As the phoneline crackles from England to Norway, one of the nation’s unsung heroes reveals he is en route to the beach. His work, for now at least, is done – and he deserves a day in the sun.
Håkon Grøttland may not be able to directly impact Saturday’s quarter-final against England in the same way as Erling Haaland or Martin Odegaard but he has played a role in the rise of Norway that is nearly as important yet unheralded.
He is the man who, since 2013, has been their head of player development and drew the blueprint for their current World Cup run. He also happens to be the scout credited with first spotting Odegaard. Not a bad c.v. and, like all Norwegians, he is humble but full of pride.
‘It has been a long time with a lot of frustrating years,’ he tells Daily Mail Sport about his career. ‘Before this I was in one of the districts in the federation and I was lucky to be the guy who spotted Odegaard.
‘It is just a pleasure to be that guy. I worked very closely with him from age 11 to 13 and I then got the job in the federation. I was inspired by my experiences with Martin and was very happy to get the job but I soon started to think, ‘What actually is our model?’.
‘We had to change something, we had to make it clearer.’
Erling Haaland’s Norway are on their greatest ever run at the World Cup after reaching the quarter-finals
Norway, remember, are at their first World Cup in 28 years. Their current run, which has seen them beat Brazil and Ivory Coast in the knock-outs to set up a last-eight clash with England, is their best ever. And it is no fluke.
Grøttland describes the last decade as a ‘revolution’, all stemming from his team setting up the Landslagsskolen, or National Team School (NTS), with nearly all of Stale Solbakken’s 26-man World Cup quarter-finalists graduates of the programme.
In the last 10 years alone, 539 new artificial pitches were built around the country, while a further 586 were renovated to make the game a year-round sport as part of a decades-long commitment to transforming the nation’s football infrastructure.
‘What we did was inspired by my dealings with Martin,’ adds Grøttlandon the current national team skipper. ‘In Norway, we have some rules that say you cannot select players before they are 12. With Martin, we had to change the rules because he was so, so, so special.
‘He was the only player in my 15 years with the federation that we have said he had to become a national team player. He must. He was a genius, he was so brilliant, saw spaces and solutions that the coaches had not even talked about.
‘He was so special. We now say in Norway that talent, for us, is the player who has the most ownership over their own development. That kind of thinking is inspired by Odegaard and my experiences with him.
‘We had a lot to do but we had to get some togetherness in Norway, common principles over how we train and play and how we spot talent. That was very important. We are a huge country so we have big potential if we have a trend.’
The NTS is not too dissimilar to Clairefontaine in France but it is more an ideology. Every player must play at a grassroots club until age 12, then the most promising ones go to the NTS while still playing for their original teams.
Martin Odegaard has been described as ‘special’ and a ‘genius’ by the man behind the Norwegian football revolution
The best coaches (and there has been a boom in UEFA-accredited ones given the Norwegian FA’s investment), all following a blueprint of how to play and how to train, are at the NTS and players then go on to the top club academies from around age 15.
It is not just at national team level that they are thriving. One of the sporting stories of the year is Bodo/Glimt’s run to the Champions League last-16, beating Manchester City and Atletico Madrid in the league phase before beating Inter Milan in the knockout play-offs.
Gregg Broughton, who worked at Bodo/Glimt for five years as academy manager and is now sporting director at Chicago Fire, tells us: ‘The alignment behind the club was absolutely clear. They knew what they wanted to do and they knew how they wanted to get there.
‘And then they had a stable of young players behind the scenes who hadn’t quite broken into the first team as regulars at that stage. Many of those players are now with Norway and what you saw was deliberate investment in infrastructure throughout the country.
‘This was especially in player development. They didn’t try to say ‘this is how Spain or England or Germany does it’, they were very deliberate in saying, ‘what does success look like for Norway?’.’
Norway’s FA invested heavily in clubs – not just the top teams but every one – and also in coach development. There was an academy classification put in place and the FA hosted an annual conference in La Manga with every sporting director and academy chief.
They shared ideas and worked collaboratively. They also have live reporting on clubs’ finances. Unlike, say, Leicester City, who have been punished for financial missteps 12-18 months prior, every club in Norway is graded on their current finances. Every one is green and in a surplus.
‘What you saw, especially at Bodo/Glimt where I was, they worked hard on developing players as human beings,’ adds Broughton. ‘They ensured there was a well-rounded person at the end of the journey.
‘Norwegian society, one of the reasons it works, and it’s not a cut-and-paste model that you can just plant into another country and say it’s going to work the same, is there’s a concept in Norwegian called dugnad, which is basically volunteering.
‘There’s a willingness to sacrifice yourself as a person for the greater good. In other societies that would never work, but within Norwegian society, putting yourself above something that’s bigger than yourself would be absolutely unthinkable. You’d be ostracised if you tried to do that.’
On the streets of Norway, they are going into a state of frenzy. Helge Vermundsen Grunnevag, who is head of the Norwegian supporters club of Everton and based in between Bergen and Stavanager, has witnessed it all.
‘It is impossible to not be inspired,’ he tells us. ‘If the kids are looking for inspiration, it is right there. Every kid in Norway is running around with Odegaard, Haaland, Antonio Nusa on their back. It is no longer Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, it is Haaland or Odegaard or Nusa.
‘It is not just Haaland, you know? It is easy to just look at him and Odegaard but, another player for Bodo/Glimt is midfielder Patrick Berg. Probably our best player this tournament. He is outstanding. He is absolutely fantastic and also humble.
‘These Norwegian youngsters, they are all in it together. If one of them misses a penalty like Strand Larsen did, they all get around him. Norway has something special.
‘We also need to mention the way that Haaland conducts himself, he is so humble. That sends a message to the kids. Against Brazil, they are the favourites with the pressure, so we have nothing to lose. We have no pressure.’
Whatever happens on Saturday in Miami, they believe it is just the beginning.
Grøttland, head of development at the FA, tells us: ‘Our journey is going better than I dreamt of but we have to be humble. We have stars that are not a product of the model… It is a bit of luck that Haaland is so good, that Odegaard is so good.
Norway’s talented stars will pose a stern test for England in the quarter-final on Saturday
‘I never dreamt we would create so many creative players, that was unthinkable 15 years ago, they were all defensive, hard-working players with a bad first touch! It has been a player development revolution.
‘We invested in it and created structures. Maybe the most important thing we did was as we got more knowledge, we started to train more intelligently. Football is about solving situations over time and space, now we train like that.
‘We have a common understanding of what talent is. It is not who runs the furthest, it is about mindset and attitude, motivation for his or her own development but mostly the team’s development. I am proud of us – there are no egos, no a***holes, only guys with good energy.’
England, beware.
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