Everyone Has Youth Soccer Takes After USMNT Crashes Out Of World Cup

It’s a big week for proponents of the Norway model - play-based discovery of sport over competition - and rightfully so as the small Scandinavian country advances on.

But it’s also worth noting that their leading scorer, Erling Haaland, a modern viking, has scored 7 of their 12 goals and in 14-straight competitive games for Norway. Haaland’s father played in the Premier League, and his mother was a champion heptathlete. Meanwhile, he set a “non-competitive” standing long jump record of 1.63 meters at the ripe old age of 5— the same year he started playing for a 100-year-old soccer academy program.

Sure, he played other sports too, but let’s not act like Norway - a country that pumps $400 million annually into sports for a population the size of South Carolina (this would be the equivalent of the US spending $25B in public money) and still hadn’t made the World Cup since 1998 or qualified for the Euros since 2000 - is successful because a group of kids discovered the joys of footy by kicking a spherical object on the banks of the Fjords. In soccer at least, it’s due to a once-in-a-generation cyborg whose athletic prowess has been measured since the time he was in kindergarten, or barnehage, as they call it.