Read for 5 minutes11 July 2026 06:30 AM IST
Ståle Solbakken has already died once. On Saturday, he still coaches Norway against England.
The first shock from the defibrillator did nothing. The body, which was already holding its breath, was shocked by over one hundred and fifty joules. It was his second heart attack moments later on March 13, 2001, on the training pitch in Copenhagen. He doesn’t remember any of it. “I don’t remember anything,” he told VG. That day has been completely erased, a blank space where his own death should have been.
Club doctor Frank Odgaard immediately began compressions, continued until an ambulance arrived, then used the defibrillator himself. Solbakken did not breathe for seven minutes. He was declared medically dead. His parents came from Norway; His mother, he said, began planning his funeral on the North Sea, before anyone knew whether his brain had read what his heart had not.
He came out of the intensive care unit thirty hours later, battered and put back down.
Doctors then tested the pacemaker they had implanted by deliberately stopping his heart to see if the machine had caught it. “Finally, you disappeared,” he told NRK’s Drivecraft program. “They take your life… and then they bring you back to life.” In the interval before that happened, Solbacken noticed something. “It was a beautiful light blue,” he said at the same event, describing the tunnel opening in the dark. Residual brain activity, doctors told him.
A second chance
He was 33, yet fit enough to imagine playing until 36. What stopped him was not the fear of his own body, but the thought of what he would ask of everyone around him if he stayed. He didn’t want to surprise teammates and opponents, every time he went down, if it was true this time. “Will he get up, or will he lie there?” It was a question he didn’t want anyone else to take up, he later explained. So he retired and within a year was coaching Norwegian second division club Hamkam. The team’s revival under him was so dramatic that the press began calling him Stalle Salvatore, the Italian for savior, without anyone realizing they were describing a man who had killed himself a year earlier.
He won eight Danish league titles in Copenhagen and further tough spells at Wolves before Norway made him their national coach in 2020. He last played for the country in the 1998 World Cup, their previous appearance in the tournament, and twenty-eight years later, he is the manager who took them back.
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On the way, his heart was once again interrupted. In 2009, running across the pitch, his legs gave out under him, the pacemaker doing exactly the job it was fitted for. “What’s going on?” was his first thought, he later recalled. He recovered within an hour. This May, just days before the World Cup team was named, a reporter’s microphone set his pacemaker vibrating, something that hadn’t happened since 2009. He completed the interview anyway, then drove himself to the hospital for a check-up. Cleaned up, he made plans for the evening and appeared on the live podcast as scheduled. It turned out to be a microphone magnet. “There was full service,” he later joked to VG, as if he had come for nothing but coffee.
A new perspective
He faced another test last year. Three weeks before the start of Norway’s World Cup qualifying campaign, Solbakken’s mother passed away. The latter’s camp was already filled with political arguments about merits against Israel, and his own misery, he later admitted in Dagbladet, was that he had to wait his turn. It was only after the camp that he joined him. There is a word for it in Norwegian: overfallet. ambush The mother, who once started planning his funeral, had to be buried quietly in an effort to get her country back to the World Cup.
Anniken Solbakken, married to him for more than thirty years, was the first when Norway beat Senegal 3-2 in June to reach the knockout stages. He climbs into the stands to find her and kiss her, while Erling Haaland leads the rest of the squad through a subway-platform dance, already an Internet ritual. “Things like that change you a bit,” Solbakken told FIFA.com of the collapse, “especially in the short term.”
Norway will face England in the quarter-finals on Saturday. Either way, Solbakken will be on the touchline, the pacemaker keeping time he should never have had.