It seems that everybody in Bryne has a connection to Erling Haaland.

The only lady in the pizza place at lunchtime? She knows both sets of grandparents. Those lads coming out of a training session at Bryne FK’s stadium? Half of them are taught by his mum. One of their dads was Haaland’s teacher. One of their sisters is Haaland’s girlfriend.

The only guy drinking in his friend’s bar before Norway kicked off their game against Armenia in March shakes his head dismissively. “Not really,” he says. “He was in a different year and a different class… but I do teach at his school.”

Haaland was born in Leeds just after his dad transferred from the Yorkshire city’s club to play for Manchester City but, when he was three, the family moved to Bryne, the farming town on the southwestern tip of Norway where his parents Alfie and Gry Marita Braut were born and raised.

It was Bryne that formed the goalscoring machine we see today; the one tipped to take even this great Manchester City side to the next level.

“In this area, we are known for not speaking too much, but rather working,” Alf-Ingve Berntsen, Haaland’s first coach and the man who gave him his senior football debut, tells The Athletic.

“It is a small town of 12,000 people; the area is flat, 150 to 200 years ago it was quite rough, with a lot of rocks. You had farmers who had to be up at five in the morning and work until it was dark, all year.

“So when you have worked 10, 11, 12, 13 hours, you were totally exhausted, and then you went to bed, you didn’t speak too much. Some of that is still in our genes. You don’t brag about something, you show what you are capable of by doing it.”

A post shared by Erling Braut Haaland (@erling.haaland)

Pronounced Bree-nuh, Bryne is a charming little place with enough bars and cafes to visit but, at the point in early spring where The Athletic shows up at least, not many people to visit them.

Walking through the town centre on a sunny Tuesday afternoon it was notable that there was simply nobody about, until a man walked around a corner pushing a stroller. It turned out he was the goalkeeper at Bryne FK, the club Haaland joined at five and where his dad Alfie had also started his career.

“If you go to Madeira (the Portuguese island Cristiano Ronaldo hails from), you’ll see Ronaldo’s face everywhere,” Berntsen says, standing outside Bryne Stadium, overlooking the metal shell of an under-construction sports hall. “We’re a bit more humble.”

That is about to change, though: by the end of the year, there will be two major Erling Haaland murals in the town, which seems fitting given his superstar status.

Alfie, who played for Nottingham Forest, Leeds and City over nine years in English football from 1994, has one too, although word is that he does not like it very much. Last year, a local primary-school student created a large sticker of Haaland senior, in an early 2000s City shirt, and ever since it has been on the wall of the India Tandoori restaurant.

The first Haaland Jr mural was in progress when we visited, and is considerably bigger than his old man’s one.

Stencilled onto the side of a former supermarket right in the heart of the town, opposite the railway station, the work is being undertaken by Pobel, a famous Norwegian artist who has painted other notable works in Bryne. Keep an eye out for one or two around Manchester, too.

On the day his impending move to Manchester City was confirmed, the mural looked far more impressive. “Speak with your feet, and then everything else will be fine,” it says in a Norwegian dialect, the same message Haaland tweeted after Norway’s match against Armenia.

The other artwork will adorn that soon-to-be-completed sports hall right beside the stadium and the pitches where he learned so much of what he knows today.

“The goals he’s scoring in the Bundesliga, the Champions League,” Berntsen says, “we had that in our training sessions.”

Espen Undheim played with Alfie in the Bryne youth team, has worked with Berntsen in the town since 1998, and coached a young Erling. “When you see him running and doing things with his body to keep the ball now,” he says, “it’s like seeing him when he was 13 and 14.”

Those pitches were left unlocked at weekends so Haaland and his friends spent hours upon hours playing against each other, on top of their organised sessions during the week.

“Usually you had to be there early so you could grab a goal, otherwise there wasn’t space for you,” Tord Johnsen Salte, one of Haaland’s team-mates at Bryne, tells The Athletic. “We always played something we called the World Cup. Three or four teams, two-versus-two with one goal.” UK readers might know this as “Wembley doubles”.

Once work on the hall is finished, there will be a wall named “drylaveggen” in Haaland’s honour. It roughly translates as “the wall of great kicks” because of the local slang term — “dryla” — that he used to describe his powerful shots.

