Can Haaland (when fit) and Odegaard carry Norway to their first major tournament in 24 years?

“I think that Stale Solbakken, the coach, has to do one thing before we start our qualification,” Jan Aage Fjortoft says. “He has to go to the church and pray that Martin Odegaard and Erling Haaland won’t get injured.”

Former Norway international Fjortoft, talking to The Athletic last week, spoke too soon. This week came the news everyone in the Scandinavian nation was dreading: Haaland, scorer of eight goals in his past two matches for Manchester City and a staggering 42 in all competitions so far in his debut season in England, has a groin injury. A “heavy blow” for Haaland — that’s how Solbakken described it — feels like an even bigger blow for a country desperate to make up for lost time on the pitch.

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It is 23 years and counting since Norway qualified for a major international men’s tournament, going back to the days when Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Tore Andre Flo, John Carew and Steffen Iversen were part of their attack at the 2000 European Championship. Haaland wasn’t even born.

“To have the Norwegian passport is one of the greatest assets you can have, but not when it comes to big football tournaments, then it’s not good,” says Fjortoft, who won 71 caps over a decade from 1986 and played at the 1994 World Cup.

“You can imagine Erling seeing the guy who is his deputy at Manchester City — Julian Alvarez — being a World Cup winner and getting four goals (at Qatar 2022). Of course, he would love to be there. Of course, he would like to be at a World Cup, that is normal, and the same with Martin at Arsenal.”

There is a mixture of hope and belief in Norway that the narrative is about to change. Their qualification campaign for Euro 2024 gets underway away to Spain on Saturday and there are a couple of reasons — starting with Haaland and ending with Odegaard — why Norwegians feel that this time will be different.

Haaland is arguably the top striker in the world. As for Odegaard, the Arsenal and Norway captain is in the form of his life. Together, they are among the best — if not the best — performing players in the Premier League this season. Not bad for a country with a population of a little more than five million people.

“We also have Ada (Hegerberg, 2018 Ballon d’Or Feminin winner) and Caroline Graham Hansen in the women’s game, so we have big profiles on both sides,” says Leif Gunnar Smerud, Norway’s men’s under-21s team coach. “But Erling Haaland and Martin Odegaard are a huge inspiration, and not least for the young players who are playing in top football that can see, ‘Wow, they are actually doing this — and he played on my team last week’.

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“If you take Jorgen Strand Larsen, who now plays for Celta Vigo (in Spain’s top division), when he sees Erling — who has played on the same team as him — just rocket and be the king of the world, he will think, ‘OK, I’m not that good. But I’m not that bad either. So I can do this’. From that, I think they (Haaland and Odegaard) are breaking barriers in players’ minds.”

Now for the not-so-good news…

“I would think that there is no team in the whole world who have a wider space between the best players in the team and the worst players in the team. I don’t think it’s possible,” Fjortoft says.

“You have Martin Odegaard, who has developed into a great player, a great leader, and has been at the national team since he was 15. You have Erling Haaland, who is scoring goals for fun, and he will keep on scoring goals. Martin will end up breaking the record international (appearances) for Norway — 100 per cent. Erling will break all kinds of goalscoring records in Norway.

“But then you have — and I say this in no disrespect, I just try to state the fact — no defenders. You have defenders playing abroad who can turn into good players. But you have none in that class at all. You have my good friend, Orjan Nyland, who is a good goalkeeper but he doesn’t get games (for RB Leipzig), so he’s losing rhythm. So I think that is a big, big headache for Stale Solbakken.”

Julian Ryerson, who joined Borussia Dortmund from fellow German Bundesliga side Union Berlin in January, will start against Spain at right-back, while Birger Meling, who has been used mainly as a substitute by French top-flight club Rennes this season, is expected to play on the left. As for centre-backs, good luck trying to find a modern-day Ronny Johnsen, Brede Hangeland or Henning Berg.

Leo Ostigard has played only 237 of a possible 2,430 minutes in Serie A for Napoli this season and Kristoffer Ajer, currently out with a calf strain, has missed more matches than he has started for Brentford. That leaves Norwegian side Valerenga’s Stefan Strandberg, who has been riddled with injury problems for the last 18 months, and Andreas Hanche-Olsen, who joined Mainz of the Bundesliga from Belgium’s Gent in January.

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The shortage of defenders in Norway is intriguing, not least because nobody seems to view it as bad luck. Instead, it appears as though the country has, inadvertently, turned off the supply line at the position through the combination of cautious and prosaic training methods and an increasing dependence on using artificial pitches.

