Paal Arne 'Paco' Johansen can be forgiven a knowing smile at 's scoring feats at the . After all, Haaland may have hit the net seven times in four appearances in North America, but Johansen was there on the evening he managed nine goals in a single fixture on the world stage in 2019. That was at the FIFA U-20 World Cup Poland 2019™ where Haaland, then 18, struck nine times in a 12-0 hammering of Honduras. “He was mostly annoyed that it wasn't 10 because he had a great chance he missed!” says Johansen, Norway’s coach that day, with a grin. Indeed, that rare hunger for goals had been the very first thing Johansen noticed about Haaland when, just after his appointment as Norway Under-18 coach, he made a scouting trip to Bryne, the striker’s first club, in February 2017.
“He had colourful tights on under his shorts so it was very easy to spot him in the floodlights,” begins Johansen. “They were playing small-sided games and every time he or his team-mates scored, he was so happy – he’d get down on his knees or run out of the pitch cheering the goal. His joy for goals and his hunger for the next goal was so impressive. I haven't seen anything like it and that’s the Erling I saw every day. I worked with him for those two years and I still see it – the enormous joy for goals from him or his team-mates.”
Johansen, who now works with the UEFA game insights unit, was Haaland’s first national-team coach, accompanying him from the U-18s through to the U-20s. Haaland scored 23 goals for him in that time and his recollections shed light on the Manchester City striker’s early steps in international football.
The first “breakthrough” as Johansen puts it, came during qualification for the UEFA U-19 EURO final tournament in 2018. In their four-team qualifying tournament, Norway began with a 6-1 defeat by the Netherlands. Haaland, by now a Molde player, soon made amends in the next game against Germany. “I remember we had to win and he scored twice and was absolutely brilliant," says Johansen. "I think that was the big breakthrough from him, winning 5-2 against Germany. He scored two but could have had five and then he scored three against Scotland when we won the last game [5-4] and went on to the tournament.”
During that period, one of Johansen’s assistants, Haakon Vibe-Lund would do individual work with Haaland on his finishing. He explains: “Haakon put on quite hard exercises so there was a reasonable chance of failing on certain tasks. Erling would maybe score seven from of 10 difficult situations we gave him and when he didn't succeed, you could really see the animal you see scoring goals. It was that frustrated animal not being fed the goals he wanted!”
And what were his strengths and weaknesses then? “He had a great left foot,” he says, noting that, by contrast, he scored “only once with his head and not many with his right foot”. Hence a focus on developing his “ability to score with all parts of the body. And then it was a lot about positioning, being patient enough, keeping the angles open, being ready to attack the ball.”
By the time of the aforementioned U-20 World Cup, Haaland had become a Salzburg player. Indeed, he arrived at that tournament rusty after starting just one league game for the Austrian club (and scoring in it) following his January 2019 transfer. He failed to score in Norway's first two games, both defeats. With his nine goals against Honduras, though, everything changed. “After that World Cup, his international club career really took off,” says Johansen, remembering the streak of 28 goals for Salzburg before Christmas which secured his move to Borussia Dortmund.
Today, Haaland has 62 goals from 54 internationals – the product not only of his own extraordinary talent but having a strong team around him, blessed with other attacking talents.
As Johansen explains, this is the result of a long process that began with the installation of artificial pitches across the country around the turn of the Millennium. Then came the creation in 2009 of a national centre of football excellence, an unit established by Norsk Toppfotball, the union overseeing the leagues. It was tasked with collecting insights from other countries and feeding them back to the Norwegian football community. Johansen himself visited four similar-sized nations – Croatia, Czechia, Portugal and the Netherlands – on fact-finding trips some 15 years ago. Out of that came a new playing style not typically associated with Norwegian football. A revamp of the academy system in 2015 then helped develop the players needed for that.
Johansen elaborates: “I think with being quite a small football nation – and we were ranked number 29 in Europe at U-19 when I started in that job in 2017 – we saw that we needed sometimes to defend and counter against the big nations. But we also knew that if we wanted to progress as a football nation, we had to have the ball more, play more in the opposition half, and create more shots on goal, etc.”
Hence the satisfaction he took from the style of Sunday’s , when Norway took the game to their fancied opponents – the product, he says, of having under-age teams “playing offensive football and dictating games. I think watching the Brazil game, that was what I was most proud of because that process started maybe in 2010."
As for Haaland, he considers his old pupil to be the "perfect" striker for this style and adds that the manner of his first goal against Brazil was something else years in the making. “I remember working with him on situations like the first goal he scored against Brazil – with him being on the back post and putting the balls for him on the ground or in the air.
“That's the goal he really wants to score because he wasn't that good at those positioning skills or in the air, but that was a perfect goal. And that's only through training. It's the hunger. It's hour after hour, with the Norwegian national teams and in Bryne, in Molde, in Salzburg, in Dortmund and Man City. He was really keen on scoring goals like that and now you see him do it more and more.” And on the greatest stages of all.
Sources: FIFA Official