On that wall will be two depictions of Haaland: one the skinny 15-year-old who played for Bryne, the other the formidable powerhouse that he has become, celebrating a goal for Norway.

He was indeed much more slight during those early days, almost unrecognisable given how he has turned out. Pictures of Bryne teams going back to the 1980s line the corridors at the stadium and nobody features in more of them than Haaland, with his pointy cheekbones and then-skinny legs.

“The reason why he began to play with us,” Berntsen says, “was because, when he played against his 2000 friends — born in 2000 — if he played a game five-against-five and he was on the Bryne team, Bryne would win 7-0 or 8-0. (But) If he changed sides, the other team would win 7-0 or 8-0. He was so much better than the others.

“So the reason why he began to train was because he lacked competition.”

Like many of the most talented youngsters in world football, he got moved up an age group. Given he was born in July, he was often 18 months younger, and much smaller, than his team-mates and opponents.

His stark physical development only came once Haaland moved on to Molde, 450 miles to the north, at the age of 16, where he packed on 15kg of muscle. But those who worked and played alongside him in Bryne agree that early physical disadvantage helped develop his scoring instincts.

“There were decent players in the group and he was one year younger, so he had to struggle to do it,” Berntsen says. “Two of the defenders later played for Norway Under-18s; they were big and strong, if Erling was going to score against them he had to be smart, so he developed a smartness in movements.”

“When he was young, he was fast but he wasn’t so fast, and he was quite small,” Salte adds. “So he had to learn to adapt to being less physical than the others, he was so good at getting through on goal every time, even though he wasn’t faster than the defenders. Now he is a monster and can do both.”

Undheim is speaking in an upstairs room at Bryne Stadium where young players have team meetings and eat their meals. There is a signed “Haaland” Borussia Dortmund shirt on the wall, and it is far from the only one in the town. In the office downstairs, which has Haaland pictures on the walls, there are two Red Bull Salzburg shirts he’s signed folded up on a shelf.

Undheim started an after-school programme Haaland attended, and remembers his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.

“He was always in the correct position to score goals,” he says. “He was scoring a lot of goals when he was eight, nine, 10, when he played five against five. And when he had scored a goal, he looked like he had scored the winning goal in the Champions League final. He was always celebrating and running around. He loved to score goals.”

But it was only after a few years, when Haaland continued to score them as he rose through the age groups, when his coaches started to realise exactly what they had on their hands.

“It was not before he was 12,” Berntsen says, “Then we really started to say, ‘This can explode’. When he was eight to nine, nine to 10, 10 to 11, he still kept scoring. When you are 13 in Norway, you begin to play 11 against 11 on a normal pitch and Erling just kept scoring 11 against 11 with older boys. He was normal height, but he was skinny, and he just kept scoring on that level against good teams. We began to talk about him being special.”

The way Bryne run their academy is interesting, even without Haaland’s emergence from it. The programme has been the subject of academic study and Berntsen has given talks at business conferences on the subject of team-building.

Unlike at the majority of academies, where weaker players are let go or move elsewhere at the end of a season, Bryne keep the 40 youngsters who comprise each age group together throughout their time at the club — in many cases for more than a decade.

Around the age of 13, the children are asked to decide themselves, without input from their parents (so there is no pressure), whether they want to play for the “grassroots” team — with two fun sessions per week and a match in the lower divisions — or the “elite” team — with more of a focus on technical and tactical work, and a match in the top division. Haaland, obviously, chose the latter.

“I want to be better than my father,” he always used to say.

Haaland’s age group of boys and girls included five others who now make their living from football, among them Salte, back in Norway with third-tier Arendal after moving to Lyon in France at 16; Andrea Norheim, who moved to Lyon Feminin at 17 and has now returned home with Koge; and Jonatan Braut Brunes, Haaland’s cousin, who also played up an age group and is now a striker for Start in the Norwegian second division, on loan from top-flight Lillestrom.

“That’s not from this region, that’s from these streets — where there are 12,000 who live here,” Berntsen says. “And from one generation, that’s not common.”

Just as impressive, though, and something Berntsen mentions often during a three-hour chat at his home a five-minute walk from the stadium, is that he is just as proud of the non-footballers from that group as he is of Haaland and the other football professionals.

