Natalie Rahhal
UpdatedMon, July 6, 2026 at 3:07 PM UTC
11 min read
The soccer players competing in the World Cup are admired by countless fans of all ages. And who doesn’t want to emulate their heroes? Well, some of those supporters are taking that very literally — and racking up tens of thousands of views while they’re at it.
On YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, soccer fan content is booming, with countless videos of commentary, interviews, skits, jokes and more, all centered on the “world’s game.” One particular genre has emerged within the soccer content universe and is captivating viewers: creators who are eating, training and doing ice baths just like their favorite professional athletes. Some do it for a day, others a week — I even spoke to one who spent a year on an athlete-inspired diet. But what’s all the fuss about? I called up four football fanatics to find out.
The food influencer eating like Erling Haaland
Norwegian striker and veritable modern Viking, Erling Haaland has shared his diet openly — and gone a bit viral for it. The rising soccer star says he consumes about 6,000 calories a day — about twice the upper end of what a typical adult man should — from, eggs, raw milk and, the pièce de résistance: organ meat. Oh, and he chugs a “magic potion,” reportedly a blended concoction of milk, spinach and kale.
His diet, which is often referred to as “ancestral,” caught the attention of food influencer Coleman Anderson. The 27-year-old health care finance worker and soccer enthusiast had been struggling with his weight, and decided to try a “primal” diet to help him shed pounds and break some unhealthy habits. (What’s commonly referred to as the primal diet involves lots of raw meat and is highly controversial; Anderson’s meals more closely resembled the paleo diet, which health experts also generally advise against.) It was partly based, he tells Yahoo, on Haaland’s own meals.
Anderson got interested in Haaland’s meat-focused meal plan “because of how much protein is in there and how satiating it is,” he says. Not only is Haaland an incredible athlete, but “he’s a fun, goofy guy who brings a lot of great energy, so [I wondered], ‘How can I be like him?'” Anderson tells Yahoo.
While many soccer content creators get clicks for spending just 24 hours eating, training or living like their favorite footballers, Anderson says he spent a full year on a radical, Haaland-inspired diet. And of course, he documented it
In one of his TikToks, Anderson flashes a nervous grin while holding up a cutting board of cubed, raw liver and heart meat. “The liver, raw or cooked, is not the tastiest thing in the world,” he says. “But it was like eating your vegetables: I’d wake up in the morning, and it was just something I had to do.” In the video, Anderson chases his organ meat appetizer with raw milk sipped from a massive glass beer stein, before moving on to six fried duck eggs and a giant slab of locally sourced, grass-fed ribeye (just as Haaland would want; the athlete is apparently very committed to eating the highest quality organic ingredients). “The diet that I partook in was an amazing, sort of shock diet, and it helped me wean off the unhealthy foods I was consuming,” says Anderson.
As a health editor, I have to tell you: The science does notsupport eating this way long-term. While protein is important, diets high in red meat are linked to greater risks of heart disease and certain cancers. But, Haaland and Anderson are right on one point: Whole foods of any kind are better than ultraprocessed ones, especially meats.
Like many who follow keto and carnivore diets, Anderson credits his “primal” eating for his 60-pound weight loss and says his “nutrient-dense” meals did help him feel more energetic. But even he acknowledges that, for some who isn’t Erling Haaland, it’s probably not sustainable and works better as a “short-term solution.” The Haaland diet isn’t exactly affordable either. “I don’t think that eating a steak every single night was worth it on the wallet,” he admits.
Training like the greats, ice baths and all
Like many kids in the U.K., Luke Nuttal grew up dreaming of being a professional footballer. But he also spent his youth as a costar in his older brother’s YouTube videos, a role he loved.
When he moved to the U.S., Nuttall seemed to be on his way to achieving his childhood dream of becoming a professional athlete. But, while there, he also decided to try his own hand at YouTube. He had a knack for it, collecting about a million subscribers in his first year (his channel now has more than 6.8 million subscribers). And the pay was certainly better than what he anticipated making anytime soon as a soccer player. “I did want to go pro, obviously, that was the goal,” he tells Yahoo. “But then I decided to scrap that off and just go into [being a] full-time football YouTuber. So, in a way I’m still a pro footballer — but definitely not anything near to what the actual pros are.”
That said, he still puts himself through a pro’s paces sometimes. Nuttal has made videos of himself training like Lamine Yamal and Cristiano Ronaldo. Or, at least he thinks so. Nuttal pieced together an approximation of Ronaldo’s day and tried it himself for a week. He was curious how he’d do — and it fit the “challenge” format popular among football YouTubers and their audiences, he says. “After that week, I did have to take about two weeks off [from training] because it was really strenuous,” he says.
