In Iceland, packing salt to face Messi at World Cup

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND » To prepare for his job of keeping Lionel Messi quiet in Iceland’s opening game of the World Cup, defender Birkir Saevarsson worked as a salt-packer at a warehouse in an industrial zone of Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital. Not because the 33-year-old seasoned football pro needs the money, but because the monotony of factory work, the graft, the need to cover his neat hair with an unsightly net all helped keep him real.

“This is normal for an Icelander, you know? More normal than going to the World Cup,” Saevarsson said during a recent shift before he flew to Russia with the Iceland squad, talking to The Associated Press as he fed jars into a machine that slapped them with labels marked: “Hand Harvested Lava Salt.”

Playing football professionally is “the best job you can have, but it’s not the real life,” Saevarsson added. So he works because “I can’t really sit on my ass the whole day and do nothing. It’s boring and you just get lazy. I didn’t want to get lazy before the World Cup.”

Go Iceland! In a sport of excess, the fiery volcanic island of 350,000 people is keeping its feet firmly on the ground. From a football perspective, there is nothing not to love about the least populous nation ever to play in a World Cup.

Iceland did not qualify for Russia by accident. Despite having just 100 or so full-time professional footballers to choose from, Iceland succeeded where four-time World Cup winner Italy and three-time runner-up the Netherlands failed because — in everything from lavishing training on kids to making fans feel like they’re an integral part of the team’s success — Iceland is doing everything right. On its Hollywood ride to the quarterfinals of the 2016 European Championships and now to the World Cup, where it plays in Group D with Messi’s Argentina, Croatia and Nigeria, Iceland is blowing apart the myth that success in sports depends solely on weight of numbers.

Although it has just 33,000 people who regularly play football, Iceland has ensured they’re not lacking for two necessities: pitches and coaches. Huge geothermally heated indoor football halls welcome boys and girls after school for government-subsidized training, away from the hostile Artic weather, and an abundance of licensed coaches — one for every 35 players registered in clubs — hothouse their progress.

But infrastructure and ensuring that all those who want to play football get a chance to play does not, alone, fully explain Iceland’s breakthrough. Other factors, more specific to Icelanders, their mindset and habitat, also are important.