks like they’re making the most of the comeback.