THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020 N B11
SOCCER
some sort of behind-the-scenes advan-
tage — an edge that will hold for a year or
two until everyone else adopts it — or
some bold new style of play that takes op-
ponents by surprise.
What makes Bodo/Glimt’s story stand
out — what transforms it into almost the
Platonic ideal of an underdog story — is
that it contains all of those ingredients,
and a few more.
The coach, in this case, is Kjetil Knut-
sen, a 52-year-old who inspires deep af-
fection in his players. Saltnes said he
“loves him,” and Patrick Berg praised his
collectivist approach: “He listens to his
players.”
The core of the squad is homegrown,
the likes of Berg, Saltnes, the defender
Brede Moe and the winger Jens Petter
Hauge all drawn from Bodo itself or from
elsewhere in the north of Norway. All
came up through the club’s youth sys-
tem.
“Half the first team are local boys,” Or-
jan Berg said. “We aim to have 40 per-
cent of our squad from northern Norway,
and 15 percent of playing minutes for lo-
cal players. That is part of our identity.
The fans want northern Norwegians to
play.”
Prime among them is Patrick Berg,
the scion of what is arguably Norway’s
premier soccer family. His father, Orjan,
played for the club. So did his uncles
Runar and Arild. His grandfather Harald
is regarded as the best player in Bodo/
Glimt’s history, the inspiration behind
what remains — at least until the league
championship is sealed — the team’s
crowning achievement: lifting the Nor-
wegian cup in 1975.The best perch is on the rooftop over-
looking the stadium. Reaching it is not
for the fainthearted: The only access is
via an external staircase, and most of the
field can be seen only if you sit right on
the lip of the building. But still, during
most games, a handful of hardy fans
have made the journey up there.
If anything, others have had to be even
more creative. Before one match over
the summer, one group of fans hired a
cherry picker, parked it outside the sta-
dium, climbed into its basket and then
extended its hydraulic arm until they
could see the field.
The stunt resulted in a fine for the club,
but it was accepted with a laconic grin.
The club’s executives understood that
nobody in Bodo, a city of 50,000 people
just north of the Arctic Circle, a 16-hour
drive from Oslo, has ever seen anything
like this; they know that this season, peo-
ple will go to extraordinary lengths just
to see Bodo/Glimt play.
This has been a golden year for the
club. It stands on the cusp of claiming its
first Norwegian championship. Despite
a budget that is just a fraction of some of
its rivals’, it has steamrollered the com-
petition. It has won 21 of 24 league games
and scored an improbable 83 goals — and
counting — in the process. It has a slew of
records in its sights.
The team’s rise has captivated not only
the city and the region, but the country
as a whole. Frode Thomassen, Bodo/
Glimt’s chief executive, said recently it
had sold merchandise to new fans in ev-
ery corner of Norway, and across Eu-
rope, too. Despite a traditionally small
fan base, its games are suddenly a major
draw for television networks. Ulrik
Saltnes, the club’s captain, said barely a
day had gone by without an interview re-
quest.
Orjan Berg, a former player and now a
coach in the club’s youth academy, was
struck during his summer vacation by
the number of people who approached to
congratulate him on the team’s season.
“Everyone is cheering for Bodo/Glimt,”
he said.
Earlier this year, when his son, Pat-
rick, a 22-year-old midfielder for the
club, won his first call-up to the Norwe-
gian national team, he was greeted en-
thusiastically by Erling Haaland, Martin
Odegaard and the rest of Norway’s ex-
ported superstars. “They said they didn’t
normally watch much of the Norwegian
league,” Berg said, “but that they were
watching our games.”
The bitter reality, of course, is that few
have been able to see the greatest team
in the club’s history in the flesh. There is
a reason fans have had to clamber up
that staircase or rent construction equip-
ment: The coronavirus has meant that,
for much of the season, only 200 fans
have been allowed inside Bodo’s low-
slung Aspmyra Stadion for each game.
