In December 2025, an Erling Haaland book purchase quietly made history. A 430-year-old book sold for 1.3 million kroner about $134,000 at auction in Norway, the highest price ever paid for a Norwegian book. The buyer wasn’t a museum, a university, or a collector. It was Erling Haaland himself.
Manchester City’s record-breaking striker, 25, had bought the only known surviving copy of the 1594 edition of Snorri Sturluson’s Kings’ Sagas the oldest printed history of Norway. And he never intended to keep it.
What the book actually is
The sagas were written by the Icelandic poet-historian Snorri Sturluson in the 1220s. They trace Norway’s medieval kings back to the legendary Yngling dynasty and Harald Fairhair, widely regarded as the country’s first king its Viking roots, its royal bloodlines, and its conversion to Christianity, told through kings, queens, farmers and warriors.
The 1594 volume is a specific thing: an abridged Norwegian-Danish translation by the magistrate and historian Mattis Størssøn, printed in Copenhagen by Jens Mortensen. It had to be printed there because Norway didn’t have a printing press at the time. The copy the Haalands bought was the last one left in private hands.
He bought it with his dad
Haaland made the purchase alongside his father, former Norway international Alf-Inge Haaland. Neither planned to own it for long.
He donated it to the public library in Bryne the small town in Time Municipality, in the Jæren region of southwestern Norway, where he grew up and first started playing football. He attached a single condition: the book must stay open at all times, so anyone who walks in can read it.
Why the condition matters to him
Haaland’s reasoning is the part that’s traveled furthest, and it’s worth quoting because it’s unguarded. “I want the book to always lie open so that people can read about those who came from where I come from, Bryne and Jæren,” he said. “It’s easier to feel drawn to reading when you can recognise yourself in the people and places being written about.”
Then the admission that gives the whole gesture its shape this is one of the best strikers alive telling you he doesn’t read: “I’ve been lucky enough to live out my dream through football, and I know not everyone gets that chance. Books give so many more people the chance to dream big, see new possibilities and find their own path.”
He’s been blunt elsewhere that he was never much of a reader himself. Which makes the donation a slightly unusual kind of philanthrop a man buying the most expensive book in his country’s history specifically so that other people, not him, will read it.
The detail that ties it together
The book isn’t just going on a shelf to be admired through glass. Time Municipality is linking it to a reading competition in local schools and the prize is a trip to watch Haaland play for Norway.
That’s the mechanism that makes the gift more than a gesture. A 430-year-old Viking manuscript is an abstract thing to a ten-year-old in Bryne. A ticket to watch the most famous person their town has ever produced is not. Haaland has effectively used the one form of currency he has that a child understands himself to get them through the library door. Whether they stay for the sagas is the gamble. But he’s stacked the odds better than most literacy campaigns manage.
The book won’t just sit on display. Time Municipality is tying it to a reading competition in local schools, and the prize is a trip to watch Haaland play for Norway. A 430-year-old Viking manuscript means little to a ten-year-old in Bryne, but a ticket to watch the most famous person their town has ever produced means everything. Haaland has used the one currency he has that a child understands himself to get them through the library door.
