Erling Haaland is the highest-paid footballer in the Premier League, earning a reported £27.3 million a year at Manchester City, around $36.5 million, and more than six million a year clear of the next name on the list. This summer he became something more unlikely still, the breakout viral star of the 2026 World Cup, an internet event who spawned AI parody clips, waves of meme edits, and even a crypto token trading on his name. One detail fans could not stop talking about was his hair and, more specifically, what was holding it up. The small intricately woven band holding his blonde man bun in place survived over ninety minutes of sprinting, aerial duels, and the full-body violence of a Haaland celebration. And the brand name, printed on a tiny bead, was a word almost nobody outside one corner of South Korea could pronounce.
On the pitch that band was almost always red, the color of Norway’s home kit, and the shade every knockout-round photo seems to have caught. The coordination runs deeper than one color, though; Haaland treats the tie as part of the uniform, and when Norway wore their black change strip he switched to a black band to match. The name is KKNEKKI, and it comes from kkeunaekki, a Gyeongsang-dialect term meaning string or cord. The brand was founded in 1987 by Cho Hyun-tae, a businessman from Hamyang, in South Gyeongsang Province, who named the product after the way people back home said the word. The origin story is almost too tidy to be true: a former footballer with a back injury wanted a hair tie that hurt less to put in and pull out. What he ended up making was less an elastic than a small feat of textile engineering.
Each band is woven from more than sixty fine polyester threads wrapped around a flexible core, then capped with a bead. The weaving is done on vintage Korean knitting machines from the 1960s, contraptions originally built to produce heavy upholstery banding, the kind of thing meant to survive decades of being sat on. Repurposed for hair, the technique yields a tie that grips without slipping, holds its stretch under real abuse, and slides free without snagging or leaving a crease. This is a very Korean kind of achievement, the ordinary object made unreasonably, almost obsessively well, and then quietly exported until it turns up on the head of the most feared striker on the planet.
For a decade the rest of that sentence was written in Norwegian. In 2015 Cho signed a European licensing deal with Bon Dep, a family-run Norwegian accessories company, and moved manufacturing to an industrial complex in Chuncheon, in Gangwon Province, with state support to scale up. Bon Dep bought the brand outright in 2024 and now owns the design and the trademark, giving KKNEKKI its clean Scandinavian styling and a palette of more than seven hundred colors. The core of it, though, stayed in Chuncheon. Cho’s factory kept the exclusive manufacturing rights and the proprietary methods, which means the thing on Haaland’s head is Norwegian on the label and Korean in the weave.
Haaland found it the way the best endorsements begin, by accident. He started wearing the bands in training and daily life because they worked better than anything else, and kept wearing them once the cameras were rolling. When Cho spotted the striker in them during Manchester City matches, he made custom bands in City’s sky blue and sent them over. The affection ran deep enough that in 2024 Haaland bought a minority stake in Bon Dep, going from customer to part-owner. “I wear KKNEKKI and have invested in the company because I believe in the product,” he has said, which is roughly the most Haaland sentence imaginable. The company’s revenue now runs in the neighborhood of seven million pounds. There is something pleasing in the math: the best-paid man in English football, an algorithm unto himself, loyal to a woven band from Chuncheon that sells for about the price of a coffee, and taken enough with it to own a slice of the maker.
The frenzy tracked his tournament almost minute for minute. On July 5, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, he scored twice in the final eleven minutes to beat Brazil 2-1 and send Norway to their first World Cup quarterfinal in twenty-eight years. The run ended on July 11 in Miami, where England edged them 2-1 after extra time and Haaland, subbed off late, finished the tournament with seven goals. In Korea, the discovery landed as equal parts trivia and pride. Searches for kkeunaekki spiked on Naver and Google, older users surfaced memories of buying “the best hair elastics” at Seoul’s Bangsan Market twenty years ago, and commenters from the region cheered the obvious: of course it came from Hamyang. A limited “Haaland Edition” box, eight colorways he picked himself, each bead engraved with his name, sold out almost instantly. Bon Dep reported tens of thousands of new followers, website traffic up seventy percent, and Norwegian visits up a startling 319 percent. The Chuncheon factory posted the best short-term sales in its history.
Getting one now takes a little patience. The official shop at kknekki.com carries the full rainbow, and a store locator points to roughly six thousand stockists, most of them in Europe, plus boutiques and Amazon listings elsewhere. Expect around sixteen dollars for a set of four. Two different kinds of color are selling out at once. The everyday bestsellers are the ones you would guess, black and the neutrals, the shades people reach for every morning; black has its own deep catalog on the site, and several black styles now read “available soon,” quietly out of stock after the World Cup rush. Then there are the hype colors, the ones Haaland wears, Norway red and Manchester City sky blue, which spike whenever he plays. The signature Haaland box is gone for good, marked sold out with a note that it will not be restocked. For a hair tie that costs a few euros and started life as a dialect word, that is not a bad afterlife.