Fjortoft and Solbakken have been critical of the latter at first-team level — a practice that is largely a product of the harsh climate in Norway, where the freezing temperatures in winter mean the domestic league doesn’t start until around this time of year then runs to a November conclusion.

Although Fjortoft is all for younger players developing their technical skills on artificial surfaces and wouldn’t want that to change, he believes Norway now have a generation of footballers who all play the same way.

“They know everything about the ball,” Fjortoft says. “They know everything about the Cruyff turn. They know everything about chipping. They know everything about everything. But they don’t know everything: how to win a football match? So I think a consequence of that is: where are the fucking-big centre-halves? Where are these players? We don’t have them. We have some defenders who I would love to play against.”

Smerud is familiar with this debate.

A licensed clinical psychologist as well as Norway Under-21s coach (his team have qualified for the European Championship finals in Georgia and Romania this summer), Smerud is an erudite man and has some interesting thoughts. In his view, the training methodology in Norway in the past, together with the influence of fitness coaches and medical staff on those sessions, is a bigger reason for them being short of options in defence than the artificial pitches.

“If I went around Norway and looked for many years, it would be rondos, a passing drill, then it would be possession without any direction and without any goal, and then it would maybe be some (team) play at the end,” Smerud says.

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“If that’s the main ingredients during a training week, you don’t want the big, ugly, strong-tackling guy there who can’t handle the ball. So I think we selected them away.

“I’m a psychologist. So I tend to think that we give medicine and we give treatment. But everything that works has a side effect. And I think we were improving training, but we were systematically excluding creating central defenders — they didn’t get through the cut, they were filtered.

“For me, I think that’s more of an important thing to change. Because the training you can do with kids on artificial pitches, that creates skills and it creates good players. That they have to adjust when they get older and start playing senior and playing more on grass, yes. But we can’t take away the artificial pitch, because it has so many advantages.

“But we can stop the fitness coaches from running everything on low-risk only, and play more football. Then you will get more fights (duels) in training and then we will develop all types (of players), because you need all the types in the game.”

Wales. Population 3.2 million. Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey. Euro 2016 semi-finalists. Euro 2020 round of 16. World Cup 2022 qualifiers.

Norway. Population 5.4 million. Haaland and Odegaard. Err…

“I will steal that from you, because I think that is a very good comparison,” Fjortoft tells The Athletic, smiling.

Eirik Bakke, a former Norway and Leeds United midfielder, nods too.

“Wales is a great example of what Norway was before,” says Bakke, who was at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday to see Manchester City beat Burnley 6-0 in the FA Cup, with Haaland scoring his latest hat-trick.

“Everyone wants to play nice football. I was in Sogndal (as a coach of the Norwegian club) before. When you’re a coach for a long time, you play and you do well and you win games, and people want more: ‘You want to win nicely’. It doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen Wales play a good match. They just win 1-0 and Gareth Bale scores the goal.

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“So sometimes it’s all about, as the national team: ‘Just win the games’. That’s the mentality that we had before. We didn’t care about how we played, and everyone was so happy when you’re winning. Now it’s, ‘Because we have these world stars we have to play this way’. It doesn’t have to look so nice, even if Martin Odegaard and Erling Haaland are there. Just win the game. I think that’s the right thing to do.

“But what Wales have been doing — (even just) qualifying — is crazy. Why shouldn’t Norway be doing the same?”

It is a good question and one that Bakke swiftly answers himself when he thinks about the successful Norway teams he was part of. He talks a lot about mentality and identity, about culture and togetherness, and about how players were willing to make sacrifices to liberate the best members of the team.

“We had to make sure that we were doing all the work, so maybe if Tore Andre Flo, Steffen Iversen or Ole Gunnar Solskjaer are going to finish the game, we have to do some running,” Bakke says. “It wasn’t all about us. It was about finding a way to beat the big teams, not be the same as them.

“We had a great identity before with the way we played. And I think that’s what Stale Solbakken wants now — he has to make the most of that. We have Martin Odegaard and Erling Haaland — you have to pick a team around them who can make them good, then you will qualify again. It was close (last time). If Erling wasn’t injured, we would have qualified. As simple as that.”

Bakke is referring to qualification for the 2022 World Cup. Norway finished third in their group, three points behind second-placed Turkey. Tellingly, in the four matches (of 10) Haaland missed, Norway picked up only five points — a statistic that will not be lost on Solbakken and his players as they start this Euros qualification campaign again without their talisman.

In short, the supporting cast in Norway’s squad will need to step up in a group that also includes Scotland, Cyprus and Georgia.