“The others are carpenters, plumbers, one in the army; many studying all over the world,” he says. “Our purpose is to train them to manage their life when they are becoming adults. It’s quite an important role, to teach them how to behave, how to become a decent citizen.

“We don’t have other clubs in Bryne; if you aren’t allowed to play with your friends when you’re 13, 14, you quit. So we have a responsibility to keep them together. But we also have to give Erling and others the specialisation.”

Haaland is so famous in Norway now that Berntsen himself is a recognisable figure.

When The Athletic arrived at nearby Stavanger airport, the customs official enquired as to the nature of the visit.

To see Bryne and speak to Haaland’s first coach.

“Ah, the guy with the glasses!”, the customs official exclaimed.

He has given more than 150 interviews since Haaland moved from Salzburg to Dortmund just over two years ago, and most likely will give another 150 at least in the coming weeks.

“It’s quite an important story to tell,” he says. “If I don’t tell it, who will?”

After showing us around Bryne’s club shop, which sells far more “Haaland” Dortmund jerseys than anything else, Berntsen uses photos and videos of Haaland’s time at the club to spell out the three phases of the new City striker’s development: ground formation, developed formation and professional formation.

“From when they were six to 11, it’s more about variation of the movements with or without the ball, they get loaded into the mind and they will learn and develop,” he says as he shows clips of Haaland training in a Mario Balotelli City shirt.

“So it’s start, stop, change of direction, start, stop — to develop core strength. Erling is an adult, he is 195cm tall (6ft 4in) and he’s quite strong, but not all people who are 195cm and strong are so dynamic in their movements, it’s because he was doing that in every session.”

The coaches at Bryne even researched sprinting trends in the Premier League over the previous 20 years, and predicted where they would be in the future, as a guide to where Haaland would need to be if he was going to reach the top.

“After the athletic session we had a technical session, and he was 100 per cent focused, the others were 85, 80 per cent focused. So we could see it coming,” Berntsen says.

“And if you have a variation of movements, you can begin to focus more and more on the technical and tactical side.

“Then you improve decision-making, that’s why we played that much. And if you are training alongside good players, day out and day in, they become better and the speed is higher and you have to think quicker and quicker. And after a while, you don’t have to think, you are doing it by instinct.”

There is a bit more to it than that. Undheim believes Haaland was born with a talent for scoring goals.

“It’s hard to explain but it seems to me like he knew, ‘OK, it’s possible the ball will come here and if it comes here I have to be ready’,” he says.

Berntsen believes it is a combination of training and genetics.

“His skills, his speed and power is not because of training, is because of mum and dad — his mum was a heptathlete,” he says. “And his smartness and technical skills are because he trained a lot. Tactically is because he talked a lot about football and saw a lot on TV.

“But in some areas, he is faster than others to see a situation, to be where the ball is coming, but I don’t think he’s born with that. That is because he’s grown up in an environment where he has trained over and over and over again in these situations. And some learn much quicker from these situations and Erling is one of the quick thinkers.

“Erling has combined muscle fibres, he has a lot of strength and explosiveness but he can also run quite a lot — endurance. He has a very good combination of these muscle fibres. Usain Bolt couldn’t play football because he is too explosive.

“But he (Haaland) has a special gift to learn from earlier experiences, and the anticipation for where to be is important. A lot of the things he does, he doesn’t think, it’s instincts. But the instincts are based on earlier repetitions.”

The two coaches agree on his determination, though.

“When you saw his mentality as a kid, it was easy to think that this is something special,” Undheim says.

Speaking to some of the helpful and polite 14 and 15-year-olds of Bryne helps put that in perspective: it was a very young age for Haaland to be so driven.

“When they are 14, 15, you (as coaches) will do self-regulation, you get them to reflect,” Berntsen adds. “You can sit down with Erling, ‘OK, do you want to be one of the best? What do you have to do in training? What do you have to do?’ Then there are sleeping habits, nutrition, and what you have to do to be a professional.

“To be a professional, you have to behave professionally before you get professional.”

Bryne’s coaches mention sleeping habits and the importance of nutrition before tournaments but it is up to the players to take the themes on board. Haaland did.

“Erling needs good sleep, because he’s Formula One,” Berntsen says. “If you’re a diesel player, who is a bit slower but can run all day, they restitute quickly. Erling, who is very fast, he has more muscle fibres that need a bit more restitution. It’s a big part of his life now.”

