How do England stop Erling Haaland? By stopping everyone else instead

Here he comes, a man seemingly powered by hydraulics instead of muscle, who scores goals as though they were predestined: Erling Haaland, the most in-form striker on the planet and surely the single biggest obstacle standing between England and a World Cup semi-final.

No team in the tournament has yet managed to stop Haaland from scoring. Only the Ivory Coast even managed to keep him down to one. He has battered Brazil and smashed Senegal. Keeping him quiet appears to be impossible – but from England’s perspective, it may also be essential.

Erling Haaland is in imperious form – and there is no easy way to stop him

The statistics behind Haaland’s performances for Norway are quite genuinely mind-boggling. He has 62 goals in just 54 caps. Not only has he scored in every match at the World Cup, but he has scored in every competitive international he’s played since October 2024 and managed twice as many goals as any other player in European qualification. His scoring record for Manchester City is impressive enough – for his country, it’s obscene.

England have their own titans in Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, of course, and there’s a world in which Saturday’s quarter-final descends into a shootout between two attacks blessed with some astonishing firepower. That would certainly be worth a watch, but one imagines that Thomas Tuchel would prefer to find a way to shut Haaland down instead of telling his team to go at it hammer and tongs and leave the result in the lap of the goalscoring gods. Quite apart from anything else, there’s a worrying amount of evidence that they might be on Haaland’s side.

Opinions on how to deal with Haaland will vary, but there is no proven means by which to do so and Norway’s opponents thus far have only really managed to show England’s defenders how not to do it.

Get too close to him and he’ll bully you, not that either Haaland’s clubmate Marc Guéhi nor his centre-back partner Ezri Konsa have the kind of physical strength required to convincingly win that battle anyway. Give him space, and he’ll toast you with his sizzling turn of speed. You certainly can’t beat him by trying to wind him up – just ask Gabriel Magalhães whether starting a scrap is a sensible idea. Haaland thrives on the thrill of the fight.

Most of Manchester City’s opponents have found that the best way of dealing with him is simply to hope that he’s off the boil. Haaland does have dips in form and production, and doesn’t always look like his every touch has the divine right to fly into the top corner. He has troughs to go with the peaks. The problem for England is that his present peak is so high that he’s looking down on the rest of creation with a self-satisfied smirk on his exaggerated lips.

So, how do England stop him? Here’s the neat part, as the meme says: They don’t. There is no plan for beating Haaland, no way to shut him down consistently over the course of 90 minutes. Whatever your tactics, he has the tools to score. There is only way to keep Haaland off the scoresheet when he’s in this invincible kind of mood – stop the ball from getting to him in the first place.

England probably can’t stop Haaland – but they can stop his team-mates

Haaland’s excellence has masked the fact that other members of Norway’s fearsome attacking unit have actually been off the boil so far at the World Cup, not least wingers Antonio Nusa and Alexander Sørloth.

The 21-year-old Nusa scored against the Ivory Coast in the round of 32 but has otherwise been out of sorts, creating just two shooting chances in five games while his success rate with his many dribbles has dipped from 53% in the Bundesliga to a rather woeful 35% in the World Cup.

The more experienced Sørloth, meanwhile, has struggled to maintain the form he found for Atlético Madrid during the domestic season and has neither scored nor provided a goal – and he hasn’t completed a single dribble against anyone, although that isn’t as substantial a part of his playing style as is the case with Nusa.

While Haaland looks irrepressible, Norway’s primary creative outlets do not. If the wingers are playing poorly, then it perhaps presents England with a plan: Defend narrow and pack the middle to force Norway to play the ball wide, forcing them to lean on their least in-form players to find paths to Haaland. Force the players who aren’t creating chances to create them – ask the players who aren’t scoring goals or winning one-on-ones to take the reins.

The problem with that plan, of course, is that packing the middle would make it more difficult for England to get the ball down and create chances themselves, and it also means that Tuchel would be leaning quite heavily on arguably England’s greatest weakness – their full-backs.

Reece James is expected to return to battle it out with Nusa, and while that might represent the end of England’s much-discussed ‘crisis’ at right-back, much will depend on whether James is fully fit and able to find his best form quickly. Meanwhile Nico O’Reilly, at left-back, has the advantage of being quicker than Sørloth but is still developing as a one-on-one defender. It’s a match-up that should suit him on paper, but O’Reilly is not a first-rate defensive left-back as yet – his strengths lie in his attacking contributions. Those might not be the kind of contributions that England most need in Miami.

Maybe Tuchel will have a different idea. Maybe Konsa and Guéhi (who has been quietly brilliant since he was restored to the starting line-up) will be just as inspired as Haaland seems to have been since the start of the tournament and they’ll be able to shut Norway’s star striker down regardless of the tactics. Or maybe Haaland will keep up his scoring streak and England will have to hope that Kane and Bellingham maintain their own form. All that’s certain is that being scared of Haaland isn’t unreasonable – it’s a rational reaction to his astonishing form and immense physical gifts. He may be the greatest single obstacle standing between England and that semi-final.