Kjetil Knutsen, he wasn’t the first to do this
A school teacher returns to the club where he played hundreds of games. Taking over managerial duties from an Englishman, he goes about instilling a fast, free-flowing football philosophy. Clubs half a century later would hire new coaches only if they played his 4–3–3. His nation’s coaches are now revered above all for following his mantra.
This isn’t a story about Total Football, Rinus Michels or the Netherlands. This is a story about Nils Arne Nilsen’s Godfoten philosophy living a second life, defying a continent’s opinion of Norwegian football once again.
Although Bodø/Glimt fell an extra time short of the Champions League group stage this August — the place Eggen’s Rosenborg took so many scalps in the 90s — Norway can finally say it has found its philosophy’s best student, its Johann Cruijff. Kjetil Knutsen led Glimt to the club’s first two league titles before Eggen passed away at 80-years old this January.
Few have truly explained why a tiny club from the Arctic Circle has become the talk of a continent. Few can articulate why so many of Glimt’s best players — Jens Petter Hauge, Patrik Berg, Fredrik Bjørkan, Brede Moe and more — left Bodø only to fail reaching their previous heights, both in latitude and performance. But the phenomenon of “a good collective” as “the sum of good individuals” — an attacking system turning dust into diamonds — isn’t new to the long Scandinavian coast.
The system was born
Internationally, Norwegian football is seen as defensive and pragmatic, closest to the English game. The national team’s unprecedented success in the 1990s had come with Eggen’s contemporary theorist and close friend, Egil ‘Drillo’ Olsen at the helm. Pragmatic, defensive long-balls inspired by Charles Reep shocking bigger countries and better players. Surely the antithesis of total football; Drillo-football is more like the Netherlands of the 2010 World Cup than 1974.
Many suppose that Norway is more accepting of a style of football designed to primarily not concede goals. If acceptance is celebrating victories, then perhaps this is so; like England celebrating Alf Ramsey’s success in 1966, we sometimes must cheer victory over our conception of artistry. Yet, in the 80s, Eggen was chosen as national team manager over Drillo because of playstyle, much to Drillo’s chagrin. When Eggen wrote Godfoten into a book, he said of Drillo’s sudden warm reception after the 90s’ successes, “we only get recognition when we’ve already won, but we need it most when we need to win.”
Drillo, nicknamed now ironically for his ability to dribble so well in his playing days, wrote “the theorisation and intellectualisation of football did not come to Norway till around 1970.” Eggen agreed, “the Norwegian football model was conceived and created by the young, academically analytical coaching theorists who took command in the 1970s.” The supposition that Norway were accepting of defensive football is questionable, but the understanding that the country was led by academically implemented systems is unequivocal. Whilst Eggen was reading the likes of Hannes Weissweiler, even seeking a meeting with Rinus Michels in Barcelona during 1974, the biggest influence for the anglophilic country came first from England.
Rosenborg hired George Curtis in 1969, a student at Lilleshall and the Allen Wade school of thought, which is so deeply intertwined with Ramsay’s World Cup. Whilst Sweden would take to zonal defending with Bobby Houghton and Roy Hodgson from 1974, Rosenborg would already have won league titles with it, Eggen captaining from left back. “I inherited a lot of football philosophy from the gentleman from London,” Eggen wrote, “among other things the ‘flat back four’, the precursor to both the Swedish ‘Gunder [Bengtsson] method’ at IFK Göteborg and Vålerenga, and the principles of Drillo’s defence.”
In 1969, though, Rosenborg won having scored 36 goals in 18 games. In 1970, just 15 scored, but with an astounding 5 conceded. “15–5. It was crazy,” Drillo said. “Nils Arne, ‘Schouen’ and I were a group of coaches who thought it was exciting. It was then when my relationship with zonal defence began.” But Eggen, with his view from the pitch, saw the decline in attendance matching the decline in goals. Lerkendal averaged 13,948 attendees in 1969, but an average of just 7,959 wanted to watch the reigning champions in 1970.
Eggen would take over from Curtis, who’d take over the Norwegian national team after the 15–5 1971 season. “Paradoxically, the experience learned from the defensive Curtis period is one of the most important roots to our 90s style of play,” Eggen reflected, “Rosenborg plays offensive, fun, attractive and crowd-friendly football.”
Whilst Drillo led Norway back to not just one but successive World Cups after 56 years of waiting, Eggen’s attacking football brought Rosenborg to the Champions League group stage eight consecutive times between 1995 and 2002, a European record at the time. Eggen was the first to admit the wildly different circumstances; “with the national team, with so few days together, it is necessary to offer few and fixed tactical solutions.” Eggen’s training methods, where his players were pushed to problem solve till they’d come to a natural symbiosis of skill and togetherness, are only practical for a coach able to spend years, day-on-day, with the same group.
