Monterrey, on a Saturday evening in late June, is a city of concrete and heat and the particular noise that a World Cup quarter-final host generates from mid-afternoon onwards. The Norway team hotel, on the western edge of the city, had been quiet all morning; the players were resting, the staff were preparing for the fixture against Italy the following day, and the only activity in the lobby was a group of photographers being ushered through a side entrance by a man in a navy polo shirt with the Norwegian Football Federation crest on the breast pocket.
The photograph that emerged from that session, published on the federation’s social channels on Sunday morning, looked like something that had been generated by a mid-range image prompt. Erling Haaland, centre frame, standing in a reconstructed Viking longship on the banks of a reservoir outside Monterrey, wearing a leather jerkin and a hornless helmet, his expression somewhere between amusement and the particular blankness that elite footballers adopt when they are being asked to do something that is not football. Behind him, the rest of the squad, arranged in what approximated a shield wall, their faces lit by a raking golden-hour sun that seemed to have been placed there by someone with an opinion about composition.
The photograph was shared four hundred thousand times in six hours. The first comment, in every language, was the same: it looked AI. The second comment was a question about whether the Norwegian federation had commissioned an image generator rather than a photographer. The third, from several accounts with verified badges, was a complaint that the image was disrespectful to the tournament, to the opponent, to the concept of sport.
It was not AI. It was David Yarrow, a British photographer whose work sits in a category that most people encounter only when it appears in auction catalogues or on the walls of restaurants in Mayfair. Yarrow, who has spent the past fifteen years photographing wildlife and indigenous communities in locations that require permits, fixers and a willingness to stand in places where the light is right and the temperature is not, had been hired by the Norwegian federation to produce a set of promotional images for the World Cup. The brief, according to what he told The Athletic, was to create something that felt “unmistakably Norwegian” without resorting to the flag-waving clichés that every federation’s marketing department reaches for at the start of a tournament.
“The brief was to find something that was culturally specific,” Yarrow told The Athletic. “Norway has a visual vocabulary that is not the same as Sweden’s or Denmark’s. The Viking thing is real; it is not a costume. But the trick was to make it feel like a photograph and not like a campaign.”
The session took place on the Friday before the Italy match, at a reservoir complex on the outskirts of Monterrey where a local historical society had, some years earlier, commissioned a full-scale replica of a Viking longship as part of a cultural exchange programme with the Norwegian city of Trondheim. The ship had been sitting at the water’s edge, used occasionally for school trips and the odd wedding, and it had not occurred to anyone that it would become the setting for a World Cup photograph until Yarrow’s fixer, a Monterrey-based production coordinator named Luis Herrera, drove past it on a scouting run three days before the shoot.
“The ship was the thing,” Yarrow told The Athletic. “Once I saw it, the rest of the image was just logistics.”
The logistics, in this case, were considerable. The shoot required the ship to be moved to a position where the setting sun would fall across the players’ faces from the left, which meant a crane, a team of riggers and a conversation with the reservoir’s management that took most of Wednesday. The costumes, which were not costumes in the theatrical sense but rather reproductions commissioned from a historical textile workshop in Bergen, arrived on Thursday morning in four large cases. Haaland’s helmet, which several commentators noted did not have horns (the horned-helmet association with Vikings is a nineteenth-century invention, a fact that the Norwegian federation’s social media team had anticipated and addressed in a follow-up post), was modelled on a reconstruction of a tenth-century Gjermundbu find.
The players, Yarrow told The Athletic, were “professional about it in the way that footballers are professional about anything that is not football&rdquo. Haaland, who had been briefed on the concept the night before, arrived at the reservoir at four in the afternoon and spent twenty minutes in makeup before being positioned at the prow of the ship. The rest of the squad, including Martin Odegaard, whose expression in the final image is the one that circulated most widely on its own, were arranged along the gunwale in a formation that Yarrow had sketched the previous evening on the back of a room-service menu.
“The light was the real variable,” Yarrow said. “We had maybe forty minutes before the sun dropped behind the ridge. I shot on a medium-format digital back, which gives you the resolution but also the depth that makes the image feel like it was made on film. The grain is real. The lens flare is real. Everything in that frame is something that happened in front of the camera.”
The image was processed the following morning by a retoucher in London who, Yarrow said, “did about two hours of work on colour balance and removed a power line from the upper right corner&rdquo. The decision to publish it on the federation’s channels, rather than through Yarrow’s own, was a federation one; the internal discussion, according to a person familiar with the process that The Athletic spoke to, had centred on whether the image was “too good” by which they meant too polished, too composed, too far from the grainy behind-the-scenes content that football federations had learned to produce in the TikTok era.
The reaction, when it came, was the reaction that every federation fears and desires in equal measure. The image was shared, mocked, praised, analysed, accused of being AI, accused of being disrespectful to Italy, accused of being disrespectful to Vikings, accused of being disrespectful to photography. A thread on a Norwegian football forum, translated by The Athletic, included a comment from a user in Tromso who wrote that the image “made Norway look like a theme park” and a reply from a user in Oslo who wrote that “the theme park is exactly the point&rdquo.
Yarrow, when asked about the AI accusation, told The Athletic that he found it “flattering in a way, and also depressing&rdquo. The flattering part was that the image had achieved a level of visual coherence that people associated with generation rather than capture. The depressing part was the implication that the real thing, a photograph of twenty-two footballers on a reconstructed longship in the Mexican sun, was no longer legible as real.
“The image is real,” he said. “The ship is real. The light is real. The players are real. The only thing that is not real is the idea that Norway has a Viking team. But that was the brief. Norway is not a Viking team. Norway is a football team that, on a Friday afternoon in Monterrey, stood on a boat for an hour because a photographer asked them to.”