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There are options in midfield, where Benfica’s Fredrik Aursnes and Sander Berge of Sheffield United are likely to start alongside Odegaard. Union Berlin’s Morten Thorsby and Patrick Berg, back home with Bodo/Glimt after a short and unhappy spell with Lens in France, could also come into the picture.

Things are more hit-and-miss on the flanks. Southampton’s Mohamed Elyounoussi has registered the most shots in the Premier League this season without scoring, while Ola Solbakken is still adapting to life under Jose Mourinho at Roma in Italy’s Serie A following his January transfer from Glimt. Indeed, the 24-year-old winger has had as many rollickings as starts so far.

“Solbakken doesn’t understand tactics in the same way as the other lads — he doesn’t know the difference between 5-3-2 and 3-4-1-2, he doesn’t understand a high press,” Mourinho said last month. “He must learn how to play with us. The lad has quality, but he cannot just replace someone and have the team use the same structure.”

Further forward, it will be a tall order for Larsen (193cm/6ft 4in) or Real Sociedad’s Alexander Sorloth (195cm) to get much time playing as a striker apart from when Haaland (194cm) is injured. Indeed, Sorloth, the former Crystal Palace striker, is more likely to be deployed as a wide attacker on the right.

“I think that Erling likes to play alone up front,” Fjortoft adds. “Let’s put it another way, the strength of Erling Haaland is to create space. He is a master in creating the space that he wants to take advantage of, and then he just needs players around him to play him into that. I think — and this is nothing to do with Sorloth — that Haaland has found he is more efficient when he plays alone. And I think Stale Solbakken sees it the same way.”

Smerud looks up and smiles.

“If you’re looking to really go into what it is that we have that is a bit rare, it’s something in Norway we call ‘delingskultur’ — we share everything,” he says.

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“So these days, a club doing really well, like, let’s say Viking FK, and competing with Valerenga, they will share everything they do with Valerenga and all the other clubs. This culture, it’s really interesting where it comes from and the impact it has. It’s something I see more and more now.”

He adds: “Everyone has engaged in something bigger than ourselves. We could all keep our secrets, and there was a tendency to do that when — and it’s not Jan Aage, he wasn’t a coach — we had the ex-players from the ’90s coming back into leadership positions in Norwegian football who didn’t have this perspective as the main focus.

“So they came from the more competitive world in England — (Manchester United manager Sir Alex) Ferguson and keeping it ‘us against them’. I think when you’re small (as a nation), you have to use whatever you have. We can be good at competence and knowledge, but then we also need to develop quicker and that’s where the sharing comes in.”

As much as Smerud is encouraged by the Norwegian model now and the progress being made, he is quick to underline that Haaland and Odegaard are “primarily a result of their own work and their families’ work”, rather than products of the system.

Bakke agrees. “I think more and more talent is coming,” he says. “But Erling and Martin are different, they’re unique. I don’t think we should be thinking there’s more and more of them coming.”

Although Haaland and Odegaard are outliers, it is clear they are on the same page as their Norway team-mates in so many other ways. Fjortoft tells a story about a documentary he made about Haaland that also involved Berge and Odegaard, and how listening to the three of them discuss how passionate they are about playing for the national team, and seeing how well they got on, made him pine for yesteryear.

“I went from that meeting and called a friend and said, ‘This is the only time, 20 years after I retired, that I miss playing football’, because I saw that the Norwegian national team, they like to meet up, they are friends,” Fjortoft explains. “Although it’s serious and intense, and the demand for Norway is to qualify for a World Cup or a Euros, they love to be together.

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“So I think that the atmosphere at the national team is very good, and that should not be underestimated because there are countries where the players don’t like to go to the national team. I think that with the coach now, Stale Solbakken, he is the first from my generation, or from our squad back in the ’90s, and he knows that one of the reasons we did well is that we loved to be together. We loved to represent our country.

“We are a very proud sports nation. There is a time now where, suddenly, we have a good golfer (Viktor Hovland), we have a good tennis player (Casper Ruud). We have Karsten Warholm in athletics that is winning Olympic golds (in the 400m hurdles).”

The obvious difference with Haaland and Odegaard is they are outstanding individuals in a team sport, and their success for Norway depends, at least to some degree, on others.

“It’s going to be a challenge,” Smerud adds. “If Erling and Martin are going to do all the work, we can’t make it. It’s too easy to stop two guys. We need more. And, of course, we are more than just those two.”

(Top photo: Pedja Milosavljevic/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)

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