Haaland, Odegaard and Norway’s desperate quest to end decades in the wilderness

Sitting in the Allianz Arena on the opening night of last summer’s European Championship, Lise Klaveness could not quite stave off her sense of regret. As the game’s powerbrokers mingled in the corporate suites, fireworks crackled in the night sky above Munich, and Germany bulldozed past Scotland, the President of Norway’s Football Federation felt, in her words, “depressed”. 

The source of Klaveness’ sadness was not simply that Norway had not qualified for the tournament. Like the rest of the country, she has grown used to that. Norway’s women’s team, twice European and once world champions, are a genuine powerhouse. The men, by contrast, have not so much as qualified for a major finals since the turn of the century. 

What made this absence particularly painful, though, was her sense that Norway would not simply have been in Germany to make up the numbers. “It was the feeling that you have a team good enough to be there, living their dream,” she told the BBC this week. “We had years when we could have come but we knew we wouldn’t play decent football. It is different now.”

There is no great mystery as to why it should feel that way. Erling Haaland, the Manchester City striker, might be the best Norwegian player of all time; he is almost certainly the most famous player the country has ever produced, a genuine global superstar. Martin Odegaard, captain of both Arsenal and his national team, ranks a close second.

Most striking of all, though, is the quality of their supporting cast: Haaland’s club team-mate Oscar Bobb, the Atletico Madrid striker Alexander Sorloth, Borussia Dortmund’s Julian Ryerson, Benfica’s Andreas Schjelderup, as well as a host of others, all familiar faces from high-profile teams in Europe’s elite leagues.

Nobody in Norway has used the cursed term “golden generation”, Klaveness said, on the admirably modest grounds that the country “hasn’t qualified for anything yet”. But then they do not need to, not really; it is apparent, to those inside and outside the national team, that horizons have shifted, aspirations changed.

“Having Martin and Erling, these artists, on our team makes me shiver,” Klaveness said. “It means we have to change, in terms of security and logistics. They can’t be in airports, for example. People would flock around them. We have always had popular national teams, but this is a different level. We expect more. People expect more.”

That means, too, that there is an unavoidable but unfamiliar sort of pressure on Stale Solbakken, the country’s head coach, and his team as they begin their attempt to qualify for the 2026 World Cup over the next few days.

It is their job to end Norway’s long wait for a place in a major finals. It is their task to fulfil the hopes and dreams of a nation. But it is also their duty to ensure that two of the sport’s brightest lights are present and correct on its greatest stage in North America next summer, that yet another tournament does not kick off without them.

 “There is a sense that it is our turn now,” said Klaveness. “That spring is coming, after a long winter.”

In many ways, the idea that Norway might have spent the last quarter of a century underperforming by not qualifying for major men’s tournaments is not really historically accurate. 

Before the 1990s, Norway had only ever played one game at either the World Cup or the European Championship. It was in 1938, in Marseille. They lost to Italy. After extra time. There was no group stage, so they were eliminated immediately. They would not return to the World Cup until 1994. They have advanced from the groups just once, in 1998. They had to wait until 2000 to make their debut in the European Championship. 

Their experience there was brief, too — they were knocked out of the group stage on a head-to-head tiebreaker — and, with that, the curtain closed on their heyday. Norway have not been back since. The period when they qualified for tournaments was the exception; their absence has always been the rule.

Norway line up ahead of their final game at Euro 2000, which remains their most recent match at a major tournament (Michael Mayhew/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)

Establishing how that golden age came about is easier than explaining the years of scarcity that followed.

Norway, in the 1990s, benefited not just from the domestic and European success of Rosenborg, a fixture in the early editions of the Champions League, but from the country’s status as a natural market for English teams only just experimenting with the radical idea of employing foreign players.

Most significant, though, was the presence of Egil Olsen, a manager derided as a dinosaur at the time but who looks, in hindsight, an awful lot like a pioneer. Olsen, an early adopter of data and analytics, particularly in terms of physical output, took charge of the national team in 1990.

He was a tactical non-conformist, deploying tall, powerful forwards on the wing (a role that may have become more fashionable had he referred to it as the ‘false seven’). He played unashamedly direct football. He encouraged Norway’s authorities to arrange as many friendlies as possible in order to game the FIFA ranking system and at one point his side was officially the second-best team in the world. He turned Ullevaal, the national stadium in Oslo, into a fortress.

Now 82, Olsen might self-deprecatingly refer to himself as an “old man”, but he remains fiercely active. He will conduct interviews with TV2, a national broadcaster, from his home both before and after Norway’s game with Moldova on Saturday (Israel, Estonia and one of Germany or Italy make up the rest of the qualification group). He is in regular contact with Solbakken, one of his many former players. They talk, mainly, about “how to organise a defence,” Olsen said.