Like Rinus Michels and Helenio Herrera before or Kjetil Knutsen and Jose Mourinho now, all successes are celebrated. But, in Norway, the style that is revered, the style that fans beg their clubs to use, and the style they wish the national team could play is Eggen’s.
The postulates
Eggen took a sabbatical during the eight year run to write ‘Godfoten : samhandling — veien til suksess’ (translated as ‘Stronger foot: Interaction — the path to success’). Littered with his own poetry, Confucius teachings and psychological theory, it belongs better in a Philosophy aisle than the Sports aisle. The book’s title alone takes a Masters thesis to explain in English. He founded his philosophy upon almost 50 postulates, agreed upon by his teams, one being to play crowd-friendly football. Before you’d get to the likes of “No one pays hundreds of kroner to watch throw-ins!” though, you’ll read, “Rosenborg always goes onto the pitch to score goals themselves, and must therefore tolerate the opponent doing the same.”
In Bodø/Glimt’s first league title at the end of 2020, Kjetil Knutsen’s team scored a record 103 goals from 30 games. Three-a-half goals a game. When hosting Roma last year, a Jose Mourinho-managed team conceded six goals for the first time in his 1,008 game career. En route to the Europa League group stage this year, they scored 20 goals and conceded 9. This is the Norwegian style, this is Eggen’s legacy.
Eggen first knew he had to write a book after the greatest night in the history of Norwegian club football, 4th December 1996, the ‘Miracle of Milano’. The year before, Eggen’s Rosenborg had brought the country to the group stage for the first time. But, now travelling to Milan, they knew the home side only needed a draw to advance beside Porto. In a retrospective interview with VG, Eggen admitted, “we were aware that we had to go to the San Siro and give them problems. That is to say, we hardly even practised our defensive play before the game.” When Rosenborg won 2–1, they’d become one of the eight best teams in Europe, and they did it playing their way.
The Miracle came, fortuitously in retrospect, just a day after Silvio Berlusconi had rehired Arrigo Sacchi for his final spell at the San Siro. The two coaches who had defined the revolution of system football in their respective countries faced off. But where one was defined by making the most out of world-class players, the other made the most out of a gang who “had grown up within walking distance of Lerkendal”. Sacchi famously reflected, “at Milan I had quality players, at other clubs they obviously weren’t as good”. But Eggen’s memoir would reach anti-capitalistic heights when describing San Siro’s defeated empty stands, “it has become too expensive for the football-loving regular Milanese to go to a Champions League match, because too many billions of lire go into the pockets of football-playing boys in shorts.”
Eggen’s Rosenborg would end up beating Dortmund, Porto, Athletic, PSG, et cetera. After beating Real Madrid 2–0, their only loss en route to their first European Cup since 1966, Eggen’s classroom wit was shown best in the post-game interview: “I’ll give them this much, at least they tried.” He’d argue, probably fairly, that the 1990s should be remembered as the decade of Ajax, Milan, Barcelona and Rosenborg. Primarily, Eggen argues, because of their philosophies’ success; “Rosenborg’s achievements in the Champions League are above all else based on the ability to score goals. In Milan, we scored twice, unlike almost every other visiting team, and thus we became quarter-finalists.”
Like Michels and Eggen, Kjetil Knutsen was a school teacher. During the Miracle of Milano, he was giving up teaching to go full-time at Hovding IL, a fourth-tier team a walk away from where he was born. Like Eggen, he grew up in a village outside of the big city; Eggen was born amongst the hills and lakes of Trondheimforden’s western coast; Knutsen came from beyond the four largest mountains east of Bergen. It’s one thing to say Knutsen came from humble beginnings, but when describing his choice to join Hovding in 1995, he said, “it was an attractive club with very good facilities, such as a grass pitch.” 27 years later, he has more than just a grass pitch.
Having retired from playing in the depths of lower league local football, he’d find immediate inspiration. In an interview with the Norwegian FA, Knutsen said, “I started as a coach in the mid-90s, during the Golden Age of Rosenborg. The leader, Nils Arne Eggen; the philosopher, Nils Arne Eggen; the educator, Nils Arne Eggen; but, not least, the football coach, Nils Arne Eggen; the sum of what he was, without a doubt, is what inspired me. He is the greatest Norwegian coach of all time. So much of what he thought about football, even if it was decades ago, is still true to this day.”
The Godfoten theory
‘Godfoten’, or ‘stronger foot’ in English, is distilled best into the postulate, “At Rosenborg, you will first and foremost be allowed to improve what you are already good at.” That is, if you’re a left-footed midfielder, then Rosenborg’s system will allow for balls to come into your left foot. If you’re a short striker, then Rosenborg’s system will allow for cleared balls to be found by a winger. Training your weaker foot, or using voodoo magic to increase your height is a waste of time; for the system to reach its peak, it must make the most of your good foot, not your weak foot.
