Norway’s football fever is finally down to normal, after the national team’s best performance ever at this summer’s World Cup. That hasn’t warded off calls for Norway to host a World Cup itself some day, possibly in partnership with Sweden and Denmark, but now even the leader of the country’s football federation thinks that’s “unrealistic.”
Several top politicians, business interests and not least an architecture firm with stadium expertise embraced the idea of a World Cup in Norway someday. The national team’s international standings jumped dramatically after Norway beat Iraq, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and even Brazil, and then nearly beat England, while star player Erling Braut Haaland kicked in seven goals.
That grabbed international attention for a country that already has hosted two Winter Olympics and a few World Championships. When Norway narrowly lost to England in the quarter-finals, fans were disappointed but characteristically started looking ahead. There will be another World Cup in four years and European Championships in 2028, and now Norway is suddenly ranked in the world’s elite top 20 teams.
So why not make a bid for arranging a World Cup in Norway, or in a joint Nordic effort? Newspaper Aftenposten called around to raise the question among Members of Parliament and others who would need to approve such a project, and likely provide funding. Several party leaders, including those for the Socialist Left and Liberals, were postivive.
“It’s important that we don’t turn over these huge public events to authoritarian regimes,” responded the Liberals’ leader Guri Melby. After the 2030 World Cup in Spain, Portugal and Morocco, the next host will be Saudi Arabia in 2034.
The vast majority, however, turned thumbs down on the idea because Norway (population 5.6 million) is too small to handle a World Cup alone. There are also “too few of us” here in the all the Nordic countries, editorialized Aftenposten itself. The newspaper and others have also pointed out that the Nordic countries’ stadiums are also way too small, with Norway’s own national stadium only able to accommodate a maximum of 27,000 spectators.
The national football federation (Norges Fotballforfund, NFF) had aired the idea itself in May, with a call to build a new national stadium on the east side of Oslo with seats for 45,000. A local architecture firm took that a step further, proposing construction of a new stadium to be built as a dome of sorts over Oslo’s central train station downtown.
Even such a relatively large stadium for Norway would probably still be deemed too small by international football associations. Those bidding to host the next European Championships in 2028 had to provide at least one stadium with seats for 60,000 and another for 50,000, plus four stadiums with 40,000 seats and three with 30,000.
“It’s not realistic,” Karl-Petter Løken, NFF’s secretary general, had to admit to newspaper Dagsavisen on Tuesday. Even though he called the national team’s World Cup performance “a dream from A to Å (the last letter of Norway’s alphabet, pronounced like “oh”)” and he highly praised both the team and all its fans, Løken declared that a World Cup for men in the Nordics “is not possible” because it’s become “too big” with so many countries competing now and all the fans and support staff that entails.
Løken still wants a new national training facility, calling that “priority number one.” He claims the past few weeks “have shown that football has the power to gather fans and national support” like no other sport, “and that’s nation-building of the highest class.” Løken added that the national team has now outgrown the existing national stadium at Ullevaal in Oslo, noting that all the Nations League matches there this fall are sold out.
Norway’s leading business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv (DN) also urged politicians and others to stop dreaming about a World Cup in Norway. The most important, DN editorialized, is to continue to make sure children who want to play football have a field to play it on. Oslo alone lacks an estimated 46 fields, according to NFF, forcing local clubs to cancel training sessions, so investment in football for youth in a higher priority.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
