The football world cup is billed the greatest show on the planet for a reason. Besides the sheer joy of watching the beautiful game on TV, it is incredible to see the fans from around the world passionately cheering for their countries. And the standout sight of this world cup has to be the Norwegian fans’ Viking row . The sight of Erling Haaland beating the drum as his teammates on the ground and their fans in the stands rowed to the beat exemplified the joy the game is supposed to bring as opposed to the insipid controversies around Trump’s intervention to overturn a red card on an American footballer or the Egyptian coach’s allegation of favouritism by FIFA for Argentina and Messi.
This piece tells us a bit about how Norway actually legislated joy in sport for its kids:
“Neymar, Matheus Cunha and Vinícius grew up in a system that prioritises prodigies – spotting talent early and fast‑tracking it through academies built around a single sport. Haaland, Martin Ødegaard and Antonio Nusa grew up with something altogether different.
That is because in 2007 the Norges idrettsforbund (NIF), Norway’s governing body for sport, revised the eight “rights” 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.
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.
Of the eight rights, two buck the trend of the sporting tiger parent culture: mastery and freedom to choose – 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.”
David Epstein’s book Range compared Roger Federer’s upbringing playing an array of sports well into his teens before zeroing on tennis to that of Tiger Woods’ tiger parenting (no pun intended). Norway systematised the former with most of its footballers having played handball or skied, often both, before choosing football. “Most nations run a version of Brazil’s model – spot the gift early, build the pathway around the position a child is presumed to suit already – and it has produced some of the most beautiful football played. But Norway’s success is a prompt to ask whether the alternative, protecting a child’s right to choose, may be the better pathway. It may be rare to legislate patience. It is rarer still to win by doing it.
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‑year‑old 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.
…After the final whistle against Brazil, the Norway fans broke into their Viking row, 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.
There is a version of their story that is just about football, about a team that beat the odds, and then there’s a better, quieter one. One where a small nation chose to let its children be children – 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.”
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