Last week, a viral clip circulated showing Erling Haaland mid-chew in a restaurant, flinching at his own reflection. One post on X sharing the footage gathered more than 31 million views in a few days. Fact checkers traced the video to a slapstick skit by Chinese comedian Jin Long, posted to TikTok in mid-June. The corrections were duly noted, yet the clip kept traveling. By the fourth week of the 2026 World Cup, the internet had already decided who Haaland is.
The old model of stardom relied on a tight grip on your own image. The new one, evidenced by Haaland’s recent internet fame, is being a character so vivid and relentlessly meme-able that AI can generate the hype for you. The celebrity therefore becomes something like an open-source character, only loosely tethered to the human who has the face.
The Haaland fake did not spawn from nowhere. It came from China, where the striker has already become a meme sensation. He has spent the past few months fronting a commercial for a Chinese herbal drink, gamely attempting Mandarin, being turned into song and being rechristened Habao by fans who delight in the gap between the on-pitch destroyer and the off-pitch golden retriever. As his popularity in China exploded, Haaland launched official Douyin and Weibo accounts, and quickly amassed millions of followers. The reflection clip was one artefact in an entire cottage industry of AI Haaland memes and edits, all riffing on the same joke.
What it means
Deepfakes have become fan art. This is increasingly how sports fandom works online. Athletes are no longer consumed solely through highlights or post-match interviews but as evolving characters with recognisable quirks and storylines.
They are also now getting the full fandom treatment previously reserved for fictional characters, in lore, canon, character arcs, edits. A recent report from AI sports content firm WSC Sports found that Gen Z in particular feels more connected to individual athletes than they do teams. A survey by the consulting firm Oliver Wyman found that social media content from athletes is the single largest driver of Gen Z sports engagement.
Once a footballer becomes a character, the fans stop being mere spectators and can instead have a say in content. The fanon, which refers to the material the audience invents to fill the gaps the canon leaves, is now highly susceptible to AI. You no longer need the athlete to generate the lore; the audience can synthesise it on demand, and the character absorbs it. It is not surprising, then, that Haaland’s deepfake was so readily embraced online. The content does not have to be real, it just needs to fit the character fans have created.
Perhaps what the Haaland-ification of it all suggests is a strange shift away from a mere deepfake panic. Though much of the public was, in fact, fooled by the AI video, a meaningful share of the audience is actively opting in and sharing nonetheless.
Fans have been doing this sort of thing for years. When the @deeptomcruise account started posting eerily perfect Tom Cruise deepfakes on TikTok in 2021, the response was delight in the millions. Similarly, an AI-generated track mimicking Drake and The Weeknd that appeared in 2023 created its own fan hype, getting streamed enthusiastically before the labels could get it pulled.
That same year, the Balenciaga Pope fooled half the internet for an afternoon, which actually resulted in more praise for the Balenciaga coat than it did concern over AI. Which just goes to show that if you like someone or something enough, you will suspend your disbelief and just roll with it.
After all, Haaland was always going to be a star of this tournament—Norway’s first World Cup since 1998, a striker chasing the Golden Boot—but it is his audacious displays of personality off the pitch that made him its unlikely main character. Modern footballers are supposed to be monomaniac automatons, media-trained and brand-protected. The Haaland canon is pretty much the opposite. His personal Snapchat account of 3.3 million followers and climbing is a masterclass in unpolished celebrity.
Through the account, Haaland has become a lovable internet persona, spawning countless memes, edits, and fan interactions that treat him more like a recurring character than an athlete. The joke, mostly, is the contradiction. On the pitch, Haaland is a frightening 6-foot-5-inch Viking-coded goal machine whose celebration face looks like something carved into a longship. Off it, he is posting nostril-angle selfies, bald filters, Q&As, and comedic videos.
French player Kylian Mbappé is another footballer meme-ified and AI-ified amidst the internet’s current fixation with the World Cup. Making its rounds online, the “Dictator Mbappé” AI memes recast him as Mao and Kim Jong Un, usually soundtracked—with the internet’s flair for tonal chaos—by an ominous nasheed.
Despite the roots of the meme actually going back as early as 2023 after a dispute over a kebab joke, it has resurrected in this year’s tournament tenfold, showing up this time in AI-rendered fiction too. Hype in football has always worked this way at some level; every transfer rumor runs on the fans’ appetite to believe.
The old fantasy machine needed raw material from Haaland doing real things in the real world. And although Haaland, to give the guy his due, does indeed pump out plenty of comedic content on his own, AI now enables the fans to crank out new material manufactured to spec. The old celebrity economy depended on access to the star. The new one depends only on the audience’s willingness to keep the story going.
