Norway hadn't been to a men's World Cup since France 1998. Getting back there needed someone to drag a functional, unspectacular squad through qualifying almost by force. Erling Haaland did exactly that.
Across Norway's eight qualifying matches, Haaland scored 16 goals, the kind of tally that would be a good season for most strikers, not a qualifying campaign. He scored in every single one of Norway's Group I qualifiers. The standout performance came against Moldova, where he scored five goals and added two assists in an 11-1 win, the first time a European men's player had scored five in a World Cup qualifier since Austria's Hans Krankl back in 1977.
A month later, he added a hat-trick in a 5-0 win over Israel, and then sealed qualification outright with two goals in a 4-1 away win against Italy in November, a result that also doubled as a measure of revenge, since Norway had already beaten the same Italy side 3-0 earlier in the campaign, with Haaland scoring the decisive goal that day too.
The bigger picture matters as much as any single match. Norway's national team hasn't traditionally been a major footballing power, and in the early part of this decade it failed to qualify for anything, including the 2022 World Cup. Head coach Ståle Solbakken built a counter-attacking system almost entirely around isolating Haaland against opposition centre-backs, and it worked well enough to carry a squad that, on paper, isn't stacked with world class talent anywhere else.
Getting back to a World Cup after 28 years isn't a small achievement for Norwegian football. Doing it on the back of one player scoring at a rate no European has managed since the 1970s makes it a genuinely historic qualifying campaign, not just a successful one.