When Erling Haaland stepped off the Norwegian team plane in Oslo, he was carrying a souvenir that no one expected: a stuffed raccoon clutching an empty gin bottle. The Manchester City striker had picked it up at Wild Bill’s Western Store in Dallas during the World Cup, and the image of him cradling the taxidermy quickly ricocheted across social media. Within days, the shop had sold out of its entire stock of raccoons and was shipping internationally for the first time, a sudden demand spike that, as one American retailer put it, no business plan could have foreseen.

Thousands of kilometres away in Moscow, a 24-year-old model was experiencing a parallel jolt of viral fame. Anastasia Kostromitina had been told for years by friends and family that she resembled Haaland — the same prominent forehead, flattened nose, full lips and deep-set blue eyes. During the tournament she posted an Instagram video meticulously recreating his signature stares, smirks and grimaces. It gathered over six million likes. “At first I didn’t even understand how I could resemble a male football player,” she told Agence France-Presse. “Then I started to take it with a sense of humour, and now I’m completely fine with it.” She confessed she hoped Haaland himself might see the clip and laugh.

The lookalike’s sudden celebrity was one strand of a broader digital gold rush. According to data compiled by analysts tracking the tournament’s social-media footprint, Haaland added roughly 24 million Instagram followers during the World Cup, second only to Cape Verde’s goalkeeper Vozinha, whose underdog heroics earned him nearly 30 million new fans. Even lesser-known players were swept up: New Zealand defender Tim Payne saw his following leap from under 5,000 to 5.6 million after an influencer campaign, while Mexican teenager Gilberto Mora gained 5.7 million, placing him just behind Lionel Messi in the tournament’s follower rankings. Viewed from Latin America, Mora’s rise signalled the arrival of a new marketing asset; Brazilian media noted that defender Douglas Santos experienced a 1,200 per cent increase, driven by a coordinated push from local streamers.

Haaland’s image, however, proved elastic enough to accommodate mockery as well as mimicry. An Argentine streaming programme, Nadie Dice Nada, sent an actor dressed as the Norwegian into the studio, where he stumbled into chairs and doorframes, playing up the “robot” persona that fans had assigned to Haaland’s on-pitch demeanour. The sketch drew sharp criticism from Argentine viewers who called it disrespectful, arguing that the forward had never provoked their country. The backlash underscored how a player’s memeability can become a contested cultural space, especially when it crosses from affectionate imitation into caricature.

By the time Haaland surfaced at a Dolce & Gabbana Alta Sartoria event in Taormina, Sicily, he had moved from internet oddity to front-row fixture. Dressed entirely in white with a gold brooch and blue loafers, he attended alongside his partner Isabel Haugseng Johansen, who wore a sheer crystal-encrusted gown. Italian fashion observers noted the couple’s presence as part of a broader post-tournament blurring of sport and luxury spectacle. Back in Moscow, Kostromitina was still fielding interview requests, still hoping her video might reach the man whose face she had borrowed. The raccoon, meanwhile, remained sold out.