Why Norway's World Cup Team Shipped Half a Ton of Food to America — and What Erling Haaland Eats to Fuel a Record-Breaking Run

When Norway's national football team set up camp in Greensboro, North Carolina, for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, they didn't come alone. Along with players, coaches, and equipment, the Norwegian federation shipped hundreds of kilograms of food from home — salmon, trout, halibut, and two kinds of cheese, including the beloved brown cheese known as brunost. Predictably, the story exploded online, with viral posts claiming the Vikings didn't trust American food and had come prepared to avoid it entirely.

That narrative, though catchy, isn't quite true.

It's Not Distrust — It's Sports Science

According to reporting on the story, Norway's shipment included roughly 300 kilograms of salmon and trout, 100 kilograms of halibut, 80 kilograms of brown cheese, and another 100 kilograms of Jarlsberg. That's a serious amount of fish and dairy, but it's far from the team's entire food supply. Norway's head chef has confirmed that the squad still relies heavily on American produce, meat, grains, and even fresh orange juice squeezed from oranges grown in the United States.

Nutrition experts who commented on the situation were quick to push back on the "distrust" framing. Sports dietitians and nutrition professors who work with elite teams describe this kind of food shipping as standard practice in high-performance sport — a way to reduce unpredictable variables rather than a verdict on the host country's cuisine. Norway is far from alone in this: Mexico brought pozole ingredients, chile peppers, and nopales; the U.S. team packed A1 steak sauce, oatmeal, Cheerios, and peanut butter; and at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Argentina and Uruguay reportedly shipped around two tons of meat between them. Even outside football, Korea's Olympic committee set up dedicated kitchens for the Milan-Cortina Winter Games to keep a steady supply of rice and kimchi on hand. Bringing your own chef and select ingredients to a major tournament, in other words, is less a scandal and more the norm for professional athletes competing far from home.

The logic is straightforward. At the highest level of competitive sport, nutrition is treated as a performance variable, just like sleep or training load. Athletes travel constantly, adjust to new time zones, and face compressed schedules between matches. Keeping key elements of their diet consistent — the same fish, the same cheese, the same flavors they've trained and recovered on for years — removes one more unknown from an already demanding equation.

Erling Haaland's Diet: Built Around Omega-3s

No single player better illustrates Norway's food-first mentality than their captain, Erling Haaland. The Manchester City striker has become almost as famous for his eating habits as for his goal-scoring, and salmon sits right at the center of it.

Haaland has spoken publicly about why fish plays such a large role in his routine. In his own words, fish offers athletes a valuable combination of protein, healthy fats, vitamins, and minerals that support the body through intense training. Norwegian salmon in particular is prized for its omega-3 fatty acids, along with vitamin D and vitamin A. Omega-3s are widely recognized for supporting cardiovascular health and helping to manage the inflammation that comes from repeated high-intensity exercise — a genuinely useful property for a striker who regularly sprints at speeds above 30 km/h and absorbs heavy physical contact match after match.

But fish is just one piece of a much larger, more unusual eating plan. Haaland reportedly consumes around 6,000 calories a day — nearly double what an active adult male typically needs — a regimen his father and former Premier League player, Alfie Haaland, helped design alongside a nutritionist. The diet is often described as "ancestral," built around whole, minimally processed foods: steak, eggs, raw milk, honey, and notably, organ meats like liver and heart, which are dense in iron, zinc, and fat-soluble vitamins. A typical day might include eggs and coffee for breakfast, fish with rice and vegetables for lunch, and a hearty steak dinner, all punctuated by a green smoothie of kale, spinach, and raw milk.

What If You Can't Eat Salmon Every Day?

Not everyone can — or wants to — build a diet around fresh wild caught salmon for times a week, and that's exactly the gap that fish oil supplements are designed to fill.. For the average person who wants the same omega-3 benefits Haaland gets from his fish-heavy diet — support for joint health, reduced inflammation, and faster recovery after training — a concentrated fish oil supplement is a practical substitute for people whose weekly grocery list doesn't include halibut and Jarlsberg.

Products like Omega 3 fish oil caps has high doses of EPA and DHA, the two long-chain omega-3s found in fatty fish, at levels that would otherwise require eating fish several times a week to hit. That's the appeal for time-strapped athletes and weekend warriors: the same fatty acids doing the same job in the body — supporting the cardiovascular system, reducing exercise-induced inflammation, and aiding recovery — without needing a national federation's shipping budget to import Norwegian seafood.

The Bigger Picture

Whether it's a national federation shipping salmon across the Atlantic or one player structuring his entire life around omega-3s and organ meat, the underlying idea is the same: at the elite level, food isn't just fuel, it's strategy. For Norway, that strategy seems to be working — reaching the knockout rounds of a World Cup for the first time since 1998 is no coincidence, and neither, perhaps, is all that salmon.