“Norway was an almost team,” Morten Gamst Pedersen told The Indian Express, “but almost is never enough.”
He will know. Pedersen played 83 times for Norway and lived through three separate World Cup qualifying campaigns in 2006, 2010, 2014, each of which ended the same way: agonizingly short. There was no one around this time. Haaland’s second goal only reached the 90th minute before Neymar pulled one back in stoppage time as Norway held off Brazil’s brilliance, reaching the quarter-finals of the World Cup for the first time, 28 years since they last won the World Cup, scoring 37 goals and making it 37 goals in any eight-eight campaign.
No one could be prouder than a man who spent his career on the wrong side of Norwegian football’s near misses.
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He attributes this to what he calls the team’s superpower: coming together. “This is an incredible generation of footballers. Of course Erling is a superstar, who scores goals for fun and then laughs about it. But he’s also a humble guy, like the rest of the team.” Pedersen, who was the last Norwegian to score against Brazil, two ahead of Haaland in the last 16, in a friendly, pointed out a team stacked with talent from Haaland, Martin Odegaard, Alexander Sorloth, who has avoided being tasked by anyone bigger than the squad. “That’s their superpower. Watching this team feels like it’s a kids’ vacation.”
That collectivity has also found its way home, in a form no one can script. Supporters’ club Oljeberget turned the Viking row from the stands in America into a global festival, and in Norway the same gesture has spread to retirement homes, airports, children’s nurseries, even military bases. The clearest sign of how far he has come came recently at Oslo’s Karl Johans Gate, where an estimated 100,000 people gathered in front of the Royal Palace. After a while, Crown Prince Haakon came out of the palace and joined them, royalty and commoners shoulder to shoulder, doing the same silly, hilarious thing at the same time. “There’s a sense of excitement coming home,” says Pedersen, who was recently in the US to support the team and will travel again for the quarter-finals in England.
Norway’s Erling Haaland (9) leads the team as the Vikings line up after their World Cup round of 16 match against Brazil. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
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None of this happened by accident. Pedersen extends some of that credit to FIFA’s 48 teams, but a deeper engine has been at work for two decades at Norway’s football association, known locally by its Norwegian name, Norges Fotballforbund, or NFF.
His grassroots route starts with six-year-olds: a published, age-by-age curriculum, divided into detailed chapters for coaches and clubs, spelling out not just the format but what to raise at each stage. Six and seven-year-olds play three-a-side, giving kids plenty of time on the ball; Eight- and nine-year-olds go five-a-side, with an emphasis on passing; The plan continues to evolve step by step from there. Since 2011, UEFA statistics show, more than 17,000 coaches have completed Norway’s full grassroots coaching pathway and nearly 2,000 have gone on to complete the UEFA B Diploma.
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At the top of that pyramid is Landslagskollen, the national team school for players aged 12 to 16, fed by 1,800 clubs spread across 18 football districts, each enrolling talent in a standardized development system. Many of the current squads came from this. Somewhere in that process, Pedersen says, the federation has made a deliberate shift away from defensively strong sides and toward technically gifted players who can hit opponents “like longboats through the fjords.” “In Norway there is a lot of focus on the grassroots,” he says. “This has resulted in younger players playing for the national team earlier in their careers than previous generations.” Norway’s brutal winters forced parallel investment: 539 new artificial pitches were built between 2016 and 2025, with another 586 renovated, so the weather stopped dictating who would develop them.
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On Sunday, Norway will face England in the quarter-finals, a team that has almost a long history of its own, the country that invented the game and hasn’t won it in decades. Pederson doesn’t seem worried. “England will have more pressure. Football was born there. Norway? No pressure at all,” he laughed.
A near-team knows best what pressure puts on a team that hasn’t learned to handle it. Norway, after all, is.