Manchester United enjoy vast support in Norway. In a country with a population of just five million, United’s Scandinavian branch boasts 46,393 paid-up members – the great majority in Norway. It is, by a distance, United’s biggest supporters’ club and counts hundreds of season ticket holders among its membership. Only Liverpool have a similar following.
It’s one reason why United regularly play pre-season games in Norway and started the 2024-25 season in Trondheim, yet for all the friendlies, United have never played a single competitive match against a Norwegian opponent.
That will change on Thursday when Old Trafford hosts Bodo/Glimt in a Europa League match: 6,714 fans will travel – the biggest ever away following at Old Trafford for a European tie. Most will journey from the town of 55,000 in the Arctic Circle, where there’s almost 24-hour daylight in the summer and only a few hours of soft daylight amid the dark this time of year.
Bodo, home to a NATO air base, was seldom renowned for its football and Glimt — ‘flash’ in Norwegian — are not one of the bigger clubs of the Norwegian leagues. Average home crowds were around 3,000 for much of the last decade when they bobbed between the top two divisions, with just two major trophies to their name, the Norwegian cup won in 1975 and 1993. They were not even allowed to compete in the national league until 1971.
Then it all changed. Crowds have doubled since Covid and Glimt have become the pre-eminent force in Norwegian football. A second-place finish in 2019 has been followed by three titles in four years. A fourth could be added this Sunday should they beat Lillestrom at home. After that, there will be no league football until March. The new European format, with European games in January, does not help Glimt, but they’ve enjoyed a good start, winning at home to Porto and away at Braga, one of Ruben Amorim’s former clubs. Now they play his current charges, but who are Bodo Glimt?
Bodo is 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle and is the most northerly point of Norway’s domestic railway network. It’s the end of the line stop — or the start if you speak to the gentle, friendly and tough locals who have a motto to ‘keep standing’ in spite of everything that life can throw at you.
There are no polar bears in the streets though, instead there are neat whiteboard houses, Premier League football shown in the bars and one of the world’s strongest tidal currents, Saltstraumen, near the harbour. Close to spectacular mountains, Bodo is infamous for a wind ripping in off the Atlantic, while the northern lights are visible away from the illumination of the town.
The town is welcoming but the climate can be testing for newcomers, even if not quite in the ways they expected.
“I packed warm things and put my ski trousers on,” Robert Scarborough, the current Glimt physio, who arrived from Birmingham in 2019, tells The Athletic over a zoom call this week. “I thought it would be freezing but it was like a standard autumn day in England. The weather doesn’t get too extreme until late November — and the spring and autumn are very short here.
“I was less prepared for the darkness in the winter. It’s quite extreme, we get daylight from 11 to 1pm and we have three weeks where we don’t see the sun. That can be tough and quite confusing for your body clock, but it’s cosy, friendly and the people are welcoming. In the summer it’s normal to have blackout blinds.”
That is not to say it cannot get very, very cold.
“There was one away game where it was minus-13 (celsius, 8 degrees fahrenheit) but felt like minus 20. I was on the touchline and I was so cold,” says Scarborough. “The pitch was like a creme brulee — crunchy on the top and soft underneath. It was like ice skating.
“It becomes difficult for players to perform the explosive actions they’d normally do when they can’t trust the floor so much, but they are used to these conditions and the pitches they train on in the top divisions are much better than the ones they had as kids, but it can still be tricky to get a player to use an ice bath to help aid his recovery, particularly on a cold day. It’s a pretty hard argument to get a player to jump into an ice bath when they have been outside so long.”
A previous trip by this writer for another publication five years ago began with meeting the Berg family, local football royalty, at Bodo’s tiny airport, which is adjacent to the much bigger NATO base (Bodo was heavily bombed in World War Two and was a Cold War hotspot).
“Those in the south thought we were primitives up here,” Orjan Berg, then-sporting director and former Glimt player, explained at the time. “We were bullied, they thought that we were only farmers, fishermen and some still think that we are.”
The Bergs are a Bodo/Glimt dynasty which continues to this day. Orjan’s son Patrick is the current Glimt captain. He’s also a Manchester United fan, as is team-mate Hakon Evjen. When Norway’s biggest tabloid VG compiled a list of the 60 best players from Northern Norway in 2019, the Bergs took four of the top five places with Orjan’s father Harald ranked first. Orjan, now Bodo’s head of community, and key player for Rosenborg when they were Champions League regulars at the turn of the millennium, was second.
Morten Gamst Pedersen, previously of Premier League Blackburn Rovers, was fourth. Harald Berg is one of the giants of Norwegian football, a man who scored twice in a European game for Lynn Oslo against Barcelona. He returned north to Bodo, won the cup in 1975 and his statue stands outside the stadium, even though he’s very much alive.
Runar, Orjan’s brother, played 500 times for Glimt. He saw one transformation for the club during his playing days — an indoor pitch constructed in 1991. Before that, Glimt’s players trained with spikes on their boots in the winter months.
Another of Orjan’s siblings, Arild, also played for Glimt. He died in July 2019, aged 43 after years of struggles with illness and injuries. “Arild chose to leave us,” read a statement from his family. The Glimt players all attended the funeral — and lost 6-0 at Valerenga the following day, a rare defeat.
