At the Sports Gala on the first Saturday in 2024, for the very first time in the history of the gala, a footballer was named “Male Athlete of the Year”. It says something about Haaland being a completely unique athlete in Norwegian sports history – but also a little about Norwegian sports’ ambivalent relationship with its biggest sport, a little about how difficult it is to achieve the same status as the individual when you are an athlete in team sports and a little about the quality of Norwegian football over the past two decades. One woman, Ada Hegerberg in 2017, has won the award. And Ståle Solbakken is the only one from football to have won the Coach of the Year award, which he received in 2011. Now Haaland has broken a kind of barrier – without he probably feeling so strongly about it himself, just this time. But it emphasizes one obvious fact: Norwegian football is in a kind of age of irony. Where everything that seems obvious somehow turns out to have an opposite value. World Championship of Humiliation Where the nation has more real world stars than we’ve ever come close to before. And possibly never experienced greater disappointments than the one our two flagships, the national teams, have invited us to in 2023. A Norwegian WC team with Guro Reiten, Ada Hegerberg and Caroline Graham Hansen lost the opening match against New Zealand. New Zealand had never previously won a World Cup match. In five championships. Photo: Lise Åserud / NTB After an almost fascinating amount of internal turmoil leaked to the public and an obvious lack of enthusiasm in the squad, our former world champions qualified with a so-called emergency cry for the knock-out rounds. There, Japan was disappointingly much better than the Norwegian hopes. Without anyone really understanding why. National team manager Hege Riise was forced to resign. Her assistant Monica Knudsen did the same. None of them had the players’ trust. Or ever had. Instead, both got well-paid and just right diffuse retreat positions in the union. In came the substitute Leif Gunnar Smerud. He is also an internal favorite in the association. His U21 national team had qualified for the EC play-offs in the summer, which in itself was a good achievement. But the playoffs were a letdown. Where the internal turmoil between the coach and several players spilled out into the public eye already after the first defeat. Smerud obviously did a better job of assembling the women’s national team during the interim period in the autumn. And it seemed as if the federal board, under the leadership of the increasingly powerful president Lise Klaveness, was just waiting for an, if not good enough, then at least usable excuse to employ him permanently, in the best federal spirit. But the opportunity never arose. Photo: Matthias Schrader / NTB Smerud was possibly the right man. But obviously at the wrong time. Norway continues into 2024 without a national team manager. And no one will admit that it is time to look up at Ullevaal Stadion’s snow-covered gates. But the Norwegian Football Association has also started the year by announcing a new top football manager. Lise Klaveness has realized that she has forgotten to replace herself in the increasingly large federal system. That is probably a reasonable realization. The men’s world WC for women in Australia and New Zealand was otherwise a surprisingly great success in many ways. In a number of ways. Enthusiasm, audience, quality – and not least the flourishing of new and competitive nations. While former dominants such as the USA and not least Germany disappeared early on, there was success for Jamaica, Colombia, Morocco and others. And through that a victory for women’s football as a real global phenomenon. But there was progress with obvious aftertastes. The most obvious in the form of the sensational open and invasive kissing scene after Spain had won the World Cup for the very first time. Spanish football president Luis Rubiales’ forced kiss of star player Jennifer Hermoso during the victory ceremony took all attention away from the nation’s historic achievement. FAMOUS KISS: Luis Rubiales kissed Jennifer Hermoso after the World Cup final in Australia. This followed a year-long protest by as many as 15 national team players against national team coach Jorge Vilda. Who nevertheless gained the trust of both Rubiales and the rest of the men who ruled Spanish football. At the back of the fade in the World Cup, Rubiales was finally fired. So did his protégé Vilda. But those who hoped for real change have subsequently lost further illusions. The Spanish world champions were forced to play in a national league match against Sweden they did not want to play, precisely as a protest against the lack of structural changes. While the deposed and hated national team coach Vilda quickly got a new job, as head of Morocco’s women. One of the teams that many had used as an example of the emergence of a new, feminine force in world football. Men – and only men – rule football. Also in 2024. Photo: Rick Rycroft / AP Football’s Donna Quixote Norway’s football president Lise Klaveness is becoming increasingly powerful. Here at home. Internationally, she reminds more and more of a Donna Quixote. One that fights against more and more unyielding windmills. “We own Fifa, even if it doesn’t