Cleats, Couture and Bromance: Football’s new ball game

Over the last month or so, I've found myself watching not so much World Cup football as its framing. Which is how I stumbled upon the tournament's defining bromance: between England's 23-year-old Jude Bellingham and Norway's 25-year-old Erling Haaland (he turns 25 this Tuesday).

They have, at this point, become sport's favourite odd couple. Their two formative seasons from 2020 to 2022 together at Borussia Dortmund have been thoroughly mythologised into an origin story.

Through this lens, Germany's top football league Bundesliga appears as a kind of Hogwarts for the pair: you enrol at 19, leave at 21, and emerge as a global brand. Out of this cauldron came a friendship that is being described as a 'cleated rivalry'.


'Cleated rivalry' is a delightful mash-up, a nod to the Canadian gay sports romance streaming series, Heated Rivalry, in which two hockey players conduct a secret relationship while battling it out on the ice in rival teams, welded onto the cleats (studs) of football boots. In Belligham-Holland case, it's fandom performing cultural remixing in real time: queer storytelling leaking into mainstream football language - even when the two men in question are straight.

This doesn't mean the England No. 10 and the Norway No. 9 are secretly rehearsing lines in the players' tunnel. It simply means that the emotional choreography between elite male athletes has become legible in ways it was never previously allowed to be. The visual contrast helps. Haaland, with his Viking aura - blond, broad, with the sort of jawline you could grate Parmesan on - also carries the expression of a lovable puppy. His smile looks as though it was designed to melt a 500 g block of butter.

Across from him stands Bellingham--tall, poised, mixed-race poster boy of the modern European game, more masculine than androgynous, someone who could step off the pitch and walk straight onto a fashion runway without changing shoes. Together, they are Nordic Thunder meets London Cool, even though Bellingham is a proud Brummie.

Then there is Haaland's relationship with Hermes. Nothing says contemporary machismo quite like turning up with a 5-figure-priced handbag, and looking as though you would happily suplex anyone who laughed.

His extensive collection of Hermes Birkin and Haut a Courroies (HAC) travel bags presents a very particular image: hyper-wealthy, hyper-confident, and completely unbothered by traditional gendered rules about accessories. Those bags are not subtle. Nor are they shy. They are statements: a modern football god can stride into the stadium carrying a Gris Perle HAC 50 Endless Road without surrendering a single ounce of macho branding.

Haaland's machismo image, paired with his Hermes collection, is doing something rather clever. On one hand, it underlines his place within an elite global luxury circuit. These bags cost more than some small flats in London's Zone 4. On the other, they chip away at the old idea that 'real men' carry only kit bags or briefcases. You can spend the GDP of a minor island nation on handbags and still be the most feared striker in the tournament.

It tells young men that style can be extravagant, even flamboyant, without requiring apology. Football, once the playground of lads in tracksuits, now comfortably includes men in couture.

From my vantage point - somewhere between saucepan and sofa - this has been the World Cup's true fascination. Not the scorelines (even though they matter), or the possession statistics. It's the way the tournament acts as narrative glue. Race debates that never resolve. Luxury fashion riding on a striker's shoulders. Prime ministers and royalty doing stand-up routines to ease us into conversations about submarines and security alliances. All of it streamed into homes where the real contest is between sleep and one more match.

Whatever happens tonight in the final between Spain and Argentina, I suspect I'll be exactly where I've always been: refilling plates, listening to my family roar at the telly, and quietly collecting the stories unfolding on the sidelines. The football, to me, is a soundtrack. The main event is the way the world chooses to talk about the game.