Should Alexander Sørloth Be Blamed?
Alexander Sørloth made the wrong decision. That much is easy to say. Norway led England 1–0 in a World Cup quarter-final, Martin Ødegaard released him into space, Erling Haaland ran to his left, and the pass never came.
The mistake mattered. It may have changed Norway’s tournament. But the story cannot begin in the 44th minute in Miami. It begins with the kind of player Sørloth spent a decade becoming, and with the role Norway asked him to perform once the World Cup arrived.
A Famous Name Without a Clear Path
Sørloth grew up with a surname already known in Norwegian football. His father, Gøran, won 55 caps for Norway and played at the 1994 World Cup in the United States.
Alexander came through Rosenborg but did not immediately resemble a future Atlético Madrid striker. He made only a handful of first-team appearances before joining Bodø/Glimt on loan in 2015. That was the first glimpse of the pattern that would define his career: slow adaptation followed by a violent run of scoring.
After one goal in his first senior season, Sørloth scored 14 times in 29 appearances for Glimt. Ten came in his final 19 matches. Groningen took him to the Netherlands, Midtjylland took him to Denmark, and a strong season there persuaded Crystal Palace to bring him to England in January 2018.
The Premier League move arrived before the player was ready for it.
The Failure That Followed Him
Sørloth played 20 times for Crystal Palace across all competitions and scored once, in the League Cup. He did not score a Premier League goal.
For a large striker, the judgment was predictable. He was considered technically limited, too slow to create his own chances and not dominant enough in the air to justify everything missing from his game. A loan to Gent did little to change the verdict.
Palace’s mistake was not necessarily selling him. It was assuming that the 22-year-old version was complete.
At Trabzonspor, Sørloth finally received a full season as the central reference of an attack. He responded with 24 league goals, won the Turkish Süper Lig scoring title and added seven more in the Turkish Cup. Trabzonspor finished second in the league and won the cup.
RB Leipzig paid an initial €20 million for him in 2020. The move should have confirmed the breakthrough; instead, Sørloth struggled again. He was unable to secure a regular place in a fast, fluid attack and was sent to Real Sociedad on loan.
That could have been the end of his rise. By 25, he had already passed through Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, Belgium, Turkey and Germany. His career looked less like patient development than permanent relocation.
Spain changed it.
Becoming a Super Centre-Forward
Real Sociedad used Sørloth for two loan spells. He did not produce spectacular numbers immediately, but his movement became cleaner and his contribution with his back to goal improved. Spanish football gave him repeated exposure to low defensive blocks, centre-backs who denied space and attacks built around timing rather than constant transition.
Villarreal then made the decisive commitment in 2023.
Sørloth scored 23 La Liga goals in 2023–24, finishing only one behind Girona’s Artem Dovbyk in the race for the Pichichi. He scored four in a 4–4 draw with Real Madrid. The player who had failed to register a league goal for Crystal Palace was now the second-highest scorer in Spain.
This was not a winger learning to survive centrally. It was the opposite. Sørloth became dangerous because he became more completely a centre-forward: a 1.95-metre striker who could hold direct passes, attack crosses, finish early, make the first contact under pressure and turn awkward service into a platform for the rest of the team.
Atlético Madrid signed him in August 2024 after Álvaro Morata’s departure. The attraction was obvious: a powerful left-footed forward with La Liga production, aerial ability and enough pace to attack behind a high line. Atlético’s own profile describes the same essentials: physical presence, strength in the air and that left foot.
He scored 24 goals in his first season, 20 of them in La Liga. Many came from the bench because Diego Simeone also had Julián Álvarez and Antoine Griezmann. Sørloth nevertheless produced one of the most extraordinary displays in recent Spanish football: four first-half goals against Real Sociedad, including a hat-trick in approximately four minutes.
He had become elite without ever looking fashionable.
What Simeone Sees
Sørloth’s second Atlético season brought another mixture of goals and uncertainty.
He finished the La Liga campaign with 13 goals in 35 appearances, but played fewer than 2,000 league minutes. His minutes per appearance remained closer to an hour than a full match. A head injury interrupted a strong winter run, and another physical problem affected the spring.
His peak came in February against Club Brugge. Atlético needed to overturn a Champions League play-off deficit; Sørloth scored a hat-trick in a 4–1 victory. UEFA’s technical analysis praised more than the finishes. He held direct passes, connected teammates, attacked the space behind the defence and gave Atlético an exit when the rest of the side had dropped deep.
Simeone’s summary was even simpler: Sørloth possesses something no other Atlético player has.
That does not guarantee a starting place. Álvarez is the more mobile and technically varied forward, while Sørloth changes the match through penalty-area presence and direct play. Simeone has often treated him as a specialist solution rather than the organising centre of the attack.
The distinction matters. Sørloth can score at an elite rate and still feel that trust is temporary. But the uncertainty at Atlético has never changed the basic point: when Sørloth is valuable, he is valuable because he is a striker.
Why Norway Put Him on the Right
Under Ståle Solbakken, Sørloth’s role revived an older Norwegian idea.
On the team sheet, Norway could look like a 4-3-3: Sørloth on the right, Haaland through the middle and Antonio Nusa or Andreas Schjelderup on the left. Sørloth was not expected to behave like a conventional winger. He was not there to repeatedly isolate a full-back and dribble towards the byline.
Instead, he became a wide target forward.
