{"id":787866,"date":"2026-07-08T22:15:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T22:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/787866\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T22:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T22:15:19","slug":"no-league-tables-no-trophies-how-norway-made-sport-fun-for-kids-and-built-a-football-team-that-beat-brazil-norway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/787866\/","title":{"rendered":"No league tables, no trophies: how Norway made sport fun for kids \u2013 and built a football team that beat Brazil | Norway"},"content":{"rendered":"

At full time, the arithmetic felt wrong. A team from a country of 5.5 million people, back at a World Cup<\/a> after 28 years away, had just beaten the five-time champions to reach a first quarter-final.<\/p>\n

During Norway\u2019s victory over Brazil<\/a> on Sunday there was little between the fast feet of Vin\u00edcius J\u00fanior and the raw power of Erling Haaland. But look at how that pair and others on the two teams were raised and a different story emerges. Neymar, Matheus Cunha and Vin\u00edcius grew up in a system that prioritises prodigies \u2013 spotting talent early and fast\u2011tracking it through academies built around a single sport. Haaland, Martin \u00d8degaard and Antonio Nusa grew up with something altogether different.<\/p>\n

That is because in 2007 the Norges idrettsforbund (NIF), Norway\u2019s governing body for sport, revised the eight \u201crights\u201d it had first adopted in 1987 to protect the participation, safety and joy of every child playing sport. The rules are mandatory for every coach and club registered with the NIF, and they read like heresy to those embedded in the talent-funnel culture found almost everywhere else in world sport.<\/p>\n

Under the age of nine, children play only local club matches. There are no results lists, no league tables and no trophies. Regional competition opens at age 11, though scores and rankings stay off limits. Only at 13 can a Norwegian athlete take part in anything resembling a national championship.<\/p>\n

Of the eight rights, two buck the trend of the sporting tiger parent culture: mastery and freedom to choose \u2013 the idea that a child has a right to try multiple sports rather than being funnelled into a single discipline before they are old enough to have chosen it themselves. For the gifted youngsters, there is the benefit of bringing the skills of each into whichever one they settle on.<\/p>\n

Haaland is the framework\u2019s most famous graduate. He was six when the rules were revised and, as his father, Alf-Inge, told Manchester City\u2019s website, spent the next eight years involved in handball, athletics and cross-country skiing as well as football. Norway\u2019s handball setup reportedly wanted him before he chose football at 14.<\/p>\n

Erling Haaland scores Norway\u2019s first goal against Brazil by showing the aerial prowess he honed as a child playing handball. Photograph: Elsa\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Watch his goals with that in mind: a leap for the header that owes something to a childhood spent jumping to release a shot in the handball goal area and a strike that has the coiled, unhurried power of someone who learned to generate force efficiently, the way a skier does on a mountain that punishes wasted movement. None of it replaces the football training since, but the sports he wasn\u2019t rushed out of are plausibly still in his legs.<\/p>\n

Alexander S\u00f8rloth, who leads the line alongside Haaland, spent his Trondheim childhood between football, handball and speed skating. He is, like Haaland, the son of athletes: a father who played for Norway at the 1994 World Cup, a mother who competed at handball. Two of Norway\u2019s most physically imposing forwards arrived at football only after years spent learning to move in other ways.<\/p>\n

\u00d8rjan Haskjold Nyland profile<\/a><\/p>\n

Norway\u2019s goalkeeper, \u00d8rjan H\u00e5skjold Nyland, was 17 when the rules arrived and so was not shaped by them, but stands as proof the law did not invent this instinct, but formalise it. Nyland grew up with handball and alpine skiing alongside football, long before he settled in goal.<\/p>\n

Against Brazil, that upbringing perhaps showed when it mattered: a penalty saved with the lateral spring of a skier, then, with Norway ahead but not yet safe, a goal\u2011bound deflection off Kristoffer Ajer was clawed away with the kind of contorted, mid-air movement you would expect from a handball player.<\/p>\n

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This is an argument for what happens when a country builds patience into childhood rather than urgency. Norway have form here<\/a>. In February, they topped the Winter Olympics medal table for the fourth Games running, with a record 18 golds, outperforming countries 60 times the size.<\/p>\n

Most nations run a version of Brazil\u2019s model \u2013 spot the gift early, build the pathway around the position a child is presumed to suit already \u2013 and it has produced some of the most beautiful football played. But Norway\u2019s success is a prompt to ask whether the alternative, protecting a child\u2019s right to choose, may be the better pathway. It may be rare to legislate patience. It is rarer still to win by doing it.<\/p>\n

Rarer because those eight rights were never written to win a World Cup. They were written so a child could play badly without being embarrassed. So a nine\u2011year\u2011old good enough for the first team could still just be a nine-year-old. Winning is what the football world will remember about this squad, but joy, oddly enough, is what the law set out to protect.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo enjoy football and make it the thing you like to do most in life,\u201d the former Norway and Tottenham goalkeeper Erik Thorstvedt has said. \u201cThe most important thing is, don\u2019t put too much pressure on the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the final whistle against Brazil, the Norway fans broke into their Viking row<\/a>, that slow, building rhythm that starts almost hesitant and grows into something thunderous. It is easy to hear it as a pure tribal sound. But the hairs stand up on your neck a little more once you know what this team were raised on: less a roar than the sound of a parent at the sideline; the kind who let their child choose their own sport, in their own time, and then turned up every weekend to cheer them on regardless.<\/p>\n

On Saturday against England, famous for their academy prodigies, Norway will try to make history again by reaching the semi\u2011finals. There is a version of their story that is just about football, about a team that beat the odds, and then there\u2019s a better, quieter one. One where a small nation chose to let its children be children \u2013 to play, to wander between sports, to enjoy it. It was never meant to produce a team that could beat Brazil. That it did is almost beside the point. What matters is that a whole country got to stand at the touchline and watch its kids fly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At full time, the arithmetic felt wrong. A team from a country of 5.5 million people, back at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":787867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-787866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=787866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/787866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/787867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=787866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=787866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=787866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}