Football’s Growing Responsibility

This summer showed just how powerful football has become in Norway. The nation gathered in front of screens to follow the boys in the United States. People with no particular interest in football took to the streets, rowed through town, and truly let their emotions run free. Social scientists will be looking for answers to what happened to us during those summer weeks, when a powerful sense of “we” emerged.

What comes next?

The excitement surrounding the national team will not fade anytime soon. This fall’s internationals are sold out. Demand for Norway shirts remains high, and on the commercial side, other sports can only be wished good luck as they try to compete with football. They will be fighting for the crumbs.

What has received less attention is what this World Cup success will do to children’s and youth sports in Norway. There are two ways into that discussion.

The first concerns the likelihood that football will attract even more children, and the consequences that may follow. The second concerns what happens within football itself. Will we see even greater selectivity and professionalization among the youngest players?

The battle for children

This week, VG reported that one in every two 10-year-olds in Norway plays football. Among children who belong to a sports club, one in three plays football. The rest are spread across the 54 other national sports federations, which together offer nearly 200 sports.

There is, in fact, a battle for every child. A couple of years ago, I interviewed the president of one of Norway’s sports federations for a research project. The president explained that federations compete intensely for children, families, parents, volunteers, and facilities.

“We are fighting in the same market—for local, regional, and national government funding, Norsk Tipping, sponsors, and so on.”

The president saw that ceremonial speeches about a big shared sports community were largely window dressing for the public. Every sport, in reality, looks out for itself. That claim should be taken with a grain of salt. There is good cooperation in many areas. But when it comes to recruiting children and young people, every sport works for its own interests. Membership numbers also matter when the distribution of public gaming revenues is decided.

Football needs to think carefully about this, especially now, when first-graders are bringing letters home in their schoolbags inviting them to football practices.

Some children have already started while still in preschool. Most children want to be part of the group, and parents want that too. Afraid that their child will be left out of the friendship group, parents push them into football. I have seen it myself as a parent-coach, and I have heard the same story repeatedly while working more closely on these issues over the past year.

Concern in other sports

This year, VG has published several interviews with prominent figures who see their sports losing ground to football. Its report on the dramatic decline in cross-country skiing was at least as much about football as skiing when former elite skier Martin Johnsrud Sundby gave his analysis. He pointed out that four football practices per week during winter limit a family’s opportunity to go cross-country skiing.

“Sports are eating into each other. It wasn’t like that when I was young.”

Sundby is right, and football is clearly the most voracious sport.

Alpine skier Leif Kristian Nestvold-Haugen has argued that the Norwegian sports model is under pressure. Instead of varied children’s sports supported by volunteers, he sees more and earlier specialization, more mandatory attendance, and parents buying their way out of active participation and free play.

One argument against increasingly hectic football programs is that they have not produced athletes at the very top of the world game, as Norway has in other sports. Earlier this summer, Frode Saugestad, an athletics coach and the author of a book about Antonio Nusa, launched a broadside against early specialization and football’s development model. In his view, it had failed. He said:

“If it is to be considered successful, they have to win medals at the European Championships or the World Cup. Then they can say they have succeeded. But until they do, they have not.”

Without getting lost in the rather futile debate about the relative standard of different sports, I would argue that reaching the World Cup quarterfinals, officially a fifth-place, is an achievement that ranks very highly by Norwegian standards. So perhaps we can now say this: Norway has succeeded in producing outstanding male footballers.

At the same time, we can challenge another claim that is often repeated: that almost none of the players who are best at 12, 13, 14, or 15 are still the best at 25. “Martin 15,” Bobb, Schjelderup, Nusa, and Haaland were all good early.

They had one thing in common: they played an enormous amount of football when they were young. They also grew up in clubs. Some were recruited by elite-club academies. In the next generation, we see players entering the Norwegian Football Federation’s national development program (Landslagsskolen) and the Norwegian Top Football’s national leagues and elite initiatives at an early age. And a quick look at the websites of private academies shows that many players who take major steps forward have also spent time there.

Development is moving fast

How should football handle becoming even more dominant? I ask because we can already see clear signs of a more professionalized game: earlier specialization, more selection, tailored programs, and private training options. And it takes place 12 months a year. There is no longer any real distinction between seasons.

For a long time, this was mainly an urban phenomenon, particularly in the capital. That is no longer the case. Across the country, there are reports of breaches of children’s sport regulations, club transfers involving 10-year-olds, team selection, and trips abroad.

How did we get here? And what do we do now?

Football should, of course, continue to welcome boys and girls into the sport at the age of six. At the same time, the Norwegian Football Federation must be much clearer with clubs about the risks of loading very young children with one-sided football training all year round. That creates a substantial risk of burnout and injury.

Many clubs offer extra programs where “extra” can very quickly come to mean “mandatory.” Or, as many parents report from their child’s everyday life:

“Of course, you can skip futsal in January—but not if you want to become really good.”

Variety within specialization

I believe it will be very difficult to reverse the trend of more children choosing football as a year-round sport. It can actually work well, provided football is capable of filling the training week in sensible ways.

That means including activities that give children a broad movement repertoire. My recommendation is to draw inspiration from physical education and gymnastics. Simple strength exercises, now often classified as injury prevention, and already widely used, are also beneficial. Other sports have expertice in these areas. Why not copperate?

Finally, every player who becomes good has spent a great deal of time playing unstructured football during childhood. Adults need to stay out of the way often enough to let children control some of the activity themselves. That is the best way to nurture the spontaneity embodied by today’s young Norwegian national-team stars.