On the surface, Norwegians Erling Haaland and Magnus Carlsen might not seem to have a lot in common.
Haaland is one of the world’s most dominant goal-scorers in soccer — a contest of constant motion, with players covering anywhere from five to eight miles in the typical high-level game.
Carlsen is the highest-rated player in the history of chess — a contest of constant sitting, with players staring intently at a board and trying to visualize a path to victory.
Yes, they’re both from Norway, which is good in just about everything these days. The Scandinavian country of less than 6 million people has been wildly successful in men’s track and field: Jakob Ingebrigtsen may be the world’s best middle-distance runner over the last decade, Karsten Warholm has racked up world and Olympic championships in the 400-meter hurdles, and Markus Rooth is the reigning Olympic decathlon champion. The women’s soccer team includes two of the best players of the past decade, Ada Hegerberg and Caroline Graham Hansen. And, somehow, a country known for long winters has produced beach volleyball stars Anders Mol and Christian Sørum, who won Olympic gold and the world championship in back-to-back years in 2021-22.
But the overlap between Haaland and Carlsen is more than just sharing a hyperachieving nationality. Carlsen is an avid soccer fan who once ranked first among seven million players in the Fantasy Premier League game. Haaland, along with other Norwegian athletes, has reciprocated by investing in Norway Chess as it helps launch the Total Chess World Championship.
In the past, Haaland’s interest in chess might have seemed eccentric. Not today. Plenty of soccer players, including such luminaries as Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold, have found chess is a good complement to their sport, claiming it sharpens their ability to think a few steps ahead of opponents. Like Haaland, Spanish legend Gerard Pique is now a chess investor, buying into the American Gambits franchise in the Global Chess League, which puts on annual team-based events. U.S. player Christian Pulisic has such an interest in the chessboard that Chess.com used him as the model for one of the bots against whom the site’s visitors can play.
Chess Captures Internet Attention
Haaland and Pique aren’t just investing because they see chess as a fun pastime. The game has become a hot property in the past decade. A miniseries called The Queen’s Gambit was a smashing success on Netflix. Online streamers such as U.S. grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura and Sweden’s Anna Cramling have millions of followers on Twitch and YouTube. And just as video games helped push soccer’s popularity in the USA, online play has created a chess boom, with about 44 million U.S. players at Chess.com alone. Globally, Chess.com has more than 270 million members.
One reason streaming and online play has succeeded is that the chess world has finally embraced the notion of playing quickly. For about 100 years since the first world champion (Wilhelm Steinitz) was recognized in the 1880s, the chess community scoffed at “speed chess,” in which each player has only a few minutes of thinking time to use over the course of a game. The world’s best players and teachers insisted that playing quickly instilled bad habits and ruined the concentration and calculation skills required to win “real” chess games lasting several hours. When international governing body FIDE introduced a world championship in “active chess,” in which each player had 30 minutes to use, world champion Garry Kasparov quipped that the existence of an “active” world champion would make him a “passive” champion.
Today, world champions are recognized in three major disciplines. “Classical” chess is the traditional game, though it’s still faster than it used to be. In world championship matches in the mid- to late 20th century, players had 2½ hours each for 40 moves, and then they would pause and resume the next day with an hour for every subsequent set of 16 moves. Today, with digital clocks that can add time for every move, classical chess time controls have been cut down to 1½ hours for 40 moves, then 30 minutes the rest of the way in addition to 30 extra seconds per move. The other disciplines are “rapid” chess, with world championship players getting 15 minutes for the game plus 10 seconds per move, and “blitz” chess, with a mere three minutes on the clock plus two seconds per move. The Total Chess World Championship in which Haaland has invested seeks to crown an overall champion in the three disciplines.
The notion that players will ruin their “classical” prowess by playing rapid and blitz games is undercut by a look at the ratings. Carlsen is the top men’s player in all three disciplines. Nakamura’s habit of playing blitz or other fast games on his live streams while maintaining conversations with people in his chat hasn’t hurt him — he’s No. 3 in the world in blitz, No. 5 in rapid, and tied for second in classical.
USA Chases Chess Championships
Nakamura isn’t alone in putting the USA at the forefront of the chess boom. He’s tied with fellow U.S. player Fabiano Caruana in the classical rankings, where Wesley So is sixth and three more U.S. players are in the top 25. Levon Aronian is second in the world in rapid chess. In the junior rankings, Andy Woodward is seventh overall and is the second-youngest player in the top 10, while Abhimanyu Mishra is fourth in rapid and Christopher Woojin Yoo is fifth in blitz. Alice Lee is the No. 1 junior girl in rapid chess, with Rachel Li just two places back.
And just a few months after the U.S. men’s soccer team captured national interest in the World Cup, the U.S. chess team is ready for action in the Chess Olympiad, which features head-to-head contests between four players from each nation. The men, led by Caruana and So (Nakamura isn’t participating), were silver medalists behind India in 2024 and enter the September event ranked No. 1 in the world. The women took bronze in 2024, with Carissa Yip taking 10 points in 11 games, and are seeded fifth this year.
Broadcasts for the Olympiad are a bit haphazard. FIDE’s YouTube channel will have live streams, while Chess.com and other sites will have commentary.
As more investment money comes in from wealthy soccer players, perhaps we’ll see chess in sports bars one day.