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Here is an article in todays WSJ the seems appropriate for this crowd.
The Soccer Team That Lives in Perpetual Darkness
They’re based north of the Arctic Circle. They play in frigid conditions, on a plastic pitch and rarely see daylight. And yet Bodo/Glimt is lighting up soccer’s Europa League tournament.
By
Joshua Robinson
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Feb. 12, 2025 9:00 am ET
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The thing about playing for a professional soccer team located north of the Arctic Circle is that you have no choice but to accept a few cold truths.
For much of the year, it’s going to be frigid. It’s going to be windy. And it’s going to be dark.
That’s all part of the deal when you sign for Bodo/Glimt, the unlikely upstart that has won four of the past five Norwegian championships. The club is based in the small town of Bodo, on the skinny northern stretch of the country, 67 degrees above the equator and a 10-hour drive from any sizable city. For the past few months, it has sat in near permanent darkness.
Bodo/Glimt is so far north that even other Norwegians think it’s a little too remote. But to the club’s players, simply existing there is the ultimate home advantage.
“I see it in the eyes of opponents when they come to Bodo,” central defender Jostein Gundersen says. “To be honest, we also think it’s really cold—it’s not like we don’t feel it. But we know it’s much worse for them. So we hope for it to be a little bit cold, and windy, and dark and snowy.”
It’s no accident that Bodo has lost just five league games at home since the start of the decade. And although Norway’s domestic season doesn’t run through the worst of the winter, European competitions do. That’s where Bodo’s focus will be on Thursday, as it takes on Dutch club FC Twente in the playoff round of the Europa League.
“It’s actually crazy that we have come so far,” Gundersen says. “No one would have expected it.”
For most of its 108-year history, Bodo/Glimt was a sort of curiosity. The club bounced often between the top two divisions and had just two major trophies to its name. It won the Norwegian Cup in 1975, then again in 1993, and that was it. When Frode Thomassen, an ex-soccer player who had worked at Norway’s Ministry of Culture, took over the business in 2017, its annual budget was a little over $4 million.
Bodo was promoted back to the top tier in 2018 and Thomassen kept expectations low. That year, he stood up at the club’s annual meeting and hit the club’s own fans with a dose of Norwegian directness. Bodo/Glimt, he told them, would never be league champions.
“At that time, we didn’t have the resources,” Thomassen says. “There was no rich uncle coming to us.”
In the background, however, he was working to change the club’s culture from the ground up. The focus would now be on process, not results. Details and continuity mattered. Thomassen became so obsessed with small, marginal improvements—an approach borrowed from the biggest sports teams in the world—that he added a former F-16 fighter pilot named Bjorn Mannsverk to the coaching staff to help players with the mental side of the game.
This is where Thomassen likes to paraphrase one of his favorite movies, the American football classic Any Given Sunday: “If you add up all those inches, then at the end of the day, you will get triumphs.”
It didn’t take long: In 2020, Bodo/Glimt won its first ever Norwegian league title. That success not only paved the club’s way into European competition, it also filled Bodo’s coffers with more prize money than it had ever seen before. Tournaments such as the Europa League offer clubs millions just for qualifying. And today, Thomassen says, the club’s turnover exceeds $60 million.
Back when Bodo had been in the second division, it had a hard time even convincing players to join. For all the beauty of the nearby fjords, toiling in darkness on an artificial pitch wasn’t exactly an attractive proposition.
“You could always call a player and ask him to come, but then they looked at the map and it was north of the polar circle,” Thomassen explains. “They would say, ‘Thank you, but no thanks.’”
But as salaries increased and news of Bodo’s new approach spread through Norwegian soccer circles, the town of 55,000 inhabitants with an 8,000-seat stadium became the place to be for any player brave enough to weather the conditions. With a squad made up primarily of Norwegian talent, Bodo trains outdoors year-round. Its only concessions to the winter darkness are the odd training camp in Spain and having breakfast one hour later in Norway. The idea is to arrange their days around the short window when a sliver of daylight glances off their practice field.
“We have this culture: we never complain,” Gundersen says. “Especially at Aspmyra, our home stadium, we think we can beat any team in Europe.”
Or at least be competitive. In 2021, Bodo smashed José Mourinho’s AS Roma 6-1. A year later, Bodo narrowly lost 1-0 against Arsenal of the English Premier League. And this season, the club has posted three victories in its four European home games, including one over the Portuguese giant Porto.
“We know it will be really hard psychologically for the opponent to come to Bodo,” Gundersen adds. “If they underestimate us, it’s perfect.”
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Write to Joshua Robinson at [email protected]
