“Ett Liv, En Klubb”: Bryne FK, Erling Haaland, and a 21-year Odyssey
Will Colledge reflects on his experience at Norwegian side Bryne FK as the childhood club of Erling Haaland looked to secure promotion for the first time in almost a quarter of a century
“What is the purpose of your visit?”
“Football.”
It was. I had taken the short, if unusual, hop from London to Stavanger, Norway, to watch a football match.
Norway is revered around the world for its breathtaking landscapes, its cultural heritage and its extortionately priced beer, but less so for its club football. The Eliteserien, Norway’s top division, sits eleventh in UEFA’s official rankings. Respectable, but nothing to write home about.
“Oh, are you here to watch Viking Stavanger?”
“No, actually I’m here to watch Bryne.”
It was at this point the border officer looked at me in apparent surprise. Bryne FK, based in the eponymous agricultural town on the south-west coast of Norway, plays in the OBOS-Ligaen, the country’s version of the Championship. Seemingly, it’s not a regular away day for foreign fans.
“Bryne? Really? They’re all farmers down there! Those fans are…special!”
A day later, it would become apparent quite how special the club and its fans truly are.
Over the sea and far away
One might ask why I would take an entire weekend to go and watch a second division football match in Norway in November, and it’s a fair question.
After all, there’s plenty of lower league football to watch in the UK and Norway is incredibly cold.
However, Bryne FK is not just any club. It is, in actuality, intrinsically linked to the current state of English football.
That is because Bryne FK is the boyhood club of Erling Haaland.
The son of Alf-Inge Haaland, Erling was born in Leeds, but moved with his parents back to their hometown of Bryne at the age of three. It was there where he began to play football for the club, progressing through Byrne’s youth setup to play for the first team in 2016. He was just 15 at the time of his debut for the club both his father and uncle had represented.
Haaland only played 16 games for Bryne that season before moving to Eliteserien side Molde. In fact, 2016 was a difficult year for the club; having last been knocked out of the top-flight in 2003, that year saw them relegated to the third tier of Norwegian football for the first time since 1973. It was not until the abbreviated season of 2020 that they managed to return to the second division.
I had heard through various channels that Bryne were not only doing well in their current division, but on track for promotion. Bryne is an historic club in Norway. It was difficult to ignore an opportunity to see the foundations of a player who has rewritten the Premier League history books for the past two seasons.
It was only when I arrived that I unwittingly came to realise the importance of the match I had happened to buy tickets for over a month before. If Bryne were to win their tie against Egersund, they would return to the Eliteserien after a 21-year absence.
Chance Encounters
For a person with precious little knowledge of Norwegian, Stavanger and Bryne are wonderfully welcoming places. Compared to the bumbling Englishman who can just about say he ‘eats the apple’ (‘Jeg spiser eplet’ for anyone interested), most Norwegians I met who claimed to not speak much English could hold a half-an-hour conversation with ease and were often happy to do so.
Stepping out from the comfort of my AirBnB early on Saturday, I was faced with the same conundrum that faces every football fan on matchday: what to do in those interminable hours before kick-off. Having organised to meet my contact at Bryne at midday, I decided to kill some time before my train walking around Stavanger.
A port city bathed in the kind of light that Casper David Friedrichs only dreamed of, Stavanger is a hub for cruise ships and scientific explorations alike.
It was while exploring the city, wishing I’d brought a half-and-half scarf, that I stumbled upon one of the most remarkable shops I have ever had the fortune to enter.
TheFootballIdiots is Norway’s first dedicated football shirt shop, showcasing everything from rare classics to contemporary fashions. It is one of the few places where you can see Barcelona’s orange 1998/00 third kit hanging next to a mid-nineties purple and green Bury FC away shirt.
A mecca for those who worship at the altar of Kappa and Admiral, TheFootballIdiots was opened by Alan Scott, a former Royal Navy sailor from Scotland, and his son-in-law Aleksander in 2023. Talking to Alan and Thor, who was manning the shop, was an insight not only into the regional attitudes towards football, but also a taste of what it was like to be an outsider looking in on Norwegian sporting culture.
Sightseeing
The train from Stavanger to Bryne is uncharacteristically cheap for a country where a pint can set you back more than £13. It is also, however, characteristically beautiful, skirting lakes and skimming rocky outcrops as it wends its way south.
Bryne lies in Rogaland, a coastal agricultural county. The town, home to just over twelve thousand, saw the emergence of various industries producing farming machinery in the early 20th century.
Expecting to see a maze of colourless factories, what I didn’t fully anticipate was the sight that greeted me on disembarking the train.
A mural of Erling Haaland, resplendent in Dortmund yellow and bathed in a heavenly light, crowned by a halo bearing the legendary Gabriel Høyland’s quote, “Talk with your feet and hopefully everything will be alright,” stood like a Nordic Statue of Liberty, bursting through the wall of a building.
It was the first glimpse of the town’s love, not just for its prodigal son, but also for football.
To reach the stadium, fans must pass under a small bridge on which is emblazoned the mantra ‘Ett Liv – En Klubb’ alongside the club’s crest. ‘One life, one club’; it is an apt mantra for a club whose fanbase, however small, shares a familial bond with each other and with the team.
The Bryne Stadion, with a maximum capacity of 4000 spectators, is a unique arena. For instance, there is a dedicated space for tractor parking in view of the pitch, and I personally had not visited a ground with a dedicated ten-lane bowling alley before.
The banners adorning the stands proclaiming ‘Respect, Togetherness, Love’ were another declaration of the ethos that this club exudes. I made my way to the clubhouse, where I met Olav Lygren, who had helped me organise my visit.
