Haaland raccoon is back in Norway with the team after Monday’s return from the 2026 World Cup, and the squad was received at the Royal Palace in Oslo. King Harald, Crown Prince Haakon, Princess Ingrid Alexandra, and Prince Sverre Magnus met the players as the country turned a quarterfinal exit into a public homecoming.
Royal Palace in Oslo
The reception brought the returning squad straight into the royal setting in Oslo, with Erling Haaland among the players welcomed home. Crown Prince Haakon had already told the team in the dressing room after the quarterfinal loss, “When you get home, the King would like to invite you to the Castle.”
He followed that with a longer message that set the tone for the end of the tournament: “Before your ending ceremony and your welcome back, which will be hosted somewhere else in the city... But as I said: You are allowed to be disappointed, but the rest of us are just incredibly grateful, really proud of you. And we think you have given us an absolutely priceless effort.” That sequence matters because the ceremony was not an offhand greeting; it was built into the team’s return after the World Cup ended.
Oslo streets and the Viking Row
Thousands of Norwegian fans crowded the streets of Oslo late into Saturday night despite rainy weather, while others watched together on big screens around City Hall. The scale of that turnout fits the run itself: Norway was back at the World Cup for the first time since 1998, and the Viking row chant had already spread far beyond Norway, showing up in New York’s Times Square, on escalators in Boston, and on the steps of Buckingham Palace ahead of the Norway-England game.
Approximately 90,000 people joined Crown Prince Haakon for the Viking row chant, and Princess Ingrid Alexandra and Prince Sverre Magnus were sitting with the team. That public response turned a football result into a national event, even after the quarterfinal match ended in defeat.
Haaland at 65.9 million
Erling Haaland’s reach kept growing while Norway played, with his Instagram following rising from 40.7 million before the tournament to 65.9 million by the time the team flew home. At 25 years old, he remained the most visible player in the squad, and he had described the Americans ahead of the quarterfinal as “kind of hilarious” and “funny,” a line that helped feed the attention around the team’s run.
The sharpest takeaway from Monday is simple: Norway’s homecoming was bigger than a routine return, because the country treated a quarterfinal loss as a milestone worth staging at the Royal Palace in Oslo. The next question is what the ending ceremony and the welcome-back event elsewhere in the city will look like when the team steps back into public view.
