An unheralded Norwegian team from a tiny town north of the Arctic Circle have become one of the fairy-tale stories of European soccer, making a historic run to the semi-finals of this season’s UEFA Europa League.
For Bodo/Glimt, the transformation has been underpinned by a fighter pilot who developed mental techniques for his squadron before bombing missions in Libya.
Bjorn Mannsverk discovered a group of players exuding negative energy and who were prone to “a collective mental breakdown” when he was asked in early 2017 to join the backroom staff of a team who had just been relegated to Norway’s second tier.
Photo: AP
His task as “mental coach” was to make players talk openly about their feelings, lower stress levels, change their attitudes and routines about things such as preparation and nutrition, and remove the stigma around mental training.
Winning or losing no longer mattered. It was all about following a philosophy and culture established by Mannsverk, a former Royal Norwegian Air Force squadron leader whose military duties took him to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US and to Libya for a NATO-led intervention in 2011.
The results have been extraordinary.
After securing an immediate return to Norway’s top division, the team — based more than 1,000km north of Oslo in a fishing town, Bodo, with a population of about 55,000 — have captured four of the country’s past five league titles. It started in 2020 with a first in the history of a club founded in 1916.
Bodo/Glimt have also had some big results in Europe in the past few seasons — a 6-1 thrashing of Jose Mourinho’s AS Roma in the UEFA Conference League in 2021 stands out — and this year they have become the first Norwegian club to reach the semi-finals of a major European competition.
Today they are to play their first leg against Tottenham Hotspur in the Europa League in London. It is Bodo/Glimt’s biggest ever match.
“It is a fairy tale, almost a miracle,” Mannsverk said. “How can you actually come from [Norway’s] second division in 2017 to playing a Champions League playoff and teams like Arsenal five years later?”
“But I think it’s possible ... if you have the right mentality and you work hard over time,” he said.
An active air force pilot for more than 20 years, Mannsverk and others in his squadron were the subjects of a mental training project in 2010 where the focus was on meditation and “every day repeating boring stuff, but with 100 percent attention.”
It meant that when he was in Libya the following year, he had the mental capacity to handle the dangerous missions he was asked to perform. His squadron’s mantra — “train as you intend to fight” — worked.
“Even though I got strong feelings when my first bombs hit the target and it was in infernal flames and fragments and everything, it was like my training said that it’s OK, this is happening, recognize that, but know I have to return and do my job,” he said.
With Bodo until recently having a NATO air base, it was a happy coincidence that Bodo/Glimt’s leadership came across members of the squadron at the same time they were seeking a “silver bullet” — as Mannsverk put it — to improve the team’s mental conditioning.
A project was born and fully embraced by manager Kjetil Knutsen following his appointment in 2018.
Bodo/Glimt have never looked back.
Mannsverk’s fingerprints are all over the team’s behavior, although he acknowledges there has been such a buy-in by the players that they now take decisions by themselves.
Like having a rotating cast of eight captains to share leadership duties. Like when the players gather into a circle — Mannsverk calls it the “Bodo/Glimt Ring” — after conceding a goal to discuss what happened and maintain solidarity. Like the players having no specific targets, apart from being the best version of themselves.
Inge Henning Andersen, Bodo/Glimt’s chairman, said that midfielder Ulrik Saltnes considered retiring because he used to suffer from stress-related stomach issues that flared up around matches.
Saltnes opened up about his problems to Mannsverk and “finally found a way out of it,” Andersen said.
The team play at an intensity that far exceeds their rivals, which players attribute to Mannsverk.
“I don’t think it would be possible to play like that without Bjorn and the mental work we do,” Saltnes once told the BBC.
This season’s Europa League campaign is giving Bodo/Glimt widespread attention, notably for its location. The team’s Aspmyra Stadion — with a capacity of fewer than 9,000 — is one of the most northernly in world soccer at 67°C latitude. Tourists have long come to the town on the tip of Norway’s west coast because it is a good spot to see the northern lights.
Bodo, last year named the European Capital of Culture, has less than an hour of sunlight during its shortest days, meaning players take supplements to combat a lack of sunlight. It can be bitterly cold and windy in the long winters, making for tough trips for opponents from other countries.
On paper, Tottenham, one of the world’s richest clubs, start as a huge favorites against Bodo/Glimt. The crowd at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium today is expected to be bigger than Bodo’s population.
Yet the English club is having one of their worst seasons in a generation and lie in 16th place in the 20-team English Premier League. That gives Bodo/Glimt a realistic shot at an upset, like they produced when getting past Italian team SS Lazio in the quarter-finals.
Another chance, then, for the club to write another amazing chapter in their remarkable journey.
“We like to tell our story,” Mannsverk said. “The philosophy is a good thing. We know it’s difficult in football, where there’s so much money involved, to give a coach or a team the time, and it takes time to change and drill in the mentality.”
“This was not done overnight ... but I’m totally convinced that it will work more or less all over,” he added.
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