He inclines towards diplomacy when asked to explain why Norway faded in the years that followed the end of his first spell as national manager. “It is difficult to give an exact answer,” he said. As time has passed, many have come to accept that perhaps the country was a little too keen to move on from the style they had developed under Olsen and his both chronological and ideological successor, Nils Johan Semb.

“We got a bit bored of that long ball style,” said Thomas Karlsen, a journalist and author who has written extensively on Norway’s decline in the 21st century. “It had gone out of fashion. There was an idea that we should try to be a little bit more like Denmark, to play with a little more flair.”

The problem, by that stage, was that the landscape had changed. Norway had, as Klaveness put it, “lost the competitor advantage”. The country had been an early adopter of output data; soon, all of its rivals had just as much information. Norway lost its physical edge. “Everyone can run a lot and jump a lot,” she said.

Haaland during a Euro 2024 qualifier against Spain (David S. Bustamante/Soccrates/Getty Images)

At the same time, its pipeline of players stopped producing. “The great Rosenborg team had faded,” Karlsen said. “We had a few players in big teams abroad: John Arne Riise, Brede Hangeland, Morten Gamst Pedersen. But there were not that many Norwegian players at the top level in Europe.”

That, in part, was down to the changing tastes of the Premier League; by the mid-2000s, England’s clubs were shopping in the boutiques of France and Italy rather than hunting in the wilds of Scandinavia. Norway found itself with limited resources, stripped of its traditional advantages, trying to play an unfamiliar style of football. “We lost our identity a bit,” Klaveness said. “On the Viking side.” 

This time last year, when Solbakken gathered his players for the first time since they had missed out on yet another major tournament, he told them there were two words which would be crucial in ending Norway’s exile from the World Cup.

The first, “alarm”, had been suggested to him by Hangeland, a member of his coaching staff. Norway’s squad needed to recognise when they were in “a situation where all alarm bells must ring”, he told NRK, another national broadcaster. (Or, to put it more evocatively: “It is about seeing when the toilet is burning,” he said.)

The second was lidelse: suffering. South American teams, Solbakken said, have a “willingness to sacrifice and an ability to enjoy being pushed a little against the wall at times. That is what will always happen to the Norwegian national team forever. We might as well enjoy the suffering during those periods”. 

For the first time in a generation — at least — Norway boasts a squad brimming with attacking talent. There is no technical deficit, testament to the country’s investment in coaching and facilities, the benefits not just of Norway’s wealth but a sporting culture that has turned a country of only 5 million people into a powerhouse in everything from track and field to beach volleyball.

“It is the first time we have ever had actual world-beaters,” said Karlsen, the author. “Players who could play for any club in Europe. In the rest of the world, it must look like it should be easy for Norway to qualify for the World Cup.”

The problem, everyone agrees, is that the country’s resources are uneven. Karlsen describes it as a “soft underbelly”. Olsen puts it characteristically bluntly: “We have two of the best players in the world, but we are not strong enough defensively.” Even Klaveness concedes that as Norway has been churning out artists, it has “lost the defenders”. 

Norway head coach Solbakken (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

In the background, the country is doing what it can to redress that balance. Hangeland, as a player the embodiment of Norway’s historic virtues, has felt the absence of his natural successors keenly. 

Solving the problem is complex — he feels, in part, that the fact so many Norwegian players play largely on artificial turf is a hindrance — but he has launched a program to try to do so anyway. He has called it a national dugnad, a Norwegian word that describes a sort of communal spring cleaning: a chore, undertaken collectively, something that nobody necessarily enjoys but that must, nevertheless, be done.

Solbakken, though, does not have the luxury of time. Norway’s defensive frailty cost the country a place in Germany last summer. In qualifying for Euro 2024, “Scotland had four chances in Glasgow and scored three goals,” Solbakken told NRK. “Georgia had two chances and scored one. Cyprus had one, scored one. Scotland created two chances at Ullevaal and scored both.” It has left his players, he said, bearing a form of “trauma”. 

Karlsen, for one, suspects there must be a link between the expectation around Norway and the team’s tendency to collapse under pressure; he is convinced the failing is as much psychological as it is tactical.

“This generation feels the heat,” he said. “They know this is something we have to achieve.” The country expects them to be in North America next summer; they are sure, now, that the long winter is about to end. The world, too, perhaps shares that view; it is strange to think of the World Cup taking place without some of the game’s biggest stars.

But more importantly, the players themselves know they should be there, really, that for the first time in a long time, Norway belongs on that stage. “It would be a pity if Haaland, a player who is such a force of nature, is not there,” he said. “It would be sad if he has to spend another summer sitting on a beach.” 

(Top photo: David S. Bustamante/Soccrates/Getty Images)