These days, his diet is looked after by a personal chef but, he apparently gets through 4,000 calories per day.

“He’s just a freak,” Norway team-mate, and Watford striker, Joshua King has said. “I’ve never, ever seen anyone eat as much as he does. He’s shredded but I don’t know… he just eats like a bear.”

“I really like kebab (meat). I love it,” Haaland said recently. “That doesn’t mean I eat it all the time. I eat it a couple of times a year when I’m in my hometown — I almost never eat it, but it’s still my favourite food.”

The local lads in Bryne rave about Yummy Time, an establishment just over the way from his dad’s sticker on the Indian restaurant, where there is another signed Haaland jersey on the wall.

He was back there only a few months ago and, according to the owner, likes the kebab pizza, which is something of a Norwegian speciality. No more than 25 seconds walk away, at Wen Hua House, a Chinese restaurant, there’s another signed shirt. There, Haaland likes the duck, and sweet and sour chicken.

If the diet is not perfect, then there were a few rough edges to his game in the early days, too.

“When he didn’t score the obvious goals, he was very angry with himself,” Undheim says. “If he didn’t get the right pass from a mate, he was angry (telling them), ‘You have to look up. I was in the right position to score a goal but you didn’t pass to me’.

“He had a mentality that was much stronger, and much more aggressive, than anyone else.”

Salte remembers being on the receiving end of those outbursts. “If I went through on goal and I scored and I didn’t play to him, he got so angry. He always wanted to score goals but he struggled a bit with moaning — like, if people tackled him. It was quite a problem actually for a while, but he grew up and became mature, so all of that disappeared.”

Among Berntsen’s collection are several photos of a young Haaland looking less than pleased after defeats.

“Winners don’t like second place,” Berntsen says. “There was a big tournament in Denmark, we finished in second place. Erling is not very happy. The achievement is quite good, but Erling really hated to lose.”

Undheim has a memory from a previous tournament, also in Denmark: “We were playing against Silkeborg’s A team, we were leading 4-0 at half-time and he didn’t score but he had four assists. We took him off because he had a heel problem and he was so angry at me and Alfie,” he laughs.

There is a picture of a 13-year-old Haaland with a man of the match trophy from another final, a game in which he scored two goals in a 2-2 draw but his team lost on a coin toss — because there were no penalty shoot-outs before players turned 15. Haaland does not look it in the picture, but he would have been livid.

“Yes, that would not be a wrong thing to say, not at all,” Berntsen admits.

“He’s a winner,” Salte says. “He wanted to do his best and he wanted to win, and he got affected if it didn’t work. When you’re young you don’t know how to cope with it, but he can now.”

It was something that his coaches had to work on, though, because it nearly cost him a place in the regional select team at the age of 13, and if he had not been chosen for that side he would not have been able to play for Norway Under-15s.

“Sometimes there were problems because he was a bit too high, so we had to calm him down, to say, ‘Now you have to count, one… two… three… four…, because you can’t be so aggressive, you can’t complain about the other players,’” Undheim says.

“When he was 13, 14, if he was in a good position and lost the ball, he didn’t always turn around and run to win the ball back again, he took a few seconds to be angry, so we had to work with him to refocus.

“When you are trying to run with the ball all the time, you will lose it, and we didn’t mind that, we allowed it, but you have to win it back. The regional team weren’t sure.

“The Norway Under-15 coach, Erland Johnsen, the former Chelsea player, said that they saw there was something missing sometimes because he was very good at some things but had to work hard when he was not involved in the game. They were a bit unsure if he could take the next step.”

Haaland’s talent convinced them in the end but he needed to overcome another obstacle to get into his first national-team camp: schoolwork.

“He didn’t like school; he wasn’t a student who liked to read or do maths,” Undheim says. “He always said, ‘I don’t have to be good at maths because I want to become a football pro’. He said that when he was 13, 14.

“Once, he was going to Norway Under-15 training camp. The national team coaches and I had to talk to the school because the players were going to be away for two or three weeks, so they needed to do school work for two hours per day.

“I said to Erling before we went to the meeting, ‘Be a nice guy and say that you will read or do school work for two hours a day’, and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say that. I don’t mean it, but I will say it!’ We finished the meeting and I asked him, ‘Erling, are you prepared to do school work, not just football?’, and he said, ‘I don’t need school because I will become a football pro’. So he was a bit special, yes.”

