Norway will play this Saturday against England for a place in the semifinals of the 2026 World Cup. With an exceptional collective performance and figures such as Erling Haaland, Martin Ødegaard and Alexander Sørloth, the Scandinavian team eliminated Brazil and has established itself as one of the strongest in the World Cup.

Its unexpected success raises an inevitable question. How has a country of barely 5.6 million inhabitants, in which football plays a secondary role in favor of winter sports, managed to compete face to face with the great powers?

It must be said that football is no exception: Norway has been producing some of the best athletes on the planet for decades in numerous disciplines, such as athletics and skiing.

The Ingebrigtsen brothers revolutionized the world middle distance, while Karsten Warholm made history by breaking the world record in the 400 meter hurdles twice; Johannes Høsflot Klæbo marked an era in cross-country skiing and Aleksander Aamodt Kilde was the great benchmark in alpine skiing in speed.

It is a fact that Norwegians are overrepresented in elite disciplines, and the explanation could partly come from the very different way in which they understand the sport: a philosophy they call idrettsglede.

This difficult-to-translate concept is usually summarized as “the enjoyment of sport,” but it is something more than that.

“It's that enjoyment of sport, but at the same time with enormous ambition,” Tore Øvrebø, elite director of Olympiatoppen, Norway's high-performance center, explains to BBC Mundo.

But what exactly does this philosophy consist of? And, to what extent does it explain the surprising rise of the Norwegian team and the emergence of one of the most talented generations of footballers in the country's history?

What is idrettsglede

More than a strategy or a training method, idrettsglede is a philosophy; a way of understanding sport.

It is based on an idea deeply rooted in the country's culture: children should play sports because they want to, not because they feel obligated or pressured to win.

But that enjoyment, Øvrebø emphasizes, does not mean giving up excellence: “It's not just for fun; it's fun combined with ambition and that makes it even more fun for people who are very ambitious.”

The idrettsglede, he clarifies, is not something designed to produce high-performance athletes, but has been part of the country's identity for generations.

"Very few people in Norway play sports because they have to. It is a leisure activity and everything is based on volunteering from the beginning," he says.

Øvrebø explains that parents, coaches and local clubs participate in a system in which sport is understood as a community activity, also linked to health and outdoor life.

To achieve this, they have abundant sports facilities that municipalities and public administrations have built and maintained for decades throughout the country.

The idea is to give each boy or girl the opportunity to choose the sport they want, provide the means as far as possible and, above all, wait for the minor to develop his or her own motivation and aspirations.

“We tend to delay professionalization until age 15 or 16, and the process is done very gradually,” says Øvrebø.

Before that age “it is not part of the Norwegian sports culture to approach sport in a very professional way that is obsessed with results and performance,” he indicates.

The reason, he points out, is that each child matures differently.

"Some are there solely for the social aspect and others because they want to be the best in the world. And, in some cases, that ambition appears quite early," he adds.

The objective, ultimately, is for the impulse to be born from within each potential little athlete.

According to Øvrebø, young Norwegians train because they enjoy doing it and want to discover how far they can go, not to satisfy the expectations of adults.

When we ask him what he would recommend to other countries, he answers with a sentence that sums up the idrettsglede.

"Leave the children alone. Let them play, have fun and delay the pressure of sports."

"When a child plays football well, someone always says 'this is the new Messi' or 'the new Haaland', and that robs children of the enjoyment of sport because then they have to fulfill other people's dreams," he says.

How it translates into specific standards

The idrettsglede is reflected in a series of rules that regulate children's sports so that children enjoy the game outside of competitive pressure.

These are included in the Charter of Children's Rights in Sports and the Provisions on Children's Sports, which are mandatory for all affiliated clubs.

Its objective is for children to compete, but without becoming obsessed with their performance and results from an early age.

"Children compete a lot because they love to compete. The rules have nothing to do with the level of the competition, but with the rankings and the results. We postpone that way of thinking for later," says Øvrebø.

Results lists, tables and rankings can only be used from the year in which children turn 11, and only when considered appropriate.

Additionally, minors cannot participate in national, European or world championships until the year they turn 13, and regional tournaments usually do not begin until they are 11.

The little ones play only within their locality and, as they grow, they can begin to do so in neighboring municipalities.

“We try to encourage children to be together, to play sports for fun and to compete in small groups and in a very local environment,” summarizes the director of Olympiatoppen.

On the other hand, the system expressly recognizes the right of the minor to decide how much they want to train and how many disciplines they want to practice, and the clubs must adapt the activity to the age and degree of maturity of each child.

“Everything is very much based on the child's own motivation and inner drive,” Øvrebø summarizes.

This is made possible, in part, thanks to the extensive network of local clubs, municipal facilities and volunteer coaches deployed throughout Norway.

The result is extraordinarily high participation: nine out of ten children aged 6 to 12 play at least one organized sport, according to the Norwegian Sports Confederation.

What does it have to do with Haaland and the national team?

But to what extent do these rules designed to encourage the enjoyment of physical activity in childhood contribute to producing stars?

When we ask Øvrebø this question, he responds that attributing the success of Haaland, Ødegaard or Sørloth to the idrettsglede would be a simplification.

“Actually the reason is that they are good at soccer,” he says, jokingly.

Although he does not believe that the idrettsglede alone explains the abundance of Norwegian talent, he believes that this philosophy creates especially favorable conditions for harnessing the abilities of athletes.

Firstly, it highlights that the system ensures that practically all children have the opportunity to play a sport.

“That means that the potential talent pool is close to 100%,” he points out.

The aforementioned facilities financed by municipalities, the work of local clubs and a relatively affordable cost for families contribute to this, which reduces access barriers and expands the base of the pyramid.

Øvrebø considers, in any case, that the most important factor is the psychological one.

"The way we organize children's sports generates internal motivation: they don't practice it because someone pressures them from the outside. They do it because they want to do it," he reiterates.

Thus, he explains, young talents at first enjoy it because they play with other children, and later because they want to discover how far they can go as athletes.

Øvrebø believes that this philosophy, which accompanies many athletes throughout their careers, has ended up permeating the current Norwegian football team.