“Do I want to do this? No”, says Erling Haaland looking at the camera, sweaty, after a training session. And that’s the key to everything: he does it anyway.
The Norwegian, one of the deadliest scorers in this World Cup, revealed the mental trick that keeps him going when the body wants to stop. “I feel like I’m tired, but then I tell my body that I’m not”, he explained.
For him, much of the physical limit is actually psychological: “If you tell yourself that you’re tired, you’re going to be tired. If you tell yourself you’re not, then you’re not that tired”.
It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that he has exploded onto the scene from such a young age, nor that he is unstoppable in every shirt he wears. Haaland not only has talent, he has a mind trained to ignore the “enough” signal before its time.
And maybe there, he says, lies everyone’s true limit.
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