Exacting routines like Ronaldo’s play a role in great players’ success, but Nuttal knew that what he was doing was more of an experimental stunt than anything; he wasn’t expecting results. So Nuttal was shocked when he noticed them. “I definitely saw improvements, which was crazy to me … in one week,” he says. Still, Nuttal isn’t trying to make the routine a daily thing — with a couple of surprising exceptions. Ronaldo famously takes a morning ice bath, a recovery method that Nuttal has now incorporated into his regimen, along with stretches and a massage gun to ease muscle tightness.
And another surprise from his training challenges: When Nuttal trained like Yamal, the 18-year-old midfield phenom from Spain, for one of his videos, he also tried the player’s pre-game ritual: eating a meal of chicken, rice and peanut sauce, which his mother prepares for him. Nuttal made the dish for himself, even though he didn’t expect to like it. But “it was actually pretty nice,” he says. “I’ve actually had it a few times since.”
The former pro educating players through YouTube
William Oluremi John, the pro footballer, knows what it’s like to train like the professionals, because he’s actually done it, playing for clubs in the U.S. and Europe and on the Nigerian national team. But in the early days of his career, players didn’t have their own YouTube channels like Haaland and Yamal do now. In fact, that kind of content creation was actively discouraged and even punished in some cases, John tells Yahoo. The clubs’ shifting attitudes toward their players’ side hustles has been a major win for the athletes. While the top handful of footballers make millions of dollars a year, nearly half of all pros earn less than $1,000 a month. And it’s not uncommon for players to go entirely unpaid when their teams are in the midst of financial challenges.
Plus, “as a professional soccer player, you have more time than people think,” says John. That’s why, for him, the transition to making content was “seamless,” and has helped him build a business that supplements his football career income (along with his other endeavor — John is fluent in nine languages and has an education company)
John is forthright about the value of his “I-trained-like” videos: “They create — I hate corporate terms [but] — evergreen content,” he says. But there’s also a deeper motivation for doing these videos himself. In the world of footballer content, some creators are “pros or people who played at a high enough level to tell you the game, [or] some guys who got through playing college for a year or two, then quit,” he explains. “Then there’s that weird group that doesn’t know anything, and they can do tremendous damage when they start talking about things they don’t know about.” That includes scams, he says.
He knows of at least one case of a football content creator who gained popularity with kids, and advertised training, but didn’t have the credentials to teach children soccer. The difference is apparent to John, but not necessarily to unsuspecting parents. John hopes that content like his can help push videos made by people with no soccer bona fides to the margins.
Ultimately, viewers of these lived like, ate like, and trained likevideos “want an experience that they would never get”: to be a professional soccer player, John says. “So you got that whole genre” that allows them to live vicariously through their favorite football influencers. And, despite the bad actors out there, John sees genuine value in content that gets kids or adults interested in the sport. “I’m obviously very biased, but I think the type of fitness [required for soccer] is good for the general public as well,” he says. He’s not far off: A 2018 study compared the lifespans of people who played various sports for fun. Soccer players ranked third-highest in longevity, behind tennis and badminton.
A way to bring fandom and fantasy closer together
Sophia Chafin, 20, grew up playing soccer and watching Lionel Messi. “I feel like my generation got to watch some crazy players — that’s something special … that not every generation is gonna get,” she tells Yahoo.
Chafin idolized Messi’s talent on the pitch as well as his “humble” persona and love story (the now 39-year-old is married to his childhood sweetheart). And, in high school, she played the “number 10,” or center midfield position, just like Messi. When there wasn’t a match to play or watch, Chafin filled the void by watching footballer content on YouTube. Watching her favorite creators felt like belonging to a global club with its own inside jokes. “If you didn’t watch the game, you didn’t get the joke,” she explains.
About six months ago, she decided to start posting her own jokes and hot takes on TikTok, just to share with friends. It turned out that lots of other people thought her soccer jokes were funny, too. “I feel like after I started posting, my whole life switched,” Chafin says. “People were like, ‘Oh that was so smart of you to start posting a couple months ago,'” but Chafin says she had no agenda and never dreamt her videos would blow up. And blow up they have: Her social media content has caught the attention of several brands, including one that invited her to watch a World Cup match at the Kansas City stadium — and it just happened to be the Argentina-Algeria game, in which her hero, Messi, scored his historic hat trick. “It was such a dream come true. I was tearing up when I saw him,” she says.
Naturally, she’s made her own videos about it. But it’s less of a “challenge” style short, and more of a way to feel closer to her favorite player. While in Kansas City, Chafin visited a local Argentinian restaurant, Los Hornos Argentinian Flavors, which features some of Messi’s favorite dishes, including milanesa Napolitana, on its menu. (The restaurant delivered its empanadas to Messi himself while he was in town; the soccer legend thanked them with an autographed jersey.)
“People are going to follow the trends of what he eats,” Chafin says of Messi. “I wanna put myself in the shoes of [a great player] for a day and see how they live their lives. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a pro footballer. … I wanna know what they eat, and how they train. And it’s like when good friends want to go where their friends go out to eat, or when people in love go on dates: They want to know the other person.”
