Pillage: The Investment Machine Haaland Is Building Beyond Football

Most footballers only start thinking seriously about investing when they first realise that football does not last forever.

For years, the money arrives almost automatically. A salary every month. A win bonus. A trophy bonus. Sponsorship deals. A new contract, bigger than the last one. Then one day, the career ends and the question that could wait for a decade suddenly becomes urgent: what now?

Erling Haaland seems to have started asking that question much earlier.

Not because the end of his career is anywhere in sight. Quite the opposite. While he is still at the absolute peak of his powers, still scoring goals for Manchester City and earning a contract that places him among the highest-paid footballers in the world, Haaland is already building something that could exist long after his final goal.

Not just a portfolio. A structure.

Across Norway and Luxembourg, a small investment system has gradually emerged under the unusual name Pillage. Behind it are not just Erling Haaland and his money, but his father Alfie and a network of financial advisers who appear to understand one important thing: the biggest challenge of great wealth is not always how to earn it. Sometimes, the bigger question is what to do with it once you have it.

Haaland's answer, so far, is not spectacular in the way his football is. There are no major press conferences. No announcement of "Haaland Ventures". No attempt to turn himself into another athlete posting about startups, the future and entrepreneurship on Instagram.

There are simply a handful of companies, a few countries, serious capital and a series of investments that, at first glance, do not seem to have much in common.

Shipping. Real estate. Biotechnology. Banking. Hair ties. Chess.

And perhaps that is exactly what makes the story interesting.

The beginning was not a stock. It was a structure.

Pillage 3 AS was registered in Norway in 2023 as an investment company. Its purpose is straightforward: to invest in shares, funds, bonds and other financial instruments. But what sits above it is more important.

Pillage 3 is not, in the simplest sense, Haaland's personal company. It is owned by the Luxembourg holding company Pillage 2 S.à r.l., creating a structure in which capital can be held at the holding-company level while individual investments can be made through different entities. Public investigations by Norwegian media previously showed that Erling and Alfie Haaland, together with financial adviser Egil Østenstad, established several Luxembourg companies connected to the Pillage name.

That may sound like a technical detail, but it says a great deal about how Haaland approaches money. He did not first buy a few stocks and then figure out how to organise everything afterwards. He seems to have done the opposite. First, the infrastructure was built. Then came the investments.

By the end of 2024, Pillage 2 held assets worth €29.6 million, or approximately NOK 347 million. Almost all of that value was concentrated in financial assets. A year earlier, the holding company had assets of around €12.8 million, showing just how quickly the structure had grown.

That does not mean Haaland became a financial genius overnight. But it does show something else. While most footballers of his generation remain primarily focused on the next contract, the next transfer or the next season, Haaland's money already has its own financial infrastructure.

A footballer does not have to be his own investor

One of the biggest mistakes we make when talking about athletes and investing is assuming they sit alone in front of a screen picking companies.

Haaland's story suggests a different model. Around him is something that could be described as a family office in the making. Alfie Haaland is not simply the father of a former and current Premier League player. He has a concrete role within the wider business structure.

Egil Østenstad, a former Norway international, has been connected to financial management within the broader "Team Haaland" circle for years and serves as chairman of the board of Pillage 3. The Luxembourg structure also includes professional financial and corporate advisers.

That may be the most important part of the entire story. Haaland does not have to be Warren Buffett. He has to know how to surround himself with people he can trust.

That may be an underrated skill among athletes. The best footballers spend their entire lives making decisions that directly affect their careers, yet they rarely manage the entire system around them on their own. They have coaches, agents, physiotherapists, doctors and analysts.Why should money be any different?

Haaland appears to have applied the same logic away from the pitch. If football is a team sport, perhaps wealth management is a team effort too.

From 30,000 to a quarter of a billion

Pillage 3 shows just how quickly that system began to grow. At the beginning, the company was relatively small. In 2023, it started with a symbolic equity capital of NOK 30,000. By the end of its first year, its balance sheet had already grown to more than NOK 110 million, largely through financing within the broader Haaland corporate structure.

Just one year later, Pillage 3's total assets had risen to around NOK 254 million. The value of its share investments increased from approximately NOK 86 million to more than NOK 223 million, while the company recorded a post-tax profit of NOK 24.5 million in 2024.

This was no longer an experiment. It was a serious investment portfolio.And what is particularly interesting is that Haaland did not put all his money behind a single idea. Through Pillage 3, he bought stakes in companies such as Høegh Autoliners, Entra, Maritime & Merchant Bank, Akastor and Nykode Therapeutics. The portfolio stretches from shipping and real estate to offshore, finance and biotechnology.

There is no single big Haaland bet. There are several. And not all of them have worked.

Not every match is a win

That may be the healthiest part of Haaland's investment story. Nykode Therapeutics showed that even Manchester City's enormous contracts cannot turn someone into an investor who wins every time.

