The most photographed accessory of the 2026 World Cup was not a pair of boots. It was not a watch, a chain, or a pair of diamond earrings. It was a bag — a bone-coloured Hermès Haut à Courroies 50 with a patchwork of blue-grey mountains and a winding highway stitched across its front — carried down aeroplane steps in North Carolina by a 6'4" Norwegian striker who scores goals for a living.
Erling Haaland did not set out to become the style story of the tournament. But by the time the final whistle blew in July 2026, fashion editors from CNN to Bloomberg had spent a month writing about his Birkins, resale platforms had logged surges in searches for men's Hermès, and the Haut à Courroies — a 130-year-old equestrian trunk bag most people had never heard of in January — had become the single most coveted piece of luggage in world football.
This is the story of how it happened, who else was carrying what, and what it means for anyone thinking about buying — or selling — Hermès in the months ahead.
The Bag That Started It: Haaland's HAC 50 "Endless Road"
When Norway's squad landed in the United States for their first World Cup since 1998, Haaland stepped off the team jet carrying the Hermès HAC 50 "Endless Road" — one of the rarest and most artistically ambitious bags Hermès has produced in the last decade.
The Endless Road is not a quiet bag. Its bone-toned leather body carries a marquetry-style patchwork scene: layered mountains in blue-grey, an open road unspooling toward the horizon. It was conceived as a celebration of travel itself — fitting, given that the Haut à Courroies was originally designed in the 1890s to carry a rider's saddle and boots. Pre-owned examples have been listed at close to $45,500, and given the scarcity of the edition, that number has only moved in one direction since June.
For a first public appearance at a World Cup, it was a statement of extraordinary confidence. Most players arrive in team-issued travelwear carrying team-issued duffels. Haaland arrived carrying a museum piece.
Inside the Collection: At Least Seven Hermès, North of $300,000
Fashion trackers counting Haaland's tunnel walks and airport arrivals through the tournament identified at least seven different Hermès bags, with the collection's estimated value put north of $300,000 — and closer to £1 million once his Louis Vuitton and Chanel pieces are included.
The known highlights:
HAC 50 "Endless Road." The arrival bag. Bone leather, mountain-and-highway patchwork, one of the great collectible HACs of the modern era.
Caban Togo Multipockets HAC Birkin 50. A limited-edition utility interpretation of the HAC in deep navy Togo leather, with exterior pockets that turn Hermès's most formal silhouette into something almost military. A version of this bag sold for $60,480 at Christie's in 2024.
HAC 40 "Rock." Inspired by biker jackets and finished with multiple zips — Hermès at its most subversive, and arguably the most "footballer" bag in the collection.
What makes the collection unusual is not its value — plenty of collectors hold seven figures of Hermès. It is the taste. Haaland has largely avoided the standard celebrity formula of black Birkin 25s and neutral Kellys. Instead he collects the strange ones: the limited editions, the utility silhouettes, the bags Hermès made in tiny numbers for clients who had already bought everything else. As one luxury commentator put it, it feels less like a celebrity collection and more like someone simply choosing the most interesting bags in the room.
He Was Not Alone: The Hermès XI of World Cup 2026
If Haaland was the headline, the supporting cast made it a movement. Across June and July 2026, airport arrivals and team-hotel walk-ins produced what amounted to an unofficial Hermès squad list:
David Alaba (Austria) arrived with a black HAC 50 Multi-Pocket perched on a Rimowa suitcase — the single most-copied travel pairing of the tournament.
Ollie Watkins (England) chose a sandy-beige HAC 50, reportedly worth close to £40,000.
Rayan Cherki (France) carried an oversized Hermès Maxi Kelly 42 — proof that the Kelly, long considered the most feminine bag in the Hermès canon, has crossed over completely.
Manu Koné (France) was photographed with sought-after Hermès pieces on arrival, part of a France squad whose collective haul of Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Goyard turned their touchdown at Boston Logan into a makeshift runway.
Beyond the tournament itself, the wider pattern is unmistakable. Casemiro, Ousmane Dembélé, Endrick, Jurriën Timber and William Saliba have all been travelling with Hermès over the past seasons. The HAC has quietly become something close to football's unofficial luxury travel uniform — the bag you carry when a Louis Vuitton holdall no longer says enough.
Why the HAC? A 130-Year-Old Bag Finds Its Moment
There is a pleasing historical symmetry in footballers adopting the Haut à Courroies. The HAC is not a Birkin variant — it is the Birkin's ancestor. Émile-Maurice Hermès designed the "high belts" bag in the 1890s to carry a rider's saddle, boots and kit. When Jean-Louis Dumas sketched a bag for Jane Birkin on a flight in 1984, the HAC was the template he adapted: he took the tall equestrian trunk and made it wider, shorter and easier to carry.
