Norway was back in the World Cup playoffs for the first time since 1998, and something happened to the interest this summer that hardly anyone saw coming. People who usually don’t care about football at all were suddenly glued to the screen at two o’clock in the morning to watch Haaland and the gang. Between matches in the tournament, many people came up with their own to fill the waiting time. Some spent the evenings on series or social media, others gathered to discuss the form of the team before the next match. Some Norwegians also used these quiet evenings for online entertainment, including by checking out services such as https://www.casino.org/no/lovlige/ which provides an overview of reliable online casinos in Norway. What made this year’s World Cup special was not only the results on the pitch. It was just as much everything that happened around the matches, the songs, the costumes, and an entire nation that found a common thing to gather around.
Haaland and the gang that united a nation
No one can talk about this World Cup without mentioning Erling Haaland. The striker was the top scorer in the group stage with a whopping seven goals, and for many young Norwegians, this was the first time they saw him play in a crucial tournament for the national team. Of course, it helped that Norway actually performed. The team beat both Ivory Coast and Brazil in the playoffs before finally falling out to England in the quarter-finals, a result that thirty years ago would have been unthinkable for Norwegian football.
Many people still remember the scenes from the streets of Oslo after the games, where people who hardly knew what offside meant suddenly discussed formations and shooting statistics with their neighbors. Bars and restaurants that normally never showed football started putting up big screens, simply because the demand became too great to ignore.
Solbakken, the song, and the Vikings in the stands
Coach Ståle Solbakken had himself played for Norway in 1998, the previous World Cup the team qualified for, and it gave a special symbolism to the whole journey. Under his leadership, the team went through the qualifiers with an almost flawless result. But it may not have been Solbakken’s tactics alone that caught the world’s attention; It was something that started in the stands. Norwegian supporters developed a synchronized rowing song, where thousands sat down at the same time and shouted “calm” as they mimed oars through the air, as if they were rowing a Viking ship towards land.
The song spread quickly outside the stadiums as well, on escalators, in train stations, even outside the Storting. The idea originally came from a Norwegian teacher with a sense of old rowing tradition, and eventually both the players and their families took part in the ceremony after each victory. It all ended up as a feature in the finale’s halftime show, something no one saw coming when the phenomenon started on a staircase in an American train station.
The national team and the apparatus behind the success
Behind the players and the coach is the Norwegian Football Association, which in the years before the World Cup worked systematically to build up both youth national teams and infrastructure around the national team. That kind of long-term work rarely appears in the headlines when results are not forthcoming, but becomes all the more visible when a generation of players finally delivers at the same time. The combination of a strong generation and a federation that has invested correctly over time is probably a large part of the explanation for why Norway was finally back.
It is worth mentioning that much of this work has been done quietly, without the big headlines, until the results started to come. The focus on coach education and talent development in the clubs has been a recurring theme in the Norwegian football debate for years, and for many within the community, this year’s World Cup place was a confirmation that this direction is actually working, even if it took longer than many had hoped.
The elite league and football interest at home
The interest in the national team also spilled over to club football domestically. The Eliteserien experienced increased attention in the wake of the World Cup, as several of the players who impressed this summer also have roots in Norwegian clubs. The attendance figures in Norwegian stadiums partly reflected this new interest, although it is difficult to say exactly how much is due to the World Cup effect alone and how much would have happened anyway.
Clubs that previously struggled to fill the stands noticed a clear change in ticket sales over the summer, and some supporter groups began to bring the song from the national team matches into their home ground as well. Whatever the reason, the summer of 2026 was a reminder of how much a single tournament can mean to how a country talks about its football, long after the actual matches are over.
