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Manchester City striker Erling Haaland is a complete freak of nature. He breaks records and snatches souls everywhere he goes.
With Red Bull Salzburg he became the first teenager to ever score a goal in 5 straight Champions League matches. He then led the Champions League in scoring in the 2020-21 season. Then he jumped to the Bundesliga and won Player of the Season before moving to Manchester City and absolutely dominating the Premier League and breaking records in his first month.
A recent report from the Daily Mail about Erling Haaland’s sleep routine and diet reveal some major keys to his success. Erling Haaland works hard at staying fresh, and by that I mean he rigidly follows the sleep advice we’re all told but completely ignore.
Erling Haaland Reveals His Freakish Sleep Routine And Diet
For Erling Haaland, this is more than just a ‘sleep routine’ because he works hard at ‘perfecting routines’ according to the Daily Mail:
He wears orange-tinted, blue-light glasses in the hours before drifting off as they block out high energy emitted from natural light and digital screens.
Sleep is scheduled to start between 10pm and 10.30pm most nights, with electronic devices switched off way before then. Haaland is often not contactable, his phone on ‘do not disturb’ to avoid distractions.
He scores well on regular blood tests and with the Oura Ring, a device you wear on a finger which measures sleep quality, temperature trends, stress and heart rate.
Haaland has been compared to Zlatan Ibrahimovic for style and charisma but Callum Walsh, former head of sports science at Newcastle United, made a different comparison. ‘It is the extreme version,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘The sort of level of Cristiano Ronaldo — every single aspect thought of.’
So he gets good sleep… With some weird orange glasses and a magic ring… Great! I could do that but I still wouldn’t be the best striker player in the world right now.
Erling also eats a comical amount of food to fuel his engine. At 6’5″, Haaland reportedly weighs around 198 pounds (90kg) and in order to stay at that weight he consumes up to 6,000 calories a day. The Daily Mail writes that one of Erling Haaland’s national team teammates described his diet as ‘I’ve never seen anyone eat as much as he does. He just eats like a bear.’
To put down 6,000 calories a day he needs to be looking for calorie-rich foods and is said to beef up on ‘mineral-rich offal of properly grazed cows and enjoys heart and liver.’ Side note: I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone outside of classical literature boast about eating ‘offal’.
He prefers offal because it’s supposed to be mineral and calorie-rich as well as being easily digestible. Likewise, he shuns fast food like McDonald’s because he prefers to know where his ‘quality food’ came from.
That’s not to say that Erling Haaland doesn’t feast on comfort foods like the rest of us. When he visits home in Noraway he crushes kebab pizza, Italian food, and Chinese food.
Interestingly, the trainers and dieticians in Erling Haaland’s life all describe him as a ‘race horse’. The parallel is he has to carefully stay strong and bulk up without adding unnecessary muscle that might slow him down on the pitch or put stress on his body. So he basically has a team of people surrounding him ensuring he’s hitting his dietary and training marks.
Maybe Erling isn’t such a ‘freak of nature’ after all. Perhaps he’s more of a perfected lab experiment based on what we’ve learned about all his habits.