The Norwegian biotechnology company's shares fell sharply after Roche terminated a major collaboration agreement, and Haaland suffered a significant loss on the investment. According to later reports, he sold his remaining shares in 2026 at a price considerably lower than what he had paid.

That may not be the most attractive part of the story for a headline. But it may be the most important. Haaland clearly does not invest in a world where every move succeeds simply because he is Erling Haaland.

Investing means risk. Sometimes the ball hits the back of the net. Sometimes it ends up in the stands. The difference is that his structure is not built around one investment that has to succeed. It is built to live with the fact that some will not.

Real estate, cars and everything in between

Pillage is not just about the stock market. Through the Luxembourg structure, Haaland is also connected to Sapiens Eiendom, a real estate investment company he shares with his father Alfie. According to publicly available information and media reports, the company has rapidly increased its assets and is also linked to investments in real estate funds.

Here, another layer of Haaland's investment model becomes visible. Public markets are one place for capital. Real estate is another. Private companies are a third. Alternative assets are a fourth.

According to reports in Norwegian media, Haaland has also participated in investments in luxury cars alongside members of the business network around the Ertvaag family. His wider business structure previously held stakes in a company connected to a Piper M600 private aircraft, although that stake was later sold.

This does not look like the strategy of someone searching for one perfect investment. It looks more like the strategy of someone building a portfolio. And a portfolio, in the end, is simply another way of saying: you do not know what will win, so you do not want your entire future to depend on one thing. Footballers may understand that better than anyone. Because even the world's most expensive player cannot guarantee a goal.

A hair tie as an investment thesis

And then we arrive at perhaps the most Haaland-like investment of them all.

KKNEKKI.

A Norwegian hair tie. Haaland had used the product made by Bon Dep for years before becoming a minority shareholder in April 2024. He eventually became a co-owner of a company whose product had already been part of his everyday life.

That is interesting because it represents a different kind of investment. With Høegh Autoliners, Haaland is an investor. With Nykode, Haaland is an investor. With Bon Dep, he is something more. He is also a customer. And when you are Erling Haaland, that is not an insignificant difference.

Your capital is not the only thing you bring to a company. You bring attention. A global audience. Visibility. An authentic connection to the product. This is where the modern economics of athletes becomes particularly interesting. An athlete is no longer simply someone who gets paid to promote a brand. Sometimes, he can buy a piece of the brand he already wears. The line between ambassador, consumer and owner begins to disappear. And perhaps that is one model for the future.

Haaland is not just investing money. He is investing his name.

The latest example comes from a world that, at first glance, appears to have almost nothing to do with football.

Chess.

In 2026, Haaland invested in Norway Chess and, together with Norwegian businessman Morten Borge, established a company called Chess Mates, which is expected to hold a significant ownership stake in the organisation and the Total Chess World Championship Tour project. The idea is to create a global tour format designed to turn chess into a bigger sporting spectacle, with a pilot project planned for late 2026 and a full season from 2027.

Here, Haaland is no longer simply someone buying financial assets. He is entering an industry where his name itself can become part of the investment thesis. Norway Chess gets capital, but it also gets Erling Haaland. His 70 million followers. His international recognition. His ability to help something that is already big in Norway become more visible beyond it.

And that may be where the most interesting lesson of the entire story lies. The biggest athletes have something ordinary investors do not. They are not just capital. They are distribution.

From salary to institution

Perhaps that is why it is wrong to reduce this entire story to the question of how much Haaland has in Luxembourg or how much he has made from stocks.

The numbers are impressive. Hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner spread across different structures. A rapidly growing portfolio. Investments on public markets and beyond them.

But the numbers are a consequence. The infrastructure is more interesting.

Most footballers spend their careers inside a system built by someone else. The club builds the team. The agent negotiates the contract. The sponsor organises the campaign. The bank manages the account.

Haaland, with his father and the people around him playing a significant role, is doing something different. He is building a system that may one day exist without Manchester City. Without the Premier League. Without goals. Without football.

And perhaps that is where the real value of the name Pillage should be found. Not in one stock, not in one property, and not in the fact that Erling Haaland bought part of a company selling hair ties.

Pillage is an attempt to turn money earned through football into something that no longer depends on football. That is a significant difference.

A salary is income. A portfolio is an asset. A structure is an institution.

Haaland is still young enough for his entire business story to change ten times over. Some investments will fail. Some may explode in value. Some may be sold before the public even realises he ever owned them. But the direction is already clear.

While most footballers only begin to seriously consider what to do with their money towards the end of their careers, Haaland asked the question at the beginning. And perhaps that is why his most important investment so far is neither a shipping company, nor real estate, nor chess, nor a biotechnology stock.

It is the decision not to wait for his career to end before starting to build what comes after it. And that may be the smartest move he has made off the pitch.