Will Erling Haaland be the most-searched athlete of 2026?
Haaland’s path to most-searched athlete in 2026 hinges on a unique edge no rival can match right now.
Google publishes what the world searched for every December, and one of its lists ranks athletes. Polymarket already runs a market on who finishes first in 2026. Erling Haaland is the favorite at 39.5%. We think he will be the most searched man, and there are two simple reasons for that.
First, Haaland is truly one of the best football players in the world. 27 league goals last season, a third Golden Boot in four years, and ESPN rates him the third-best center-forward.
The second reason is the most important one: Haaland is famous now. Very famous. His channel launched in October 2025, reached 1 million subscribers in 35 days, and now has 4.4 million. He mostly shows himself making breakfast, sitting in ice baths, and driving out to a farm for raw milk. It is a lifestyle channel.
However, once he came to America for the World Cup, everything changed.
On June 30, he scored the goal that beat Ivory Coast in Arlington, Texas. Afterward, he went to Six Flags, then to a western clothes shop, where he spent $10,000 in 90 minutes on hats, boots, and taxidermy. One item was a stuffed raccoon that holds a bottle of liquor. All of it was filmed in a shirt that read "Y'ALL CAN KISS MY DALLAS".
After that, the internet did the rest. His Instagram grew from 40 million to 77 million followers. A video whose entire joke was that his face looks like a spring onion got roughly 100 million views. He has now become half a meme. There are dozens upon dozens of similar funny short-form videos of him, which only helped his popularity.
There's simply nobody on Polymarket's board that can beat him this year on Google.
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