always feel that way,” Klaveness told news’s Supernytt in the autumn. It is obvious to children and drunk people that you tell the truth. Klaveness could have included the European confederation, Uefa, in the same analysis. The Norwegian football president made the controversial, but definitely correct, choice to stand as a candidate for Uefa’s so-called Executive Committee as an ordinary representative, not the quota-based female one. And lost so it echoed mockingly. Photo: NTB Norway, as part of the Nordic region, also did not get the EC for women in 2025. Switzerland won. And everyone sees the symbolism. Klaveness, Norway and some of our few friends in world football have been too loud and annoying. Now comes the answer. At the end of 2023, Klaveness traveled together with, among others, Secretary General Karl-Petter Løken to Qatar, to follow up on developments in the area of human rights one year after the World Cup. On the whole, it appeared mostly as a humiliation. Such genuine commitment can easily end, if the resistance is too great and powerful. World football’s new center is precisely there. After the World Cup in Qatar, the neighboring Emirates have now become the first state to win the Champions League in football, through Manchester City in 2023. And Saudi Arabia has had its wish to also become a World Cup organizer fulfilled, through a very ingenious exclusion strategy of potential competitors from their very best friend, Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s side. The highest-scoring player in the world in the calendar year 2023 otherwise plays for the Saudi Arabian club Al-Nassr and is called Cristiano Ronaldo. Everything is as it should be. Photo: AHMED YOSRI / Reuters Five minutes from half-time But this Sports Gala weekend will most of all be about Norway – and Norwegian football at the start of a new year. Where we really appear more than anything else as a desert state. In the sense that our men’s national team does not have a real interesting international match in sight until 2025, after we failed to qualify for this summer’s European Championship in Germany, where 24 of Europe’s 55 football nations are participating. “They must like the suffering” Ståle Solbakken did not talk about the audience at Ullevaal. He talked about his own players when, just before Christmas, he summarized the football year 2023 in the podcast “Footballrådet”. It is when Solbakken speaks in such contexts that you best understand why the Norwegian Football Association chose to extend the contract with the man from Grue even before the EC qualification was decided. Not always when he has to explain why Norway once again did not qualify for a championship on the men’s side. Three minutes before the end of the decisive European Championship qualifier against Scotland at Ullevaal, Norway led. The result would, it has turned out afterwards, in theory send us to the EC. Then there were two Norwegian defensive blunders that dashed hopes. Photo: Fredrik Varfjell / NTB I venture the claim that no one has had it worse among Norwegian coaches in the past year than Ståle Solbakken. 2023 has been a continuous suffering at national team level for Norway. And it is on the national teams that a football nation is assessed, whether it wanted to or not. One can talk about systematics and chance statistics. But no one is really listening. And you shouldn’t either. Norway has never had more real world stars in football. And never got less out of them. In this sense, 2023 has been the year in which we failed. And really just that. Photo: Fredrik Varfjell / NTB Deep down, Norway wants to go to Europe, without really knowing how. Norway will be the coastal nation that has created such great success across sports and seasons. But can’t quite get it either. The infrastructure situation is, especially in the largest cities, much worse than some are willing to take responsibility for. And there are no signs of real improvement. Population growth eats up the few new establishments that manage to be established. And the politicians show a total lack of action, in one of the most important local social challenges of our time. But the problems are bigger than that. For Norwegian football’s own Columbi egg and catalyst – as well as sporting development – when it comes to everything other than producing defenders, namely the artificial grass, in 2023 it has become the biggest problem in a special class. Photo: NTB Norwegian football gambled that rubber granules would remain acceptable. But in seven years, this microplastic will be banned. Covers on 1,900 lanes need to be replaced, without anyone knowing for what. The NFF estimates the cost to exceed NOK 10 billion. It is not the fault or merit of the current management. But it is definitely their monumental challenge heading into 2024. “The last goal against Scotland. Why doesn’t anyone go down and block that shot?”, continued Ståle Solbakken to the Football Council. He has a whole year to think about this. When the jubilation over a Norwegian footballer finally becoming Male Athlete of the Year at the Sports Gala has finally subsided.
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The award for “The year’s most frustrating football year” goes to … – news Sport – Sports news, results and broadcasting schedule