Underpinning ‘godfoten theory’ are the principles of ‘flytsone’ (‘flow state’) and ‘samhandling’ (‘seamless interaction’). Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who “has a difficult name but an easy and clear message” according to Eggen, had coined ‘in the (flow) zone’ in 1975. Shown in a chart — the X-axis as ‘skill’ and the Y-axis as ‘challenge’ — the flow zone lives where high challenge and high skill meet. Low skill and high challenge leads to anxiety, medium skill and low challenge leads to boredom. In his pedagogical studies, Eggen theorised that traditional teaching is to develop skills first, then the challenges would come after. To create hyperfocus in his players, though, Eggen did the opposite; he would push increasing challenges on his players to only then drive the development of performance.
‘Samhandling’ as a word initially described computer interaction, a fully trusting model. To describe the seamless exchange of information, the Norwegian language found a word synonymous with biological interaction or symbiosis. If flow is, as written by Csíkszentmihályi, “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement,” samhandling is the culmination of focused individuals passing from their favoured foot to their teammate’s favoured foot whilst another selfishly makes a run by using their better pace to stretch the defence. It is individuals understanding individuals as a collective. You wouldn’t feel foolish if you’d have described Total Football in the same way.
When Eggen was born, Norway’s population was 3 million. It’s now still barely over 5 million. Speaking to VG reporter Knut Espen Svegaarden two years before his death, Eggen said of Rosenborg’s Champions League success, “individually we weren’t good enough, but we had the team.” The admittance of his country’s position is in large part what inspired Drillo to find such a defensive style of football. But the Netherlands only had a population of 12 million when Rinus Michels took over at Ajax. Eggen’s Total Football in a sentence: “You’re not skilled if you can’t use your skill to make others skilled,” thus “a good collective is the sum of good individuals.”
From Trondheim to Bodø
The country is littered with students of the Eggen school, tens directly through the Rosenborg system. He demanded intelligence of his players, not intellectuality; “knowledge that cannot be transformed into practical action is useless”. But, when he sought to “reproduce the achievement year after year, with constantly new players,” he wrote, “we must replace the randomness with lasting and more profound values which are embodied in a dynamic philosophy, which in turn creates a dynamic culture — a winning culture.” The inevitability of his teaching style is proliferation.
One above most was Trond Sollied, the ‘Iron Man’ from the north, who had spent most of his career in Rosenborg’s defence. When winding down his career in 1992, he returned north to become player-manager for a Glimt side that had been out of the top division since 1980. Upon promotion in 1993, they immediately became league runners-up and Cup winners. Till Knutsen, Sollied was as close to Eggen’s Cruijff, his natural heir. When Eggen took 1998 off to write Godfoten, it was Sollied who took over. He’d go on to take Eggen’s gospel to Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, but what he left in Bodø was a germinating culture.
Glimt stayed in the top division for almost two decades. But, in a place like Bodø, a hard rock beside one of the most dangerous straits of water in the world, resources are limited at the best of times. When they were relegated in 2005, Norwegian clubs’ finances reflected the world market three years later. Amidst the global financial crisis, Glimt ran up debt to £5 million. A sum that reflects almost one game in the Europa League now, but was over their entire annual budget then.
In his playing days, Ørjan Berg, another great Eggen disciple, wasn’t unfamiliar with a long-shot. But, in 2010, when tasked with creating a development programme to bring on Glimt’s long-term stability, he was standing over a free-kick 40 yards out. The focus was on the development of Northern Norwegian players, to become a team that makes northerners proud. Aasmund Bjørkan, a winger in Sollied’s Glimt, arrived into the coaching setup and helped enact a first-team policy that 40% of the squad should be northerners. The likes of Jens Petter Hauge, Håkon Evjen, Ørjan Berg’s son, Patrick and Aasmund Bjørkan’s son, Fredrik would come through the club and make millions in eventual sales.
By 2017, when Knutsen joined as assistant coach, Aasmund Bjørkan was head coach. The latter became sporting director with Knutsen being promoted the year after, although they claim that their roles barely shifted. Knutsen made the inevitable shift from Hovding to Bergen’s biggest club, Brann in 2004, becoming Head of Youth Development. He stayed in the city after a labour dispute with Brann in 2009, managing Fyllingen till a shock sacking in 2013. Another move across town, this time back to his home region of Åsane, where a swift promotion to the second tier has left the club now consistently threatening a first promotion to the top division.
In 2016, Åsane’s sporting director, Knutsen’s teammate and manager during the early 90s, signed his son without Knutsen’s knowledge. For a third time in a decade, a Knutsen exit made for some fireworks in the Bergen tabloids. Whilst Rinus Michels and Nils Arne Eggen differ, Cruijff and Knutsen are one-and-the-same; he is not afraid to be a public figure and, despite no top-level experience, he was the perfect face for the Glimt project.