Which means the HAC is, in a real sense, the original sports bag — built for athletes' equipment a century before anyone had heard of a boot bag. Footballers carrying HAC 50s to training camps are not borrowing from women's fashion; they are returning the bag to its first purpose.
The proportions explain the rest. A Birkin 25 looks like a prop in the hands of a 6'4" striker. A HAC 50 looks like luggage — structured, serious, unmistakably expensive without a single visible logo. It holds boots, a wash bag, a laptop and a change of clothes. It photographs beautifully at the bottom of aeroplane steps. For a generation of players who understand that the airport walk is now a media event, the HAC is a working tool.
The Masculinity Story Everyone Wrote — and Why It Misses the Point
By late June, the think-pieces had arrived. CNN framed Haaland's Birkins as a story about shifting masculinity; Bloomberg's opinion desk asked whether his $50,000 man bags could help rescue a soft luxury market. Both pieces circled the same observation: one of the most stereotypically masculine athletes on earth — a Viking-built centre-forward whose job is physical domination — had adopted an accessory the public still codes as feminine, and nobody laughed.
The fashion-history footnote worth adding: men carrying Hermès top-handle bags is not new. It is a return. The HAC was a man's bag for most of the twentieth century. What changed is not the bag but the audience — and the fact that the most-watched sporting event on the planet gave one collector thirty days of global coverage.
For the market, the mechanism matters more than the sociology. Every previous surge in men's Hermès demand was driven by music and fashion insiders. This one was driven by sport, which reaches an audience an order of magnitude larger, in every market Hermès cares about. When demand broadens that quickly, supply does not. That is the entire Hermès equation.
From Pharrell to Haaland: A Short History of Men Carrying Hermès
To understand why July 2026 feels like a tipping point rather than a fad, it helps to know how long this has been building.
The founding image of the modern men's Hermès era dates to 2007, when Pharrell Williams stepped out in New York carrying a purple alligator HAC — a bag so oversized and so dramatic that a single paparazzi frame turned it into one of the most recognisable accessories of the decade. Pharrell never treated the HAC as a borrowed women's piece; he treated it as luggage for a man with taste, and over the years added gold and orange HACs to what remains one of the definitive collections in the category.
What followed was a slow relay across music and fashion. Virgil Abloh carried Birkins between design meetings. Travis Scott and Gunna brought the bags into hip-hop's daily vocabulary. A$AP Rocky folded Hermès into his gallery-boy wardrobe. By the mid-2020s the baton had passed to Hollywood and American sport: Timothée Chalamet with a Kelly, Travis Kelce — a 6'5" NFL tight end — carrying Hermès through stadium tunnels, David Beckham long since fluent in the house's codes. The "man Birkin," as the style press took to calling it, had stopped being a provocation and become a category.
Football was the last major arena to convert, and then it converted all at once. The difference is scale: a Pharrell street-style photograph reaches fashion's inner circle; a World Cup arrival reaches billions. When Haaland walked down those aeroplane steps with the Endless Road, he wasn't starting a trend — he was finishing a twenty-year argument.
There is also a commercial logic to why footballers, specifically, have embraced the house. A footballer's career is short, his income front-loaded, and his relationship with visible wealth complicated by scrutiny. Hermès solves an elegant problem: it is the most expensive thing you can carry that carries no logo. To the uninitiated, Alaba's black HAC 50 is a nice weekend bag. To everyone who knows, it is a five-figure statement that required either years of purchase history or serious secondary-market intent. Quiet to the crowd, deafening to the connoisseur — which is precisely the register modern footballers want.
The Kelly Crossover — and the Chanel Counterpoint
One detail from the tournament deserves its own paragraph: Rayan Cherki's Maxi Kelly 42. The Kelly — named for Grace Kelly, structured, single-handled, the most formally feminine bag Hermès makes — has completed a crossover few predicted. In its oversized 42cm "Maxi" proportion, worn crossbody or carried loose, it reads as an entirely different object: architectural, almost briefcase-like. Cherki carrying one at a World Cup does for the Kelly what Pharrell once did for the HAC, and we expect Maxi Kelly and Kelly Dépêches demand among men to firm accordingly. Our [Kelly guide](/journal/hermes-kelly-to-go-guide-2026) covers the family in full, and our [current Kelly gallery](/shop/kelly) shows what is available to view in Knightsbridge this week.
And Hermès did not have the tournament entirely to itself. Marcus Thuram arrived with a bright green suede maxi flap from Chanel's Pharrell collaboration — a reminder that the airport runway is now genuinely contested territory. For buyers weighing the two houses, the investment mathematics remain distinct, and we've set them out in detail in our [Hermès vs Chanel value analysis](/journal/hermes-vs-chanel-value-2026): Chanel moments make headlines, but Hermès resale values make portfolios.
