What is Erling Haaland’s IQ?
Is Erling Haaland smart? What exists is a scoring record and research on footballers’ minds — not an IQ score for him.

No Erling Haaland IQ score has been published, and the one page we found that discusses the number says so. An article on riotiq.com dated July 14, 2026, from an IQ-testing company, reports that figures on celebrity-IQ aggregator sites run from 100 to 145 “depending on the source”, names none of those sites, and states that no verified, publicly documented score exists for him; it offers a behavioral inference, not a number. We found no aggregator page that prints a specific Haaland figure, so the 100–145 spread is second-hand at best. The words “Erling Haaland low IQ” also appear as a search suggestion; that is a meme, and a meme is not a result. Opinions about anyone’s intelligence, flattering or insulting, are not test results. How celebrity IQ numbers are made explains why unsourced figures like these multiply.

What people usually mean by Erling Haaland’s football IQ is a different thing from an IQ score. “Football IQ” is a fan and coaching phrase for reading the game: positioning, timing a run, deciding where to look. Research can measure pieces of it. In a 2020 Frontiers in Psychology study, Geir Jordet of the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and colleagues filmed 27 male players from one English Premier League club across 21 home games in 2017/18 and counted “scans”, head movements that turn the eyes away from the ball. More scanning went with a higher probability of completing a pass, though the effect was small. In August 2022 GiveMeSport reported on a thread by Jordet analyzing Haaland’s scanning; the article says data suggest he scans far more often than average and prints no figures. That is a measure of attention habits on the pitch, not of intelligence, and Haaland, then playing in Norway, was not in the 2020 sample.

The study most often cited on footballers’ minds is Vestberg et al., published in PLOS ONE on April 4, 2012, by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Örebro University. It gave 57 Swedish players, men and women from the highest national leagues and a lower division, the D-KEFS executive-function tasks (design fluency, color-word interference, trail making). Top-division players were in the best 5% of the population on design fluency, and the score predicted goals and assists counted from January 2008 to May 2010. The authors describe these executive functions as correlating with each other but less with general IQ, so the paper measured executive function, which is not the same thing as IQ. It did not test Haaland, who was a child of six or seven when the tests were given in 2007. The same study anchors Lionel Messi’s profile on this site, and the same caution applies: it describes a group of Swedish players, not any individual star.

The range here follows from that gap. Haaland’s documented record is exceptional, but it is a sport record, and his range matches those of Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar: 100–115, close to the average IQ test score of 100, because outstanding decision-making inside one sport does not convert into a general-ability number. On this site, sourced records almost always support a lower range than the circulating figure, and here the top of the 100–145 spread has nothing under it. Anyone curious about their own number can take a timed test such as the IQ Metrics test; no goals record substitutes for one.