Norway could play diagonally towards him, matching a 1.95-metre striker against a smaller left-back rather than a central defender. Sørloth could protect the ball, win headers and lay possession back to Martin Ødegaard or Julian Ryerson. When the attack developed on the opposite side, he could move into the penalty area as a second striker beside Haaland.
The logic was understandable. Solbakken wanted Haaland central and still wanted Sørloth’s size, finishing and target play on the pitch. The role was a compromise designed to keep two outstanding centre-forwards in the same XI.
The concern is that compromise is not always the same as fit.
The Cost of Moving Away From Goal
When Norway could play directly, Sørloth’s position made sense. A high ball towards the right touchline became a way of escaping pressure. He could pin a full-back, draw across a centre-back and create space for Haaland.
Against better teams, or in matches that demanded fast wide decisions, the weaknesses seemed to become more visible. Sørloth received farther from goal, often with his back towards the touchline. He had to combine in tighter spaces, track an opposing full-back and make longer runs before reaching the box. Those are useful tasks, but none obviously maximises his strongest qualities: heading, finishing, wall play and penalty-area timing.
By the time Norway reached England, the evidence was already uncomfortable. Sørloth had not produced a goal or assist in the tournament, a point also noted in Goal’s post-match account. Against Brazil, Solbakken removed him at half-time, moved towards a more mobile front line, and Norway scored twice.
That did not mean Sørloth was useless. His work as an outlet can tire defenders and help Norway reach the stage at which lighter, more technical substitutes find space. But it sharpened the question before England: was Norway still asking a true centre-forward to do too much work that usually belongs to a different kind of player?
The answer finally exploded in one moment.
The Pass That Did Not Come
The moment arrived in the 44th minute in Miami. Norway were 1–0 up through Schjelderup and had a chance to reach half-time with a two-goal lead. Ødegaard released Sørloth, Haaland ran to his left, and England had only John Stones between the two Norwegian forwards and the goal.
The obvious solution from the stands, the television studio and the replay angle was a square pass. Sørloth slowed, tried to work the angle himself and shot. Stones blocked it. Jordan Pickford collected the ball. Three minutes later Jude Bellingham equalised, and England eventually won 2–1 after extra time.
That sequence became the easiest story of the night: Sørloth did not pass, Haaland did not score, Norway went out.
It was also too simple.
Sørloth’s Explanation
Sørloth did not pretend the decision had been good. After the match, he explained to VG that he looked up after his first touch and felt Stones had blocked the passing lane. He then took another touch, admitted it was poor, and ended up waiting for Stones rather than forcing the defender to commit.
His intention, he said, was to find Haaland. In Sørloth’s version, the pass was the first option; the shot came only after he felt that option had gone.
That explanation does not erase the mistake. Elite forwards are judged because they must solve those moments at speed. Sørloth had a chance to make England defend Haaland in space. He did not take it.
But there is a difference between criticising the play and building a moral case against the player. One belongs to football. The other has become something uglier.
The Abuse Is Not Football
After the defeat, Sørloth was subjected to severe online abuse. Reuters reported that the attacks began after the missed two-on-one, and that Lena Selnes, his partner, shared screenshots of hostile messages. Some of the messages reportedly urged Sørloth to take his own life.
That is not passion. It is not standards. It is not accountability.
Football gives supporters the right to be angry about a decision. It does not give anyone the right to turn a player or his family into a target. Sørloth chose badly in a football match. The response should remain inside football language: the timing was wrong, the body shape was wrong, the second touch killed the pass, the shot was a low-value solution.
Anything beyond that says more about the sender than about the striker.
The Question Solbakken Did Not Fully Answer
A coach is responsible for putting players where their strengths become useful and their weaknesses become manageable. If a tall target striker is placed in a role that repeatedly asks for winger decisions, the resulting errors may not be best understood as isolated acts of stupidity.
It is a little like asking a non-goalkeeper to keep goal and then treating every missed save as a purely individual failure. The final error still happens. But some of the responsibility may sit earlier, in the decision to put a player’s skill set under that kind of stress.
That is why Sørloth should not carry the blame alone. He misread the Haaland pass. Solbakken, perhaps, also has to examine the conditions in which a centre-forward spent the biggest matches of Norway’s tournament doing work better suited to a different kind of player.
To be fair, Solbakken did not throw Sørloth to the crowd. He spoke about the sprint, the margins and the timing of the release, and that was a form of protection. His comments on the possible VAR and ball-flight controversy were also understandable after such a painful defeat. Still, perhaps the stronger protection would have been a more Mourinho-like sentence: this is on me; I asked him to play a role that did not quite suit him. What Norway did not really get was that level of public reflection on the selection compromise itself.
No, He Should Not Be Blamed
Sørloth can be criticised for the moment. He should not be made the villain of Norway’s World Cup.
The pass was there earlier than he played it. His second touch made the situation worse. The shot was the wrong ending. Those are football judgments, and they are fair.
But Norway’s defeat was not produced by one player’s selfishness. It also came from a wider compromise that had been visible for weeks: squeezing Sørloth into a right-sided role so that Norway could keep two centre-forwards on the pitch, then watching one of them struggle to look like a natural wide attacker in the tournament’s most demanding moment.
Sørloth is not a failed winger. He is a high-level centre-forward who spent the tournament living away from the area where his best qualities matter most. The England mistake did not prove that he was selfish or useless. It seemed to reveal the cost of asking a specialist to spend too long pretending to be something else.
He did not lose Norway the World Cup. He may have exposed the weakness of a plan that had been asking a little too much of him, in a place where he was never fully at home.