The Man, the Myth, the Legend
Olav, not much older than myself, ushered me into his office, chatting away with the excited trepidation of a man whose life’s work is about to come to fruition. After explaining his role at the club, which straddled being a youth coach, a board member and, as I was soon to find out, a part-time singer, he introduced me to Espen Undheim.
Espen had taken on a quasi-mythical stature in my mind. Part of the club since the age of five, his family has been a fixture at Bryne. Both parents took on roles within the club’s structure, while his brother played in the promotion winning side in 1999. But Espen himself fits into the picture for his work as one of Bryne’s youth coaches; notably, as the coach of a young Erling Haaland.
There are few better people to guide you through the storied history of Bryne FK than Espen Undheim. The coach walked me through the hallowed halls of Bryne’s clubhouse, describing each of the team’s seasons and punctuating the facts and statistics with anecdotes often too remarkable to be believed.
He then pointed out a skinny youth on the right-hand side of one of the squads. “When [Erling] was coming here to our after-school programme, he was eight years old. The special thing about him was that in the room where we had food, he was here for only five minutes.
“After five minutes, he would go down, pick up the ball, and go out. He would start dribbling and shooting, dribbling and shooting.
“I’ve never seen any player, and I don’t think I will ever see any players, who love scoring goals as much as him. Because he celebrated every goal. He wanted to score all the time.”
Walking up to the strength room, we looked out over the training pitches where groups of young players of all ages worked on skills playing small-sided games. Even with the backdrop of the club’s most important game in almost a quarter of a century, the focus still lay on the next generation.
“[Erling] is a great, great motivation,” said Espen, “because all of the boys and girls look when he plays matches and look at his moves, and ask the coaches ‘What did he do at his own training here? What was his focus?’ so he is a great inspiration for our young players.”
Bryne has been part of Espen’s life for longer than he can remember. As such, for him, and all those who follow the club, the importance of the day’s game couldn’t be understated. “You can feel the atmosphere here today. If the club were to take that next step, it would be fantastic.”
Bryne, the club and the town, is small. That is fundamental, as Espen noted, for everything that makes the club unique: “We say that we are a club for everyone who wants to support something local.”
‘Bryne æ Beste’
I found Olav again in the car park, which was by now filling with supporters making their way to the Jærhallen. Over a thousand tickets had been sold to the pre-match festivities being held there; the hall was lined with tables all leading to a stage where local bands roused the crowd with songs, only a few of which did not insult local rivals Sandnes.
Sitting with Olav and his family, even I could join in when a wholly unexpected rendition of Skinner and Baddiel’s ‘Three Lions’ floated over the now-beer sodden hall.
Every person in that tent was brought together by one thing: football. Talking to Norwegians about the Derby County sides of the 1980s and hearing about Olav’s grandfather’s away trips to Old Trafford, there was a unity that transcended language and national identity.
There was a collective roar of approval when Olav, having disappeared from the table, reappeared on stage clad in a Bryne away shirt and a bucket hat to belt out the surprisingly catchy anthem ‘Me æ Di Beste Og Viking De Vett Det’ (loosely translated to ‘We are the best and Viking knows it’).
Fever pitch does the atmosphere a disservice.
When Saturday Comes
Having picked up my own Bryne FK bucket hat so as to both fit in and stay mercifully warm in the stands, I took my place facing the fabled ‘Tractor Tribune’.
Standing on concrete terracing as the northern sunlight began to fade, we were separated from the Egersund fans, who had travelled the hour or so to see their side, by a ramshackle set of fences.
I can imagine that the experience was not entirely dissimilar from watching football in England before the introduction of seating, but Norway too has seen the benefit of forbidding alcohol in view of the pitch.
It was difficult to see the players as they walked out onto the pitch just before kick-off due to the pyrotechnics that both side’s ultras had brought with them, one assumes for the express purpose of staying warm. The Bryne ultras, a group of twenty-somethings sporting matching jumpers and scarves, made their presence expressly known.
Typical for a match of its kind, the opening minutes were cagey.
However, an outside-of-the-boot strike from talismanic Axel Kryger was the first sign that something truly special was happening.
The ‘playing out from the back’ style of football that has characterised Pep’s Manchester City in which Haaland has played such a pivotal role has clearly not taken hold at the striker’s boyhood club. In fact, long-balls, crunch tackles and header tennis are still very much in vogue the OBOS-Ligaen.
Despite the visitors pulling back a goal after half-an-hour, unleashing another wave of thick yellow smoke, a sense of the inevitability of a winning goal hung heavy in the dense Norwegian air.
So when 19-year-old Sjur Jonassen, who had worked his way through Bryne’s youth grades under the watchful tutelage of coaches like Espen Undheim, fired a shot from point blank range into the Egersund net, the fairytale felt complete.
As the final whistle rang out around the Bryne Stadion, it was a miracle anyone actually heard it.
Amidst the onrush of fans who hurdled the hoardings to invade the pitch, horns from the amassed tractors in the tribune sounded around the ground and the first notes of Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ began to play over the PA system. Flags were flown and flares were lit.
For the first time in 21 years, Bryne FK were an Eliteserien club once more.
“Those fans are…special”
The short walk back to the train station gave me time to reflect as the sounds of celebration receded into the distance.
Walking around the pitch after full time, watching families rejoice and players mingle with fans, it felt as if I was at some private celebration which I had graciously been allowed witness. I was an outsider who had been let into the fold, without question or query, and embraced as one of Bryne’s own.
As is often the strange case with football, it was not the match that really sticks in my mind. Kryger’s goal was indeed magnificent and there were passages of play that truly showed why Bryne deserved promotion.
Yet, despite this, it was everything around the match – the people, the stadium, the party (which I’m reliably informed went on into the small hours) and the welcome – that made Bryne such a special place to be that on that grey Saturday in November.
