Norway’s Philosophy of Sports Is Very Different From America’s. Only One of Them Is Still in the World Cup.
· Yahoo Sports
Erling Haaland is having the time of his life in the World Cup. The Norway national team striker scored two goals to send soccer royalty Brazil home. After the game, he’s chuckling to himself, telling reporters that even he’s surprised he won that game. Haaland has spent most of this World Cup looking like two completely different people. On the field, he is still the “Striking Viking,” a terrifying 6-foot-4 goal machine who runs at defenders like a marauding berserker. Off the pitch, he’s posting selfies with Shrek, trying on a Southern accent, and generally behaving less like one of the most accomplished athletes on Earth than a very tall guy having the best summer of his life.
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The internet has, predictably, fallen in love. But there may be more going on here than the discovery that Haaland is extremely funny. Norway has become one of the most surprising stories of the World Cup—qualifying for the first time in nearly 30 years, then making it to the semifinals. But to Brad Stulberg, a performance coach and professor at the University of Michigan and the author of the book The Way of Excellence, Haaland offers a useful rebuke to the idea that greatness has to hurt. I spoke with Stulberg about what Haaland’s memes tell us about Norwegian athletic success, why Americans are so suspicious of fun in sports, and whether any of this would matter if Norway weren’t winning. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Aymann Ismail: Erling Haaland is having the most fun at the World Cup. He’s being extremely silly, making memes nonstop, posting hilarious selfies to Snapchat. And then he’ll go on to knock out Brazil, scoring 2. What do you think explains that?
Brad Stulberg: There’s a clip of him in Dallas trying on a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and then with Team Norway, doing the Viking Row after games with a huge smile on his face. It’s clear: The dude is having so much fun out there doing something that you’d think an 8- or 9-U soccer team would do.
Imagine Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the middle of the NBA playoffs—not after winning it all, mind you, just after winning a playoff game—going to half-court and doing a celebration. They’re not doing that. They’re all business. They’re going back to the locker room. The Michael Jordan thing is: You’ve got to suffer for greatness, everything needs to be serious, you always need to be angry.
There is that meme that’s like, “Imagine being chased by Haaland,” but at the same time, Haaland is out there being innocent and joyful, putting on the Viking helmet and doing an interview. He’s just having a blast. That combination has been really neat to watch.
My wife started following him on Snapchat. She was really tickled when he answered a fan asking if he was a boy or a girl with “My dad is a boy and my mom is a girl. I am a mix. Xoxo 💋” I recently saw a random hairstyling how-to video with someone who uncannily looked like Haaland, and he went into the comments like, “Hi,” and the video gets seen 22 million times. What comes to mind when you see stuff like that?
Norway dominates the Winter Olympics, and it’s remarkable, because it’s such a small country compared to a place like America. Everybody always says, “Well, it’s the Winter Olympics, and it’s always winter in Norway” or “Nobody cares about those sports.” But they also have one of the world’s best triathletes, Kristian Blummenfelt. Their men’s beach volleyball program is a perennial favorite to win. They have some of the best Tour de France riders. And now they’ve put together this incredible soccer program. It all flies in the face of those typical retorts.
There are a couple of things going on. The first is undeniable: Norway is an extremely rich country, and it invests heavily in sports and its talent-development pipeline. What’s interesting, though, is that its youth sports programs don’t take the shape of this crazy Americanized system where it gets professionalized really early. We have rankings, A teams and travel teams, and kids specialize when they’re 7 years old. Norway’s sporting culture is entirely different. They don’t post scores or standings for young kids. They give participation trophies. And it’s such a joke that people think that turns you into a snowflake, because they’re world-beaters. The whole philosophy is “Joy of Sport.” That’s the actual phrase. In the U.S., if an 8-year-old’s coach sees that you’ve got a good pitch or a good jump shot, they’re like: “You should be playing this sport year-round.” In Norway, kids play multiple sports before they specialize.
The other thing is access. In the U.S., a lot of kids get priced out of sports. Norway invests heavily so more kids can play. When you have a country of fewer than 6 million people, you can’t afford to lose kids because they had a bad experience at age 8. You don’t know if that 8-year-old is going to turn into Erling Haaland at 15, 16, 17. You have to keep the pipeline as robust as possible.
It makes me wonder how different the experience is for the players on the other side—I’m thinking about Vinícius Júnior, Raphinha, Hendrick. These guys are under enormous pressure because of what Brazil represents in the sport globally; the expectation is that they ought to waltz into the final. Do you see a difference there?
I think it’s hard to know whether it’s pressure or just a different response to pressure. My sense is that Norway feels a lot of pressure too. Maybe the expectation wasn’t that they were going to win. But once you’re this deep into the tournament and the entire world is watching you, of course you feel pressure.
Someone who came up in a culture where soccer is life and it’s We need to win or else, the response to pressure can be to go narrow and become even more obsessed. Someone like Haaland grew up in a culture where it’s all about the joy of sport. He feels the pressure, but there’s some version of: Yeah, this is crazy, and I’m out here playing soccer with my mates. I just want to have fun. The ability to have fun is part of that release valve.
Is that why, after the Brazil win, Haaland told reporters he hadn’t expected to win?
That’s obviously easier to say after you get the win. Who knows what that press conference looks like if the game goes the other way? But I think there are enough data points throughout the tournament to believe that the sentiment behind it is real. Because you think of these elite athletes as sleeping in a freaking hyperbaric oxygen chamber, right? And Haaland is out line dancing.
