Erling Haaland is set to play in his first major tournament next summer but it means the Manchester City forward will go through a 12-month season.
Erling Haaland
Erling Haaland leads the celebrations as Norway all but booked their place at the World Cup
View Image
Erling Haaland took his extraordinary record in 2025/26 to 30 goals in 19 appearances when he scored twice for Norway against Estonia on Thursday night, all but securing a first World Cup appearance in 28 years for his country.
For the first time in his career, the 25-year-old will have to deal with a major summer tournament and the effects that can have on his fitness and managing a physical workload during the season. He will also have to do it in what is expected to be one of the hottest climates imaginable for a tournament.
It will bring into focus his workload over the course of this campaign, with Haaland undroppable for Manchester City. In those 19 games, he has found the back of the net in 17 of them.
His season arguably began with 256 minutes in the Club World Cup and a three-week break after City were knocked out by Al-Hilal in the last 16, which might well turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
Since the Premier League kicked off in August, Haaland has started 15 of City's 17 fixtures, only missing the Carabao Cup wins against Huddersfield and Swansea. Of those 15 starts, he has played an average of 86 minutes in them, and his tally of 1,283 minutes for the club this season is more than 90 minutes ahead of the second-most-used player, Ruben Dias.
Haaland's stats for Norway are similar. He played just 45 minutes of a friendly win against Finland in September and was excused from a friendly against New Zealand in October, but of the five World Cup qualifiers since June, he has been on the pitch for all but one minute, when he was replaced having scored five in an 11-1 win against Moldova.
He will play his 20th game of the season against Italy on Sunday night, with Norway needing to avoid a 9-0 defeat to secure their place in the World Cup.
It seems clear he will continue to play every Premier League game if fit and if City's title race goes to the wire, that could continue all season. He seems certain to start against Bayer Leverkusen and Real Madrid and his availability for the final two Champions League fixtures against Bodo/Glimt and Galatasaray might depend on whether qualification is wrapped up.
That could take Haaland to around 50 games this season already. City will hope to add as many of a potential seven Champions League knockout ties as possible, as well as an FA Cup run. Add in the March internationals and World Cup tune-up fixtures in June and it's easy to see him getting past 60 matches before the tournament begins.
That will be a new challenge for Haaland, but he does everything he can to maintain fitness levels and has rarely been injured at City since his £51million move to the Etihad. His recent YouTube day-in-the-life video showed the lengths he goes to maintain peak fitness.
Guardiola has already made it clear he won't be adapting his plans to accommodate the longest season of Haaland's life. Asked last month if he would look to rest and rotate him in the way he has some other members of his squad, he was clear in his response.
"I’m so sorry for my colleague Stale Solbakken from the national team of Norway but I’m not thinking about that. Maybe at the end when we win the Premier League 10 points in front and 10 fixtures from the end he’ll take a rest," Guardiola joked.
"Now he feels fit, he feels fine. There are games when he might look tired and he isn’t going to play. We are in a position right now, Champions League is massively important. In the Premier League, I don’t have the feeling Arsenal are going to drop many points, that is a reality."
City are now within four points of Arsenal and although it remains relatively early days, it's a title battle that is shaping up to be an intense one. Haaland will be key to that. Having done more than anyone to take his country to a first World Cup since 1998, his reward is likely to be the most demanding and draining season of his life.