Today’s philosophy
The club now works by the initialism, PULS (prestasjon, utvikling, lojalitet og samhold; ‘performance, development, loyalty, unity’). Undeniably, this is Neo-Eggenism, ‘samhold’ above the rest is our new ‘samhandling’. Knutsen said, “many hard-working people with similar values head in the same direction in Bodø/Glimt. We are completely dependent on that to be successful in modern football.” But Knutsen’s lilting poetry should make the man himself smile the most, “PULS…the heart has to pump if you’re to get things done.”
When Knutsen left Hovding, he’d written a document not dissimilar to Glimt’s in 2010, that would map the club’s coaching decisions. Top of the list: the club must only hire coaches willing to play attacking, entertaining football. Knutsen hasn’t (so far) written his own philosophy down into his own 300 page bible for the public. But, when describing his own philosophy in an interview with the FA, Knutsen sought to highlight four points:
Firstly, “football is an entertainment business,” mirroring Eggen’s most idealistic prose. “We must be aggressive in our approach to inspiring our players. If you talk more about defending yourself, or about your opponents, than you do about attacking, then you’ve begun from the wrong place.”
Secondly, “Like Nils Arne said, we must always go forward, and go forward fast with a high degree of gjennombruddshissighet (‘a zeal to make the break past the defenders’).” With another of Eggen’s deep vernacular, it’s no wonder Knutsen looks to Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool for inspiration in offensive pressing.
Thirdly, “The concept of energy is very important to me.” Questioning departed Glimt players quality isn’t a physical question, but often one of adaptation to a less demanding system. “That is, having players with good physique who can run a lot — run very fast. When you have an attacking and possession-based approach, then you’ll often be in your opponent’s half.”
Lastly, “Football is becoming faster and faster.” Glimt isn’t just a fit team, it’s an oppressive team. Their skills on-the-ball are maximised by their relentlessness to get the ball. “The most important aspect of both attacking and defending is one thing: distance. You must have tight distances when attacking and tight distances when defending.”
Glimt’s current band of merry men include a goalscorer who was playing in the fourth division at 21-years old. Amahl Pellegrino had only scored 6 goals in 70 top-flight games till he was 29. Now, he’s on 24 goals from 28 games in the calendar year. You’ve got a young starlet winger in Joel Mvuka who had to retire for 8 months earlier in his teens. The heart irregularity with which he had been diagnosed by comparison to a white European heart and not that of Rwandan descent. Their left-back is a right-back, Brice Wembangomo, who had literally never played on the left till signing for Glimt in 2020. Their best performing defender, Isak Helstad Amundsen, was the fifth choice centre back in May. Just like Eggen’s Rosenborg in the 90s, Knutsen leads a group of players whose best attributes make the system, and the system makes the most of their best attributes.
Eggen lives on
Whether it’s hearing him raise the importance of pedagogy, philosophise about systems, deflect pressure from his players onto himself or praise his colleagues before taking praise for himself, hearing Knutsen speak is like having Eggen back in the room. Eggen’s interview with VG’s Svegaarden came before Glimt’s first league title in 2020. Eggen was asked if his legacy, at least on the pitch, was being proverbially looked after. He typically stumbled through a philosophical half-answer before concluding, “No, it’s not.”
By the end of 2021, when Rosenborg were desperate for a coach to fit the Godfoten philosophy, Eggen told Trondheim’s local newspaper Adresseavisen, “He plays football the way that Rosenborg wants.” Echoing the 80s and 90s when he had brought so many players south from Bodø, he continued, “if it’s the case that he ever chooses to move, then my advice, my recommendation and my wish is that his next stop will be here.”
After Glimt defeated Roma 6–1, Eggen saw into the mirror most clearly, “the way they play is most familiar to me. As the commentators said so well during the match: one movement triggers the next.” Later that week, just a month before Eggen passed away in January, Knutsen rejected Rosenborg’s proposal to take over as head coach at Lerkendal. “When you search for a coach, it is important that they share the same philosophy as Rosenborg. I wanted Kjetil, but he must always decide for himself where he wants to be,” Eggen told Adresseavisen.
A staunch social democrat isn’t an outrageous description for a Norwegian. But, in a football philosophy that extends to tempering the mind away from a pitch, Eggen’s politics become obvious; as his postulate goes, “the most important prerequisite for achieving success is to sincerely wish it on others!” When Nils Arne’s Rosenborg hosted European nights, the gods watched down on many hearts being warmed on cold evenings. As Knutsen’s Glimt prepare for the Europa League, Eggen will be the one watching down on hearts being warmed on even colder evenings. The shirts’ colour will be different, but Godfoten is still Godfoten.
