For more than two decades, Norwegian Air Shuttle has flown other people’s faces around Europe. Greta Garbo has gazed out from the fin of a Boeing 737-800. Sonja Henie, Thor Heyerdahl and Edvard Munch have taken their turns up there too. This summer, the airline’s social-media team tried something lighter: not a face, but a hairstyle.

The hairstyle was Erling Haaland’s. During the FIFA World Cup, Norwegian posted an image of one of its aircraft with the striker’s long blond hair and signature ponytail edited on, captioned in English: “We’ve never looked more Norwegian.” Haaland and his British company, York Promotions Ltd, have now sued Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA in Oslo District Court. The newspaper VG broke the story on 30 September.

Haaland’s lawyer, Thomas Hagen of the law firm Schjødt, says the case concerns the airline’s unlawful exploitation of his client’s distinctive features to market plane tickets during the tournament. Norwegian says it is baffled by the writ. The two sides meet, by video link, on 9 October.

Why Haaland sues Norwegian

Neither the writ nor any sum claimed has been made public. Norwegian declined to tell VG whether it includes a financial claim. What VG did publish was the post: a Norwegian aircraft onto which Haaland’s former long blond hairstyle, ponytail and all, had been photoshopped. It ran on Instagram and TikTok and has since been deleted, as have other Norwegian Instagram posts featuring Haaland.

The court’s own case list files the dispute under the Marketing Act. Tore Lunde, a University of Bergen professor of marketing and intellectual property law, told VG he thinks Haaland has a good case, whether under the act’s ban on imitating distinctive marks or under unwritten rules protecting personality. He cited a 2009 Supreme Court case that made the company Tromsø 2018 compensate the snowboarder Andy Finch for using his picture without permission.

Haaland is no stranger to brand protection. According to World Trademark Review, he filed his first trademark applications in Norway in February 2023, for his name, his “EBH 9” autograph and one of his goal celebrations. aeroTELEGRAPH says the suit also invokes registered trademarks. A hairstyle is harder to fence in: Karl-Fredrik Tangen, a marketing lecturer at Høyskolen Kristiania, told Dagbladet that you cannot trademark a man bun, though he believes Norwegian used Haaland all the same.

Danby Choi, editor-in-chief of the cultural newspaper Subjekt, told Dagbladet the lawsuit was “hårsårt”: touchy, or literally hair-sore. Le mot juste, if one is on the airline’s side. Tangen is not. Norwegian, he said, should have avoided court, admitted it had overstepped a little and given money to a humanitarian cause of Haaland’s choosing.

“A few spontaneous posts”

The airline’s defence is that it was simply cheering. “Like almost all of Norway, we supported the national team this summer, through a few spontaneous posts inspired by trends on social media,” spokeswoman Catharina Solli told AFP. By the time Norway went out in the quarter-finals, beaten 2–1 by England on 11 July, Haaland’s hair had become a meme in its own right.

Nor was Norwegian alone. VG found World Cup posts by Wendy’s, HelloFresh and Crocs Europe playing on Haaland’s looks, and knows of no commercial deals between him and those brands. Asked about other companies, Hagen had no further comment.

NBC News reported on 10 July 2026, as Norway prepared to face England in the quarter-finals, how Haaland went viral during the World Cup, partly through AI-generated fan videos.

One airline joke of the summer did end well. Before the quarter-final, Norwegian challenged British Airways on Instagram: the carrier of the losing nation would swap its profile picture for the winner’s logo for a day. After England won, Norwegian duly wore the BA logo and wrote: “While the tournament is over for us, this friendly bet will forever live in all our hearts.” That joke had a willing partner.

An airline built on famous faces

The irony is that faces are Norwegian’s livery. “Since Norwegian’s first aircraft took to the skies in 2002, the airline has always honoured iconic figures on the tails of its aircraft,” the carrier said in 2019. The early gallery was Nordic: Garbo, Heyerdahl, Munch and Henie, the three-time Olympic figure-skating champion turned Hollywood star. As the airline expanded, Freddie Mercury joined in 2017, as did the Irish explorer Tom Crean, unveiled jointly with his family; Oscar Wilde followed in 2018.

Even so, a place on the fin was never a free-for-all. When Norwegian let the public nominate new tail heroes in 2012, nominees had to be dead, to have distinguished themselves and inspired others, and to have been challengers in their time, Dagbladet reported. Some families still said no: the daughter of the author Jens Bjørneboe declined, and the brother of the rock musician Joachim “Jokke” Nielsen did not want him used to advertise the airline.

The same report recalled that Norwegian had airbrushed a cigar out of its tail portrait of the writer André Bjerke because it distracted from his face. The airline, in other words, has edited people to fit its tails before. This summer it edited a plane to look like a footballer.

What happens on 9 October

The first court date is modest. Oslo District Court has listed a planning meeting for Friday 9 October, by video from 10:00 to 11:00: the kind of session in which a judge and the lawyers prepare a civil case before the main hearing.

The ponytail itself has already left the stage: Haaland has since had his hair cut. Garbo, who has flown on Norwegian fins, always maintained that she had never said she wanted to be alone, only that she wanted to be let alone. Without consent, Lunde told Dagbladet, a person has the right to be left in peace.

Sources: VG, 30 September and 1 October 2026; NTB, 30 September 2026; NRK, 30 September 2026; E24, 30 September 2026; Dagbladet, 1 October 2026; AFP, 1 October 2026; aeroTELEGRAPH, 1 October 2026; Reuters, 12 July 2026; aeroTELEGRAPH, 11 and 12 July 2026; NBC News, 10 July 2026; World Trademark Review, 2023; Norwegian Air Shuttle press releases, 7 April 2017, 16 October 2018 and 8 March 2019; Dfly, 1 July 2017; Dagbladet, 13 April 2012; Wikipedia (Norwegian Air Shuttle, List of Norwegian Air Shuttle tail fin heroes, Sonja Henie, Greta Garbo, Joachim Nielsen); Encyclopaedia Britannica (Sonja Henie)