In a Moscow bar showing a World Cup semi-final, a young woman in a Norway shirt was beckoned onto the stage. She took up the drumsticks and, as the crowd roared, pounded out a rhythm beneath the giant screens. The surreal scene was not a piece of Norwegian fan theatre but the latest chapter in the viral life of Anastasia Kostromitina, a 24-year-old Russian fashion model whose uncanny resemblance to Erling Haaland has turned her into one of the tournament’s most improbable celebrities. Her mother had started it all with a question posted on Instagram: “Don’t you think my daughter looks like a famous person?” The answer, delivered in more than six million views, was an emphatic yes.

Kostromitina’s rise was built on mimicry. She recreated Haaland’s poses, compared childhood photographs, and deadpanned that they might be family. The internet responded with a flood of comments — “twins separated at birth”, “Haaland in a parallel universe” — and the model, who initially did not see the likeness, learned to live with it. “I can be beautiful and I can be funny,” she told talkSPORT, a philosophy that has brought her advertising contracts and a spot on the runway at Moscow Fashion Week. Her videos, by the tournament’s end, had amassed over 100 million views, a figure that places her in the same attention economy as the footballer himself.

Half a world away, the same facial architecture was generating a very different kind of electricity. In Buenos Aires, the comedian Momi Giardina performed a parody of Haaland on the streaming channel Luzu TV, leaning into a resemblance her audience had long remarked upon. The sketch was, by her account, an absurd game — “like a child who plays” — but the reaction was ferocious. A wave of online abuse followed, including death threats, which Giardina described as far more painful than the controversy itself. She sent a message to Haaland, whom she calls a genuine idol, but received no reply. “Do you think, in the middle of a World Cup, Haaland is going to care what I do?” she asked reporters. Her colleague, the humorist Homero Pettinato, offered a different reading: the fury was, he said, simply because she was a woman.

The global audience, meanwhile, was staging its own rituals of resemblance. In Miami’s Brickell neighbourhood, on the day of Norway’s quarter-final against England, a beauty influencer named Emma Kate Willman — herself known for a Haaland-like face and a viral hair tutorial — organised a lookalike contest. Men dressed as the striker milled about, and a Norway fan won two tickets to the match at the Hard Rock Stadium. The event was a carnival of doppelgängers, a live-action version of the digital game that had been playing out for weeks. Viewed from Moscow, Buenos Aires, or Miami, the phenomenon suggested a shared hunger: to take a global icon and find him in the face of the person next door.

What united these episodes was a sense of play that the internet alternately rewarded and punished. Kostromitina, who hopes Haaland will one day contact her, has embraced the joke without apology. Giardina, bruised but unrepentant, insisted she had acted without malice. In both cases, the striker himself remained silent, a distant sun around which these satellite personalities orbited. The lasting image is not of the footballer, but of the model in the Moscow bar, drumming in a borrowed shirt, a private joke made public and multiplied across millions of screens.