Its largest attendance this year has been
600.
In a year when everyone wants to
watch Bodo/Glimt, scarcely anyone can.
The Perfect Underdog
All sports produce underdog stories.
Leicester City wins the Premier League.
Iceland makes the World Cup. Joe Na-
math leads the Jets to the Super Bowl.
But while such stories are rare — that is
what makes them special — and while
each is unique, their rhythms are famil-
iar.
There is, generally, a charismatic
coach. There is a group of players with
something to prove or a squadron of
homegrown talents ready to take the
world by storm. Most of the time, there is
And yet, while Bodo/Glimt is a story of
the shining promise of youth, it is also a
story of redemption. A couple of years
ago, Patrick Berg, frustrated at his lack
of playing time, considered leaving the
team that is entwined with his family.
“I was not in the right head space,” he
said. “I was disappointed and angry, and
I was blaming everyone else besides
me.”
Saltnes, his captain, considered walk-
ing away from the game altogether, say-
ing he had long since ceased to find soc-
cer fun. Before games, he battled nausea
and stomach cramps. He was, in hind-
sight, consumed by “doubts and fears.”
That was only three years ago. A few
weeks back, he led the team out at San
Siro for a Europa League game against
A.C. Milan.
“If you look at the team that day,”
Saltnes said, “almost every player would
have a strange story about how they
ended up on that pitch. They had all been
let down or injured or wanted to leave.
You would never have guessed their
stories.”
All of these, of course, are familiar
tropes in any case study of success
against the odds. What makes Bodo/
Glimt especially compelling is that they
are all present, all at the same time. That,
in part, may explain the club’s appeal.
“We are an underdog,” said Thom-
assen, the chief executive. “And who
doesn’t love an underdog?”The Only Ambition: Have None
In spring 2019, Bodo/Glimt’s players
traveled to Spain for their preseasontraining camp. Traditionally, while they
were there, they would discuss their
goals for the year ahead. This time, they
came back with a different mission.
“We did away with all of that stuff,”
Saltnes said. “We did not have any ambi-
tions. We just wanted to focus on per-
formance.”
Saltnes, like his colleagues, does not
believe there is a singular explanation
for what has happened to Bodo/Glimt in
the past three years, a silver bullet that
has transformed it from an also-ran into
what many regard as the best club team
Norway has had in at least two decades.
“People always ask what the secret is,
but there is no one thing or one person,”
Saltnes said. “It has all happened very
naturally. There was no grand vision, no
map.”
The one thing that everyone agrees
on, though, is that none of it would be
possible without Bjorn Mannsverk. A
former fighter pilot who served two
tours of duty in Afghanistan and flew
missions above Libya, he was hired as
the team’s mental coach in 2017.
Though he was not a soccer fan —
Mannsverk found the first few games he
watched “boring” — he insisted he en-
joyed soccer much more now. As a mem-
ber of Norway’s Air Force, he had discov-
ered the benefits of mental training and
mindfulness, and he accepted the chal-
lenge of trying to introduce his methods
to sports.
“I only had two rules,” he said. “It all
had to be voluntary. And I would not be
the club’s agent. I would not tell the play-
ers they should be more happy or that
they should work harder.”
Initially, he found his new charges
“very quiet, much more so than working
with fighter pilots,” but three years later,
his effect has been seismic. He runs one-
on-one sessions — each lasting about 30
minutes — and group meetings. He gives
the players “homework,” in which they
are encouraged to reflect on their emo-
tions and experiences. And every morn-
ing, the squad meditates before training.
Occasionally, his methods appear in
plain sight: When Bodo/Glimt concedes
a goal, the players regularly come to-
gether to talk it through. “Not every
time,” Mannsverk said. “Sometimes,
there is a bit of bad luck or whatever. But
if they need to, they do. This is quite rare,
I think.”Saltnes had just come from a group
session with Mannsverk and several
teammates when we spoke. It was, he
said, intensely personal.