What World Cup 2026 Does to the Hermès Market
At JULL we watch the secondary market daily, and tournament-driven moments like this tend to move it in three predictable ways.
HAC values firm first. The HAC has historically traded at a discount to the equivalent Birkin — it was the connoisseur's choice, bought by people who knew the history. That discount narrows every time the silhouette has a moment, and it has never had a moment like this. Large sizes (40 and 50) in masculine neutrals — black, étoupe, gold, Barénia naturals — are the immediate beneficiaries.
Limited editions detach from the curve. Bags like the Endless Road or the Caban Multipockets do not track the general Hermès index; they trade like art, on scarcity and story. A bag that has now been photographed on the biggest stage in sport has acquired provenance-by-association. Expect auction estimates to reflect it.
Men become buyers, not just gift-givers. The most durable effect. A significant share of new enquiries we have seen this summer are men buying for themselves for the first time — usually starting with a HAC, a Birkin 40, or a Kelly Dépêches briefcase. First-time buyers become repeat buyers. That is how a demand base permanently widens.
If you hold a large-size HAC or a limited edition, this is the strongest seller's backdrop in years. If you are buying, the calculus is the one we always give: buy the bag, the condition and the story — the market will do the rest. Our guide to [which Hermès colours and models hold value best](/journal/hermes-resale-colours-2026) covers the fundamentals, and our [Birkin investment analysis](/journal/hermes-birkin-investment-2026) sets out the ten-year numbers.
How to Buy a HAC (Without a Decade of Purchase History)
Here is the part the tournament coverage never explains: you cannot simply walk into a Hermès boutique and buy a HAC 50. Large HACs are produced in small numbers, offered to established clients, and in the case of limited editions, allocated by invitation. The players you saw at the World Cup either have deep boutique relationships, personal shoppers — or bought on the secondary market.
That is precisely the gap JULL exists to close. We source new, unworn and pre-owned Hermès directly from a private network of collectors and boutique clients across Europe and the Middle East, which means the bags that never reach a shop floor — large HACs, men's Birkin 40s, rare leathers, limited editions — pass through our hands in Knightsbridge. Every piece is authenticated before it is offered, and every piece can be inspected in person at our London showroom. Start with the [full bags gallery](/shop/bags), or go straight to [Birkin](/shop/birkin) or [Kelly](/shop/kelly).
A few honest notes for first-time HAC buyers:
Size matters more than you think. A HAC 50 is a serious piece of luggage — magnificent at an airport, unwieldy at dinner. If you want one bag that does both, a HAC 40 or Birkin 40 is the more versatile buy.
Condition drives everything at this size. Large bags live hard lives — they are carried, stacked and checked. Corners, base and handles tell the truth. Our [Hermès bag care guide](/journal/hermes-bag-care-guide) explains what to look for and how to keep a big bag beautiful.
Authentication is non-negotiable. A surging market attracts fakes at speed, and superfakes of men's-size Hermès are already circulating. Learn the tells in our [authentication guide](/journal/how-to-authenticate-hermes-bag), or use our [AI-assisted authenticity checker](/tools/hermes-authenticator) as a first screen — and buy only from sellers who let you inspect the bag in person.
The HAC Buyer's Cheat Sheet: Sizes, Leathers and the Price Ladder
Because the HAC is suddenly the most-Googled bag in football, here is the working knowledge a first-time buyer actually needs.
Sizes. The HAC runs taller than a Birkin at every number. A HAC 40 is roughly the footprint of a Birkin 40 but with more vertical volume — the sweet spot for daily-plus-travel use, and the size of Haaland's "Rock." The HAC 45 and 50 are true travel pieces: cabin-bag territory, magnificent in motion, heavy when full (a loaded HAC 50 in Togo comfortably exceeds several kilograms — this is luggage, treat it as such). Smaller HACs exist and are increasingly collected, but the tournament effect is concentrated squarely on 40 and above.
Leathers. Togo and Clémence dominate the large sizes — grained, matte, forgiving of scratches, right for a bag that will actually travel. Epsom brings structure at the cost of corner wear. Barénia and Fauve natural leathers develop the patina that HAC purists prize — the bag genuinely improves with a decade of use. Exotics exist in the HAC (Pharrell's purple alligator being the canonical example) and trade like art; if that is your direction, read our [exotic skins guide](/journal/hermes-exotic-skins-guide-2026) first.
