Haaland's limp is City's latest headache

Portugal remain unbeaten through this Nations League campaign and the win over Norway, 2-1 in front of their own crowd, locked in top spot and a March quarter-final with games to spare. That's the kind of form that makes a group stage feel like a formality, and on the pitch Portugal looked every bit the side with nothing left to prove.

Norway, for their part, didn't get the day they wanted, and it got worse before it got better. Haaland was withdrawn during the match after appearing to struggle with movement, according to The Guardian, which described him as limping off. The exact nature of the issue wasn't detailed in that report, and Norway's camp hasn't put out further information on it.

Why City will be watching closely

This is the part that actually matters for the Premier League table. Manchester City sit top on 15 points from five games under Pep Guardiola, unbeaten so far this season, and Haaland has been central to that: Premier League figures have him at 5 goals from 450 minutes this term, following a 2025/26 return of 27 goals and 8 assists across 2,953 minutes last season. He is not a player City can simply plug a gap for.

International breaks have a habit of handing clubs problems they didn't sign up for, and a limping forward walking off in a group game three months before his club's next fixture is exactly the kind of scene that sets phones buzzing in a medical department. Until City get their own update, this stays a watching brief rather than a crisis, but the timing, right before a run of fixtures, is the uncomfortable bit.

Norway's night gets harder without him

For Norway, losing their biggest goal threat mid-match against a Portugal side chasing a perfect record was never going to end well, and it didn't. Haaland has 62 goals in 54 caps for Norway, numbers that explain exactly why his team shape everything around him, and any spell on the sidelines reshapes what Norway can do going forward in this window.

Elsewhere in the same round, Greece held Germany to a goalless draw, a result that will get picked apart on its own terms. For now, the bigger story out of Sunday's fixtures is the one nobody wanted: a World Cup-calibre striker walking off holding something, and a club six thousand miles away waiting for the phone to ring.