How did that camp, in September 2015, go?

“They started the second half, he took the kick-off and scored — straight from the halfway line. The Swedish keeper was about 15 yards out or something like that. He saw. He didn’t pass the ball, just shot. That was his first goal for the national team.”

Haaland made the Bryne reserve team in that 2015-16 season, at the age of 15, and scored 18 goals in 14 games. When the senior side’s coach was sacked, Berntsen was put in temporary charge. He handed the youngster his first-team debut in the Norwegian second division in May 2016, two months before turning 16, making him the youngest player in Bryne history — although that record would be broken four days later by his aforementioned cousin, Jonatan Braut Brunes.

Haaland made just 16 first-team appearances for Bryne before moving to Molde, one of the country’s biggest clubs, the following February at age 16. He had been scouted by them for years.

“There are a lot of old movies from when he was 10, playing street football in Stavanger, five against five,” Undheim says. “People in our region have always known that Erling was a tremendous striker for his age.”

There is a Hell’s Angels clubhouse just a few minutes drive from Bryne’s stadium, although the members, who used to ride all over the region, have been keeping their heads down in the past couple of years. A lot of local bars have a “no uniform” rule, to keep them out.

And every day, thousands upon thousands of crows fly south from a lake in Stavanger, where they sleep, before returning in the evening. Nobody seems to know where they go, but it is quite a sight when they come back.

Plenty of them seem to hang about in the trees next to where Haaland went to primary school, judging by the noise while taking a shortcut back to the town centre.

There is not an awful lot to do in Bryne, according to the local youngsters. There is a bowling alley at the stadium, next to a tanning salon, two cinemas in the centre, drama workshops and a renowned karate club.

Sport dominates. Football, handball and athletics are all popular, and Haaland tried his hand at all of them. He set a world record at the age of five for the standing long jump — a mark that remains unbeaten.

Everybody in Norway watches Premier League football and the locals are extremely proud of Haaland, but it is somewhat surprising — to an outsider at least — that when he plays for the national team in a friendly against Armenia during The Athletic’s visit in March, not a single bar in Bryne was showing the game.

Enthusiasm is low, given Norway failed to qualify for the World Cup in November and December, and it was also being shown on free-to-air television so could be watched at home. It did not help that the main football pub in town had closed down the week beforehand — a fate that has befallen a couple of other places in Bryne since the pandemic began.

“It was just football, school and watching football, there’s not much to do,” Salte says. “Erling was a guy who loved PlayStation, being social and speaking to others on the PlayStation, but I’m not that type of guy.”

Haaland has always been especially fond of Leeds and City — there are photos of him at Wembley for City’s League Cup final win over Sunderland eight years ago — and he was a member of a Facebook group for Norwegian City fans, until he left in 2019 after becoming tired of being asked whether he would be joining Pep Guardiola’s squad.

💙 @ErlingHaaland at Wembley watching his beloved #ManCity in the League Cup Final! // #OnThisDay in 2014! 🥰🇳🇴 @ManCity pic.twitter.com/gVBzJsrKNl

— City Xtra (@City_Xtra) March 2, 2021

He watched football as much as any football-mad Norwegian teenager, and tried to base his game on those of Robin van Persie and Jamie Vardy, particularly in terms of making runs in behind (the ones Guardiola has remarked upon). On Instagram, he used to tag himself as former Swansea City striker Michu.

In a recent interview, Haaland gave a glimpse of how he spends his time away from football. Bryne’s influence was clear.

“When it’s possible, I try to relax,” he said. “One example is being on a farm — driving a tractor or feeding the cows or whatever. I don’t own cows or pigs, but I will for sure in the future. I think I will have a small farm after I retire. I don’t know where, but I am quite sure I will have some animals. We are thinking about getting a couple of goats, we will see.”

Amusingly, though, he did release a rap song with Norway Under-18 team-mates Erik Botheim and Erik Tobias Sandberg in 2016. They called themselves Flow Kingz and, compared to Haaland’s work on the football pitch, it is comfortably the worst thing he has done.