The price ladder, July 2026. Entry to the large-HAC market in classic leathers starts in the low £30,000s for good pre-owned examples, runs to £45,000–£55,000 for excellent-condition black and neutral 50s (the Alaba spec, in effect), and detaches from the ladder entirely for limited editions — the Endless Road and Caban Multipockets class of bag now trades on scarcity, story and, since this summer, television exposure. For context on how these numbers have moved over time, our [Birkin price guide](/journal/how-much-does-birkin-cost-2026) tracks the wider Hermès price architecture — and our [Birkin gallery](/shop/birkin) shows the pieces currently in the JULL stock room, priced and ready to view.
One practical warning. The speed of this trend has consequences: lead times on sourcing large HACs have lengthened noticeably since June, and asking prices on the open market are being revised upward between listing and sale. If a specific spec matters to you — size, colour, hardware — brief a sourcing specialist early rather than waiting for the perfect listing to surface.
The Bags of the Tournament — At a Glance
| Player | Nation | Bag | Est. value | |---|---|---|---| | Erling Haaland | Norway | HAC 50 "Endless Road" | c. $45,000+ | | Erling Haaland | Norway | Caban Togo Multipockets HAC 50 | c. $60,000+ | | Erling Haaland | Norway | HAC 40 "Rock" | Rare, edition-dependent | | David Alaba | Austria | HAC 50 Multi-Pocket, black | £45,000+ | | Ollie Watkins | England | HAC 50, sandy beige | c. £40,000 | | Rayan Cherki | France | Maxi Kelly 42 | £30,000+ |
*Values reflect reported secondary-market listings and auction results as of July 2026; limited editions trade on scarcity and vary widely.*
Frequently Asked Questions
What Hermès bag does Erling Haaland carry? Haaland has been photographed with at least seven Hermès bags, most famously the HAC 50 "Endless Road" — a bone-coloured Haut à Courroies with a patchwork mountain-and-road scene — plus a limited-edition Caban Togo Multipockets HAC 50 and a zip-covered HAC 40 "Rock." His full designer bag collection, including Louis Vuitton and Chanel, has been valued at close to £1 million.
What is the difference between a HAC and a Birkin? The Haut à Courroies (HAC) is the Birkin's ancestor — taller, narrower in proportion, with shorter handles and a higher body. It was designed in the 1890s as an equestrian travel bag; the Birkin, created in 1984, is a wider, shorter adaptation of it. HACs are produced in far smaller numbers, particularly in the large 40 and 50 sizes.
Can men buy Birkin bags? Absolutely — and increasingly they do. The Birkin 35, Birkin 40 and HAC sizes were designed with no gender in mind, and the 2026 World Cup made men's Hermès the fastest-growing corner of the market. On the secondary market there are no waiting lists and no purchase history requirements.
How much is a Hermès HAC 50? Boutique pricing for a standard-leather HAC starts around the price of a large Birkin, but availability is extremely limited. On the secondary market, expect £35,000–£50,000 for classic leathers in excellent condition, with limited editions such as the Endless Road commanding significantly more.
Will footballer demand push Hermès prices up? Broadened demand against fixed supply has one historical outcome with Hermès: firmer prices, especially for the exact silhouettes being photographed — large HACs, men's-proportioned Birkins, and limited editions. The effect is already visible in mid-2026 listings.
Which footballers carry Hermès bags? The confirmed 2026 World Cup list includes Erling Haaland (multiple HACs), David Alaba (black HAC 50 Multi-Pocket), Ollie Watkins (beige HAC 50), Rayan Cherki (Maxi Kelly 42) and Manu Koné. Beyond the tournament, Casemiro, Ousmane Dembélé, Endrick, Jurriën Timber and William Saliba have all travelled with Hermès in recent seasons.
Is a Hermès HAC a good investment? Historically the HAC traded below the equivalent Birkin, which made it the value pick for collectors who understood the history. That discount is closing fast as men's demand grows, while production remains tiny — a combination that has served every scarce Hermès silhouette well. As with all Hermès, condition, leather and colour drive the outcome; classic neutrals in large sizes currently enjoy the strongest tailwind. (As ever: buy first because you love the bag — the investment case is the bonus, not the promise.)
Where can I buy a Hermès HAC in London? Large HACs almost never appear on the boutique floor — they are allocated to established clients or offered by invitation. The practical route is a trusted secondary-market specialist. JULL sources HACs, men's Birkins and limited editions through a private collector network, authenticates every piece, and offers viewings at our Knightsbridge showroom.
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*JULL is a specialist Hermès personal shopping service based in Knightsbridge, London. We source new, unworn and pre-owned Birkin, Kelly, HAC and Constance bags — including the large sizes and limited editions that rarely reach the boutique floor — through a private network built over years of collecting. Every bag is authenticated and available to view at our London showroom. [Browse available bags](/shop/bags) or [get in touch](/contact) to source a specific piece.*