“We have a very open culture,” he said.
“We say things to our coach that at other
clubs might be taken as a sign of weak-
ness.” Patrick Berg credits Mannsverk
with not only helping him “as a player,
but as a person, too.”
It was Mannsverk who encouraged
the idea of thinking about performance
rather than results. “Focusing on results
generates a lot of stress,” he said. “Focus-
ing on performance is a really creative
process.”
The results were immediate. Bodo/
Glimt finished 11th in 2018, a creditable
but unspectacular, finish for a newly pro-
moted team. Last year, it finished sec-
ond, and only a late collapse prevented
the club from claiming the title. This
year, there will be no mistake: It is set to
claim the championship playing an ad-
venturous, open, expansive style of play
that even Saltnes described as “kamika-
ze.”
“I don’t think it would be possible to
play like that without Bjorn and the men-
tal work we do,” he said. “No, I don’t think
that would end very well at all.”Shining in Empty Stands
Orjan Berg was 7 when Bodo/Glimt
won that cup in 1975. He remembers that
for quite a while afterward, his family
could not go into Bodo on a Saturday.
“People just wanted to stop him and
talk about football,” he said of his father.
“It feels the same now.”
There is sadness, of course, that this
golden year should have been played out
in the near-silence of all-but-empty stadi-
ums, but those at the club are phlegmatic
about that.
“Of course people would like to watch
us, and we would like to have fans in, but
there is not much point wasting energy
on things we can’t do anything about,”
Thomassen said.
That, though, is not the only poignant
note in Bodo/Glimt’s uplifting story. A
few hours after that game last month in
Milan, it was confirmed that Hauge —
the elfin winger who has been the team’s
breakout star — would not be returning
to Norway. Not for long, anyway. He had
caught the Italian team’s eye, and it had
no intention of letting him go.
He will, probably, be the first of several
key players to depart. “That is part of the
football industry,” Thomassen said. “Of
course, we have sponsors and that sort of
thing, but the money is in selling play-
ers.” He knows that a team that does well
will, soon enough, be picked apart by big-
ger, richer predators.
Next up might be two of the team’s im-
ports, the Danes Philip Zinckernagel and
Kasper Junker, or even the 22-year-old
Berg, who said, “Players have bigger
ambitions than playing in Norway.”
For him, as a local player, as a child-
hood fan, this season has felt “like a
dream.” There is a risk for the club,
though, that once it ends, dawn will bring
a cold, bleak light, that when people
wake up from their reverie, this team
that everyone wanted to watch will be
gone.
Thomassen does not see it that way.
When the club advertised for an under-19
coach a few weeks ago, he said, it was in-
undated with applications, more than
400 in all. He believes Bodo/Glimt is now
more attractive to players in the rest of
Norway than ever; he is full of pride at
the work that has been done to improve
the academy, to keep it churning out
prospects.
“Many people want to be here now,” he
said. “It has been a tremendous journey,
but for us, the adventure does not end
this year. We have to keep developing, to
make this the first step. We will have to
make sure we win the title next year, too.”A Country
Is Watching
This Team
(From Afar)
Fans are going to great lengths to watch Bodo/Glimt play, including sit-
ting on the lip of a rooftop overlooking the stadium. At left, Patrick Berg,
son of a former team member, showing his tattoos to Coach Kjetil Knut-
sen. At right is Jens Petter Hauge, who has been sold to A.C. Milan.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LINDA NAESFELDTSmall-budget Bodo/Glimt
is dominating in Norway. Few
can share the moment in person.
By RORY SMITHBoda/Glimt represents a city of
50,000 just north of the Arctic Cir-
cle. The team, stressing a regional
identity, tries to have 40 percent of
its squad from northern Norway.
‘It has all happened very
naturally. There was no
grand vision, no map.’
ULRIK SALTNES, team captain