There’s this misconception, especially on the internet—in the grind-slop, alpha-bro hustle culture, whatever you want to call it; in my book, I call it “pseudo-excellence”—that you have to suffer for greatness. You have to make all these sacrifices. And if you’re having fun, you’re doing it wrong. It’s the David Goggins approach to greatness: Be hard. You have to be angry and resentful and have a chip on your shoulder. There’s a time and a place for that. I just think it’s one small tool in the tool kit.
Haaland is a great example of someone who is clearly a fierce competitor and very intense on the pitch, and he’s having fun at the same time. These things get pitted against each other. It’s like: Either we’re going to hold hands and sing and not care about winning, or we’re going to be so cutthroat that we literally want to kill our opponent. In a lot of the best performers, it’s not either/or. It’s both/and. They can be killers on the pitch or the court while, at the same time, having fun. Steph Curry is another great example.
This gets directly to your book. What did you learn about sports when putting it together?
When the book first came out, people would ask me: Why is there a chapter on joy in a book about excellence? That was confusing to people. I think what Haaland is doing makes it less confusing. The pendulum has swung so hard, especially in this hypermasculine online world, toward being resentful and angry and killing and all that. And it’s just not how performance works. The No. 1 thing people say to me is: “What about Michael Jordan? That guy was a killer. He was angry. He literally invented enemies to compete against in his head.” My response is twofold. One, most people aren’t wired like Michael Jordan. And for every Michael Jordan, there’s a Steph Curry. But the more interesting thing is that Jordan didn’t win a championship until Phil Jackson came along, and he won all of his championships under Phil Jackson. And what is Phil Jackson known for? He’s the “zen, compassion, joy” coach, right?
Now, I’m not trying to take away any of Jordan’s greatness. But I do think he might have self-destructed without Jackson as a balancing force. So even when you look at the strongest counterexamples, you still see this undercurrent: Fierce intensity has to be balanced with some lightness and some joy. Otherwise, it just eats itself. It becomes too much. And in my own life, I think I used to undervalue having fun. Now, if I stop having fun for too long, that’s a cue that I need to investigate my approach, because something’s wrong.
That doesn’t mean every day is going to be fun. You’re a writer. Writing sucks. It’s hard. It’s not always fun. But the totality of it should be joyful.
I was thinking about that while reading the Supreme Court’s recent decision involving transgender athletes. There’s a passage in which the majority asks, “What is the harm in allowing an additional athlete to compete in women’s or girls’ sports?” Then it says that sentiment “misunderstands the nature and reality of sports.” The opinion describes sports as highly competitive and generally zero-sum. What do you make of that conception of what sports fundamentally are?
The idea that a 10U rec soccer league is all about winning and nothing else, and that that’s the spirit of sport—to me, that’s a misunderstanding of the spirit of sport. I’ve got kids, and I’m a volunteer coach in my community. Everything we do is based around having fun, being a good teammate, and building character. That’s the point of youth sports. Nobody cares if you win an 8U trophy. What matters is that you’re being a role model and hoping that these kids develop some good life skills. I think that’s the beauty of sport right now, especially at a time when so much of life is automated and moving online. There aren’t that many venues where you can succeed or fail, and it’s very concrete.
There’s generally a direct correlation between the effort you put in and what you get out. Sport is such a great container for building self-confidence, for teaching people how to lose, for teaching people how to win. To me, that ought to be the role of sport at all levels. But certainly in youth sports, the point isn’t to win. It’s to develop athletes and develop people.
I’m going to change the way I talk to my kids about sports. I think I’ve been responding to how excited they get about points.
Mine are a little older. Here’s how I do it. I don’t pretend that winning doesn’t matter, because I think that’s dumb. Competitive kids are going to be like: “Dad, that’s dumb. Winning matters. Why else do we keep score?” So I say: “Winning matters. Winning is part of the game. We’re trying to win. And you know how you’re going to have the best chance of winning? By having fun. If you’re not having fun, I can almost guarantee that you’re not going to win over the long haul.”
Then I tell them that there are things we can’t control. We can’t control the points, because we don’t know how the other team is going to play. We don’t know what the weather is going to be like. All we can control are these two things: What’s our effort—are we trying hard? And are we appreciating the moment and having fun? If we do those things, then we’ve already kind of won the internal game. And if you play sports for long enough—which is the goal, because you’re having fun—you’re going to lose a lot and you’re going to win a lot.
You can be sad when you lose. You have to enjoy the wins. But that’s why you need to find joy in the game itself. You just keep coming back. My son used to get so upset playing basketball when he was 5. One time I asked him: “Theo, if you scored every time and beat me every time, would it be fun?” And he’s like: “No, it’d be boring.” And I’m like: “Yeah. So you kind of need to lose sometimes. Otherwise it’s not fun.”
But would we even be talking about Haaland if Norway weren’t winning right now?
And that gets right back to the both/and, right? Yes, you need to win, obviously. We wouldn’t be talking about a lot of these teams if they didn’t get out of group play. And is inspiring people the same thing as actually holding up the trophy? Of course not. I think that’s where everything goes to extremes. There’s one extreme where it’s: Let’s all hold hands and sing and everyone’s a winner. It’s like, no, that’s actually not true. But the other extreme, You just have to fucking win and nothing else matters, especially for young kids, is every bit as dumb.