words: cosimo bizzarri

photography: matteo de mayda

The sky over Reykjiavik is bright the day Vikingur plays Fylkir in its first home match of the 2018 Urvalsdeild, the Icelandic premier league. There are 1,500 people in attendance, all seated in one single stand. Local fans sit on the right; their opponents on the left. There are no fences between them. A dozen children lead the chants for Vikingur by beating their hands on a Coca Cola billboard. Right before the end of the first half, left winger Madsen scores a header. The technical level is low and the rest of the match goes by with little to report.

In certain areas of the field the players struggle to stand still. “It’s too early to play outside,” says Vikingur managing director Haraldur V. Haraldsson, “Only a few days ago the field was still frozen.” 

Due to the temperatures, the Icelandic national league usually takes place between mid-May and mid-October. This year, it started earlier to make time for the World Cup. After reaching the quarter finals of the 2016 European Championships, Iceland took the first spot in its World Cup qualifying group for 2018. With 330,000 inhabitants, it’s the least populous nation to ever compete in a World Cup. And with sponsors and broadcast money in short supply, Urvalsdeid remains a semi-professional league where you can still meet a goalkeeper who works as a videographer or a midfielder who runs a codfish exporting company.

Searching for A Warm Place

In the past decade KSI, the Icelandic football federation, has made a conscious investment in training its trainers. Today there are 800 of them with a UEFA license. That means that even a three-year-old kid coming from a remote village near the Arctic circle will likely learn football from someone qualified. “At the beginning of every training, we have them touch the ball three hundred times in six minutes,” explains Hákon Sverrisson, a coach at Breidablik, a renowned youth club that has produced most of the players in the Urvalsdeild. “We don’t focus on tactics or athletics until they turn twelve. There are no roles. If someone is inclined to play defense, we push them to play forward, and vice versa. We want them to experiment.”

If the technique of Iceland’s players has been improving, it’s also thanks to the proliferation of indoor fields, eight of which have been built over the last 15 years. Municipalities build them and clubs run them; the Breidablik field is a sort of community center, open around the clock and managed by locals. When school is over, young people flock to the stadium. The philosophy of the club is that everyone can play, regardless of their age, gender and actual skills. “About two of every three kids are not particularly interested in football. They only come because it’s warm inside,” Sverisson adds.

A Matter of Mindset

The KSI has also promoted the construction of dozens of artificial turf fields and over 120 outdoor futsal courts all across the island. One of the federation’s objectives for the next five years is getting more kids from the northern regions to try the sport, which is still relatively unpopular there because of the freezing temperatures and extremely short days of the winter months. “When I was young, fields were made of gravel,” recalls Gudmundur Benediktsson, a forward with Iceland’s team in the nineties, “In winter, we trained on the town’s commercial street, the only one that had underground heating that would melt ice and snow.”

Benediktsson today is a television commentator who achieved worldwide online notoriety for a one-minute scream after the European Championships win over England. “The risk with the indoor stadiums is that our players are going to get spoiled,”  he continues. “Our main strength has always been our mentality. I hope the next generations can retain it.” The core of the current national team has been playing together since they were teenagers. There are no real stars and their style of play is unremarkable. Still, they’ve emerged as a force, winning seven out of ten matches in the qualifying round. Many date the beginning of this rise to 2012, when Lars Lagerback, who had a decade of experience with Sweden’s national team, took the reins. In 2016, Lagerback’s deputy coach Heimir Hallgrímsson took over. A kind but determined man, he comes from the remote Vestman, an archipelago of volcanic islands east of Reykjavik. Fewer than 4000 people live there and Hallgrímsson knows them all intimately. He is the islands’ dentist.

At the End of the World

It takes three hours on the ferry to reach the Vestman. In winter, no youth team from the main island will cross the stormy stretch of ocean. So once a week, the young players from local club IBV wake up early in the morning and walk to the same harbor that their families’ fishing boats have sailed from for centuries. The only difference is that they are going to play soccer. “Many feel sick during the crossing,” explains Richard Goffe, a 36-year-old coach of the IBV youth teams. “Then we often have to drive on a bus for a few more hours to reach the field of our opponents. When we win, it’s okay. But when we lose, the three hours back on the ferry are a terrible experience.”

Goffe was born and raised in London. He had been coaching in Shenzen, China when he accepted an offer from IBV a few months ago. He’s not the only foreigner at IBV. The men's senior team, which plays in the Urvalsdeild, includes players from Iran, Mexico, Argentina, France, England, El Salvador and the neighboring Faroe Islands. The club has no choice; when the local population is so small, shopping for players elsewhere in Iceland and abroad is necessary. In fact, every team in the Ursvaldeild has a few foreigners. They are often the only ones who get paid.

Goffe quickly got used to the culture of the Vestman islands. He points to how training sessions are run at IBV: “All players live nearby. It takes five to ten minutes for them to come to the field. So we can do many short sessions, instead of one long one. We try to focus a lot on the game, so that players can learn from each other, instead than from us.” This form of learning often happens across genders, a practice that is common across Iceland.