“Erik Tobias Sandberg was really good at rhymes,” Haaland says, “Erik Botheim says he is good at rapping, so he was the rapping guy. And then I was the one who had the big verse.”

Wearing a black hoodie covered in “100” emojis, Haaland doesn’t rap as well as his mates and sticks to some rather amusing dance moves in the background — when he’s not climbing a child’s slide or posing with a big gas grill. The lyrics, according to a translation on YouTube, are as follows:

I’ve been making a song And I earned a thousand millions. By the way, I’ve also been buying a gas grill

In the past I was outside And I ate sesame salad For such a big guy like me I need good food.

“He’s funny, he jokes a lot in the dressing room,” Berntsen says. “He’s a normal kid with special gifts.”

“He was a good friend and I can’t remember that he had any enemies on the teams or around the teams because he was a good, happy guy,” Undheim adds. “When he was angry he was very angry, but after the training session everything was forgotten and he was a good guy. His mentality was, ‘I’m here to become better, I’m here to win, I’m here to take the next step’.”

Indeed, some of the lads he came through the Bryne academy with are friends for life, and they have formed a protective circle around him. A couple of years ago, Berntsen insists, more of them would have given interviews but they have had bad experiences with the press.

“I did an interview with French TV and all they asked about was gossip,” Salte, the one exception, confirms.

Some of Haaland’s interviews have caught the eye — namely the ones where he has given short answers, coming across, to many, as arrogant.

Berntsen, though, says that is due to Bryne’s farming history, and those 13 hours toiling in the fields.

“We have many who speak a lot,” he says, “but from earlier times we believe that the capacity you have to work shows your character, not what you say.

“So when Erling is short in his answers. He’s not rude.

“If you ask, ‘Blah, blah, blah, you had a good game, blah, blah, blah, are you satisfied with the match?’ Then he will say, ‘Yes’. Why should he say more? That doesn’t mean that he can’t reflect or can’t be deep, but if you ask him a question, he can answer with a few words. That’s a part of who we are.”

The veteran coach does worry, though, that his protege’s life will never be the same again, especially now he is moving to City.

“I know that he will adapt to top football,” he says. “But the downside is that you have publicity, you are robbed of your private life. At 21, he cannot now get a normal life, go in the streets. That’s why he has a private plane — he can’t go in airports. I’m very happy for him, because he is doing what he always wanted, but I also see the downside.”

There was an incident last summer at the Beverly Hills Fun Pub in neighbouring Stavanger, where Haaland had been a regular.

He had arranged for himself and a group of his friends to have a private room with security, but there was a clamour among the other customers to see him, one of the guards — apparently — didn’t recognise him and, citing social-distancing rules, threw him out.

Haaland did return soon after to meet a seven-year-old fan he had promised a shirt to, but it might be the last time he socialises in public.

A post shared by Beverly Hills Fun Pub (@beverlystavanger)

“This was the last time you will see him out,” Berntsen laments. “When he was back at Christmas he had a party at his flat, not in public places.

“But if one of our 40 players will cope with that in the best possible way, it will be Erling, because he has trained for this for years. All he has always wanted is to be a good footballer. He has sacrificed a lot.”

Ultimately, Haaland is a product of his environment in Bryne, both the town itself and the club’s unique academy set-up.

“He could challenge us (as coaches), because winners often do that,” Berntsen says. “But he wasn’t a bad kid. Maybe that’s because it’s a safe environment, maybe had it been another environment, had he still lived in Leeds or Manchester, he might have been another type.

“It’s a quiet area here, so you don’t have to behave in a bad way. This is a little, small town. In the autumn, you have cows in the grass here and you see tractors in the roads. You have to develop in a different way if you are in the big city, with a rough area, you have to take care of yourself, protect yourself.

“Steven Gerrard was from Huyton in Liverpool? And Wayne Rooney was from an even tougher area, Croxteth? But we don’t have Croxteth or Huyton here, it’s more quiet.

“But also, if we had placed Erling in the big city, I am sure that he would have known what to do to protect himself.”

One thing is for sure: nobody in Bryne would change a thing about him. Well, almost nobody.

As the group of youngsters from outside the stadium were praising him, one of their classmates rides up on a bicycle.

“He doesn’t like Erling,” they say, disgusted. “But he’s not Norwegian.”

(Main graphic — photos: Getty Images/design: Sam Richardson)