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Norway, a nation with roughly the same population as Scotland, has emerged as one of the standout teams of the 2026 World Cup — and the credit goes well beyond Erling Haaland.
Haaland, the Manchester City forward who has scored seven goals so far in the tournament, remains the team’s headline act, alongside Arsenal and Norway captain Martin Odegaard. But they represent just the most visible output of a much broader system. Of the 26 players in Norway’s World Cup squad, 17 currently play for clubs in the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, or Serie A — and most came up through Norway’s national youth development framework, known as the National Team School (NTS), founded in 2013.
The contrast with Scotland is striking. Both countries share similar population sizes and both endured a 28-year absence from the World Cup after France 1998. Yet while Scotland exited at the group stage this summer, Norway advanced past both Ivory Coast and Brazil in the knockout rounds and now face England in the quarter-finals.
Two Decades in the Making
Hakon Grottland, the Norwegian Football Federation’s head of player development, says the country’s current success reflects more than 20 years of deliberate planning. He recalled that when he joined the federation in 2010, reaching a World Cup felt like a distant dream, given how long Norwegian football had been living off the memory of 1998.
According to Grottland, two developments were decisive: a nationwide push to build artificial pitches between 2000 and 2010, and a coaching overhaul sparked by the creation of the NTS.
From Ice to All-Weather Football
Norway has built or upgraded a striking number of artificial pitches over the past decade — more than 500 newly constructed and nearly 600 renovated between 2016 and 2025 alone. For a country with harsh winters, this transformed football from a seasonal activity into a year-round pursuit. Grottland remembered playing on icy, unreliable surfaces as a young player; today’s conditions are dramatically different.
That shift also changed the style of play. Norway’s football identity in the 1990s was built on effective but unglamorous, defensively minded football. More consistent playing surfaces opened the door to a more technical approach — something now embodied by playmaker Odegaard. Grottland noted, half-jokingly, that the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, joking that Norway now struggles to produce enough defenders.
Oil Wealth and Gambling Revenue Fund the Game
Norway’s enormous oil reserves — the largest in Europe outside Russia — have made it one of the wealthiest nations per capita in the world, with an economy that outperforms both the UK and the US on that measure.
Less obviously, gambling revenue has also played a major role in funding grassroots sport. Norway tightly regulates betting, and its state-owned operator, Norsk Tipping, channels 64% of its proceeds into sport, largely toward facilities. In 2026 alone, that amounted to more than 2 billion kroner — roughly £152.7 million — directed toward sports infrastructure.
A System, Not an Academy
Grottland pointed to a second wave of change between 2010 and 2020, when Norway’s leading clubs, regional federations, and districts began investing heavily in developing young talent. That effort intensified after Norway missed out on Euro 2012 qualification, prompting the federation to launch the NTS — known in Norwegian as Landslagsskolen — in 2013.
The results are visible in the current squad: of the 15 players who started Norway’s 2-1 win over Brazil, 14 had represented the country at youth level, and 11 had come through the NTS pathway from as early as under-15 or under-16 level.
Grottland was careful to clarify that the NTS isn’t a centralized academy in the mold of France’s Clairefontaine. Instead, it functions as a connective structure linking grassroots clubs, regional programs, top clubs, and the federation. Unlike systems where elite clubs focus purely on talent production while grassroots clubs exist just for recreation, he said, in Norway “everyone’s in it together.”
That grassroots ethos was on display before the tournament, when the squad posed for a team photo wearing the jerseys of the clubs where they first started playing.
Keeping Doors Open Longer
One notable difference from countries like England — where top academies often recruit children as young as eight — is that Norwegian players typically remain with their local grassroots clubs until age 12. Grottland described this as a deliberate philosophy: avoiding premature judgments about who will or won’t make it.
He pointed to Haaland as proof the approach works. Haaland joined national talent camps within the NTS structure at 14, but at the time, no one predicted he would become one of the best players of his generation.
Odegaard was the exception. Grottland said the entire philosophy behind the NTS was shaped by encountering Odegaard at age 11 — a player who would go on to sign for Real Madrid at 16 for €4 million. Grottland said the NTS defines talent less by physical measurables like speed or ball control, and more by a player’s love of the game and sense of ownership over their own development and the team’s. He said he’d never encountered a child with that quality quite like Odegaard.
Team Over Individual
Grottland said the core values the NTS instills are safety, security, and togetherness — values he believes are now paying off on football’s biggest stage, where, in his words, no single player is bigger than the team.
He connected that ethos directly to the “Viking row” celebration that has become a signature sight at this World Cup, in stadiums and even in Times Square, describing it as a physical expression of collective identity.
What’s Next for the Domestic League
One open question is whether this player pipeline will eventually strengthen Norway’s domestic league, given that only four members of manager Stale Solbakken’s squad currently play in Norway — three of them for Bodo/Glimt, whose run to the Champions League last-16 last season offered a glimpse of what’s possible.
Grottland said producing and selling players abroad remains one of Norwegian football’s central goals, but argued that goal and domestic development aren’t in conflict — pointing to recent growth in the Norwegian league itself.
Solbakken, for his part, credited the current squad’s blend of veteran and emerging players to sustained effort across the system rather than any single golden generation. “We have players who are around 30 or older, we have players who are around 18 and 20 and then players who are in the middle who are peaking,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a generation but it’s hard work from the clubs, hard work from the federation.”
