Bodo/Glimt
With a small budget and an innovative approach, the unfancied northerners have run away with the Norwegian league title
With a population of 5.3 million, Norway is not a big country. It is, however, a long country. If you stand on Norway’s most southern point you are about as close to the country’s most northern point of Nordkapp as you are to Rome or Kiev. The two most northern counties in Norway, Nordland and Troms og Finmark, make up about 35 per cent of Norway’s mainland landmass, but only 462,000 of the country’s 5.3 million inhabitants live there. Driving from Oslo to Bodo, the biggest city in the north, will take you 16 hours.
With geography like this, a cultural divide is inevitable, and this extends to football. The first attempt at a national Norwegian football league was started in 1937, yet it wasn’t until 1972 that a team from the north was admitted to the top division. This wasn’t due to a lack of interest, but logistical challenges and a suspicion that northern teams would not be able to compete.
Bodo/Glimt were at the forefront of changing that perception, winning the Norwegian Cup in 1975 and reaching the final in 1977. They would win the cup again in 1993 and finish runners-up in the top division in 1977, 1993, 2003 and 2019. This is already an admirable set of achievements for a team from a city of just over 50,000 people, situated well inside the Arctic Circle. But neither Bodo/Glimt - nor any other team from the north - had ever managed to actually win the league.
This is the historical backdrop to one of 2020’s greatest sporting fairy tales: Bodo/Glimt, who were in the second tier as recently as 2017, have become the first team from the north of Norway to claim a league title. And they’ve done so in an extraordinary manner: the title was secured on November 22, with five games remaining. At that point, Glimt had won 22, drawn two and lost once. They had scored 85 goals, averaging 3.4 per game. And they’ve done it on a wage budget that’s less than a quarter of what Rosenborg spent on salaries last season. Norway has never seen anything like it.
Conventional wisdom suggested that after shocking the league and finishing second last season, “little” Bodo/Glimt would have their squad picked apart and fade away. The first part happened to an extent. Breakout star Hakon Evjen departed for Dutch side AZ Alkmaar, while Tunisia winger Amor Layouni was sold to Pyramids FC in Egypt. But Glimt most emphatically did not fade away. Some of the money raised by those transfers was reinvested, with Danish striker Kasper Junker arriving for less than a fifth of the reported €2.5m fee the club received for Evjen. Junker joined fellow Dane Philip Zinckernagel, already at Glimt, as two of only a handful of foreign players in the squad.
The team’s core is Norwegian, with an emphasis on local talent. Midfield orchestrator Patrick Berg is from a family of Bodo/Glimt players: his father and two uncles played for the club in the 1990s, and his grandfather was a star of the side that won the cup in 1975 and is considered one of the greatest Norwegian players of all time, winning 43 international caps.
Other local stars included 21-yearold winger Jens Petter Hauge – who departed for Milan after scoring against them in a Europa League qualifier in September – as well as left-back Fredrik Andre Bjorkan, son of sporting director Aasmund Bjorkan, who himself played over 200 times for Glimt.
Aside from a cluster of foreign bargains and a core of local players, the squad is made up of Norwegians largely recruited from the lower league.
Tactically, coach Kjetil Knutsen has taken their traditional 4-3-3 and added some notable elements, including an extremely high press and defensive line. Knutsen also encourages centre-backs to bring the ball out from defence, something most Norwegian clubs avoid.
The club has brought in former fighter pilot Bjorn Mannsverk as a “mentality coach”, while the squad have collectively embraced meditation as a tool to help them focus. According to midfielder Berg, the key to getting results has been to not think about results. “At the beginning of 2019, we decided to not focus on results at all, which I think almost all clubs in the world do”, he told TV2. “We never think ‘Oh no, we’re 1-0 down’. It doesn’t affect us at all. We only think about our own performance, and we know how to perform. That’s what we focus on.”
Not focussing on results and not spending money may seem like an unusual way for a club to achieve success in modern football, but it’s hard to argue with the results. Players will no doubt leave for bigger clubs in bigger leagues, but Bodo/Glimt have already made history and added their name to world football’s rich tapestry of impossible underdog stories.
“At the beginning of 2019, we decided to not focus on results at all, which I think almost all clubs in the world do”
Bodo/Glimt midfielder, Patrick Berg