Harald Berg’s sons grew up in one of those tiny whiteboard houses in the equally minute city centre they played in the grounds of the brewery opposite until the janitor put a sign up saying, “No football games”. That sign is now displayed in the main stand — though plans for a new stadium with a capacity of about 10,000 are at an advanced stage. The present ground, with its artificial pitch (with under plastic heating) has four stands that seat 7,354 but it is full most games now.
Glimt’s outpost location affects how they operate — and how visitors proceed. They spend more on travel than most, but at least they can now afford to charter a plane to the trickier away games and European matches, rather than flying to Oslo and then onto their destination. And, with the weather so cold in the winter months, they do pre-seasons in Spain or Turkey.
Kjetil Knutsen took charge in 2018. He is formerly of Brann Bergen, the club he’s set to pip to another title this year. With one of the smaller budgets in the league and no benefactor, Glimt set about recruiting ambitious players from Norway’s second tier and promoting academy graduates.
Glimt missed out on the title to Molde, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s former club, in 2019, but won the league in 2020, 2021 and 2023. They played fast, attacking football. Players were bought to fit into their system, not necessarily because of their individual talents. Glimt think they can improve players and the manager buys into all of this. It can be devastatingly effective. Jose Mourinho’s Roma’s were defeated 6-1 in the UEFA Conference League group stages, on the windswept artificial surface in temperatures of two degrees in 2021. Mourinho got his revenge later that season, eliminating Glimt in the quarter-finals.
Glimt have stayed true to their philosophy with the same manager. Most of the players came from northern Norway, most are still Norwegian. But they’ve not only dominated in Norway, they’ve done so as a selling club.
In 2020, Glimt drew AC Milan in a Europa League qualifier and took the lead in Milan before losing 2-3. Jens Petter Hauge, a 21-year-old winger who assisted both goals, later joined to Milan before moving on to Eintracht Frankfurt and is now back on loan at Glimt. He scored one and set up one at the weekend in a 2-0 win against bottom side Odd. Danish attacker Philip Zinckernagel, another 2020 stand out, joined Watford, then Nottingham Forest, before spells in Greece with Olympiacos and Belgium with Club Brugge. He’s also back on loan at Glimt.
Players like Hauge and Zinckernagel have returned to familiar surroundings but also weather extremes that necessitate supplements to combat a lack of sunlight and the threat of drinks freezing on the sideline.
“We do blood tests and measure vitamin D levels, but it’s standard up here that people take vitamin D as a supplement,” says Scarborough, the physio. “We also have to make sure that the pitch side nutrition we have during games doesn’t freeze. We’ve had water bottles freeze during games and had to defrost them. If it has gone solid then it’s too late. The players can snack at half time, warm up and change clothes if needed. Sometimes, there’s a sleety slush that can come down horizontally. I feel more for the fans who have to stay outside, but they wrap up well — in yellow, our colours.”
It’s not just the water bottles that can suffer on the sidelines, it is a challenge being a substitute too.
“We have heated blankets on the bench and moon boots to keep feet warm, heated hand packs that can also go in shoes too,” says Scarborough. “We also have to keep them warm in training sessions and limit breaks where they are standing around. That works well with our playing style which is high intensity.”
Glimt also use a mental coach, a former active army fighter pilot Bjorn Mannsverk. It is up to the individuals if they want to use Mannsverk but new players have three or four sessions with him before deciding if it is for them.
“In 2016, Glimt were struggling and it was a described to me as a collective mental breakdown,” says Mannsvertk. “They contacted me and wanted to start mental training. I have to put things into context. When we played in Rome, the Olimpico could seat 15,000 more people than the entire population of Bodo.
“It shouldn’t have been possible that we were there, but that’s the perspective. We tried to change the mentality from being a football one focussed on results and points, to zoom out, focus on culture, who we are and understand that we are small and we have to stay together. We changed the mentality to focus our energy on the things we can control. We don’t focus on the things we can’t control, like opponents.
“It’s all about a unique culture and mindset. It has to be a sustainable culture, where we focus on routines, where players can develop and they have to take away their old constraints when it comes to performing at their best. It’s about hunger and striving to be better all the time, about optimising performance. We think our best performance is always ahead of us.”
Such culture led them to play Arsenal in the 2022 Europa League, and now United. The income generated from European competition mean they no longer see themselves as a selling club but not everyone is wholly enamoured at the success.
“In 2019 and the record-breaking season 2020, I think almost everyone in Norway loved the story about the little self-made club from northern Norway winning and playing beautiful football,” says Glimt fan Raymond Limstrand Jakobsen. “Everybody loves a David vs Goliath story, right? Now it’s a bit different, especially with the other teams’ most loyal supporters. Little charming Bodo/Glimt is suddenly the club with millions pouring in the bank accounted by selling players and performing in Europe. But it’s still self-made and I think most people respect us and think it’s a great story.”
It seems like half of his town will be at Old Trafford on Thursday. Can he believe that any of this?
“Actually, no. It’s like we are in a game of Football Manager using a cheat code. Playing Manchester United in an important European match would have been unthinkable for all of us.”
Additional reporting: Charlotte Harpur
(Top photo: Matt McNulty – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)
