Norway WAGs 2026: Meet Erling Haaland's Girlfriend, Martin Ødegaard's Wife & the Women Behind the World Cup's Breakout Team

There is a competition happening at the 2026 World Cup that FIFA didn't organize, has no trophy, and somehow has the entire internet more invested than the group stage results.

It happens in the stands. It unfolds on Instagram Stories posted minutes before kickoff. It is decided by Hermès bags, custom denim, silk slip dresses, and the precise angle of an oversized pair of sunglasses.

WAG fashion is back — and this time, it's bigger, more diverse, and considerably more interesting than anything we saw in 2006. We're narrowing it down to the big three teams, and we're starting with the nation that hasn't shown up to a World Cup since 1998 and decided to make an entrance: Norway.

Because here's the thing about the Norwegian contingent. They didn't come to perform. Erling Haaland's team is currently sitting in the quarterfinals for the first time in the country's history, and the women standing next to these men are, almost uniformly, doing the opposite of what you'd expect. No thirst traps. No feuds. No "sources say." Just a quiet, expensive, deeply Scandinavian confidence that says I don't need you to know who I am, but since you're asking.

Let's get into it.

Isabel Haugseng Johansen — The One Who Knew Him First

Every WAG story needs an origin myth, and Isabel Johansen's is the one you'd write if you were being generous: she and Erling Haaland grew up in the same small town of Bryne, played on the same youth football team as children, and found their way back to each other as adults. Official since 2021. A son together since December 2024. A relationship that has, by all accounts, survived Manchester City superstardom without turning into a Netflix docuseries.

What makes Isabel compelling isn't the football fame by proxy — it's that she played, too. Bryne FK's women's team, to be specific, before she stepped back during the pandemic. There's a version of the WAG story that treats these women as ornamental. Isabel's isn't that story. She understands the sport from the inside, which is probably why Haaland has said, plainly, that fatherhood — that coming home to her and their son — is what actually makes him play better.

She's building her own lane now too: 200K-plus followers, a KK magazine cover, an increasingly confident fashion point of view. But her most telling quote is about boundaries, not brand deals: "I want to protect my family, but at the same time I want people to have the opportunity to get to know me... the challenge becomes setting boundaries for what is private and what is not."

That's not a girl chasing a spotlight. That's a woman managing one that found her.

Helene Spilling Ødegaard — The Captain's Wife Who Was Famous First

Here's a plot twist for you: before she was married to Norway's captain, Helene Spilling was already a household name in Norway. Seventeen national ballroom dance championships. A win on Skal vi danse — Norway's Dancing with the Stars — in 2021. Her own dance studio. Her own sportswear label, DAVAY.

Martin Ødegaard didn't make Helene Spilling famous. She arrived at that relationship with a career, a fanbase, and a trophy case of her own, and that changes the entire shape of the story. This isn't a woman standing in her husband's light. This is two public careers running in parallel, occasionally intersecting at Arsenal matches and now, spectacularly, at a World Cup.

They kept it private for as long as they could — first public appearance in March 2023, a quiet civil ceremony in November 2024, and only then, in June 2025, the big wedding in Gjerdrum with the Arsenal boys in attendance. Their son Matheo arrived in December 2024. And through all of it, Helene has kept dancing, kept designing, kept building — because the assignment was never to become someone's wife. It was to become Helene Spilling, who also happens to be married to the captain.

That's very Søstre of her, if we're honest.

Lena Selnes

If Isabel is the quiet love story and Helene is the parallel-careers power couple, Lena Selnes is the one who will actually talk to you — and that's what makes her the most compelling read in this entire lineup.

Together with Alexander Sørloth for roughly a decade, mother to two of his children, Lena trained to become a kindergarten teacher before the family's life in Madrid rearranged her plans into full-time motherhood. And in a rare, candid sit-down with VG's podcast Intervjuet, she said the quiet part out loud: that luxury "drips a little" onto her life from his career, that she's given birth to both their children without him present and plans to do it again, and that the couple doesn't fully agree on family size — he wants five kids, she's thinking four.

She also addressed the criticism head-on: "Some think you're a terrible person for taking away the father's chance to be there for the birth." No spin, no publicist smoothing it over. Just a woman who has made a choice, been judged for it, and said so plainly.

This is the story that reminds you WAG life isn't a highlight reel. It's logistics, disagreement, compromise, and a woman who is refreshingly unwilling to pretend otherwise.

Julie Gregersen — The Next Generation, Still Finding Her Footing

At 21, Antonio Nusa is already Norway's youngest-ever men's World Cup goalscorer, a Round of 32 Player of the Match, and being called the "Norwegian Neymar" by French press. His girlfriend, Julie Gregersen, is the closest thing this lineup has to a rising star in her own right — mostly because we know so little about her yet, and that's clearly by design.

What we do know: they bought an apartment together in Belgium while he was still at Club Brugge, before the move to RB Leipzig turned him into one of the Bundesliga's most closely watched wingers. Nusa has said plainly that having "a great girlfriend" is part of what keeps him grounded at the highest level of the sport — not a headline, just a fact he mentioned in passing, the way you'd mention having a good coach.

Julie hasn't had a KK cover or a viral moment yet. She's the story still being written — the 21-year-old watching her boyfriend become a household name in real time, deciding, presumably in private, how much of that she wants to let in.

Tine Nyland — The One Nobody Talks About, Who Might Matter Most

Ørjan Nyland is 35 years old. He is Norway's starting goalkeeper. He saved a penalty against Brazil in the Round of 16 to help send this team to its first-ever World Cup quarterfinal. And the woman who has been beside him through Molde, Aston Villa, RB Leipzig, and now Sevilla — through club transitions, through the death of his father mid-career, through two children and a June 2019 wedding — is a woman named Tine, who has, as far as public record shows, said almost nothing to the press. Ever.

There's no interview. No magazine cover. No branded content. Just Ørjan, occasionally, thanking her on Instagram — calling her his rock, marking five years of marriage in 2024 with a quiet post instead of a campaign.

In a tournament obsessed with who wore what and who posted when, Tine Nyland is the reminder that some of the most important women in football have decided, deliberately, not to play the visibility game at all. And there's something in that worth sitting with — especially for us, the ones building lives that don't always want an audience.

Coming next: the women behind the two other biggest teams left standing — because if Norway taught us anything, it's that the most interesting WAG story isn't always the loudest one.