Bodo/Glimt: How ‘team from a small town up north’ are slaying Europe’s elite in first Champions League campaign

The year that Inter last won the Champions League, their historic treble season of 2009-10, Bodo/Glimt finished sixth in the Norwegian second division.

We could be here for quite a while, listing ways to measure the gulf in the respective sizes and international reputations of these two clubs, but that seems as good as any.

One of the most historic and storied football clubs to ever exist – 20-time Serie A champions and three-time European champions – were beaten on Tuesday, and beaten easily, by “a team from a small town up north”, as their head coach, Kjetil Knutsen, put it after the game.

Even that is an understatement: Bodo is so far north that it is located just above the Arctic Circle, home to a population of just over 40,000, all of whom could have fitted comfortably inside Inter’s San Siro stadium.

And this isn’t just a plucky upstart taking down a faded giant: Inter are 10 points clear at the top of Serie A and have reached the Champions League final in two of the last three seasons.

It also wasn’t a fluke, or a mugging that Bodo didn’t deserve: they hammered Inter in the first leg in Norway and kept them at arm’s length in the second. Despite having less possession (71 per cent to 29 per cent) and fewer shots (30 to seven) in Milan, they never looked in real danger.

This is Bodo’s first ever season in the Champions League, having come through the qualifiers to reach the league phase, but they also looked odds on to go rather quietly out at that stage: after six of their eight games, they were 32nd in the table, having not recorded a win. They had to beat Manchester City and then Atletico Madrid to stand a chance of even reaching these play-offs, which they somehow managed, but surely they wouldn’t be able to pull off another upset? As it turns out, they very much could.

“Can you believe it?” Knutsen said to TNT Sports after the game, his eyes wide with wonder at what they had achieved. “I can’t actually believe it. The players were amazing. I’m so proud.”

It’s also worth pointing out that Bodo are playing in their off-season: the Norwegian league finished in November, and while it does seem to suit them – the end of the domestic season coincided with their revival in Europe, and they haven’t lost since – it goes against conventional wisdom that a team can succeed without the rhythm of regular football.

“It sounds not true!” said Jens Petter Hauge, the winger who started at Bodo, but then left for Inter’s rivals Milan in 2020, before returning in 2024. “What we have done, it’s really, really… I’m so proud of the group. We’re all in this together and we believe so much in this project.”

For those unfamiliar with the project, you should know that Bodo’s success has not come because of some wealthy benefactor. This is more ‘organic’, broadly explained by Knutsen’s adherence to high-intensity, high-energy football and a recruitment strategy that not only finds players who fit that approach, but also identifies those with raw talent and an “X factor”, one single outstanding quality that everyone else might have overlooked because the player might be raw and unpolished.

“Each player we sign has an X (factor),” their former assistant coach Morten Kalvenes told The Athletic in 2022. “Does this player have the specific X that we are looking for? That we can build his development around, and find a position in the team where we can really use it?”

It worked then, when they were merely bloodying the noses of the big boys in European football’s two lesser competitions, the Europa League and the Conference League, but it’s still working at the highest level, and with some gusto.

They also employ a former fighter pilot called Bjorn Mannsverk as a mental coach, who uses his own experiences to train the players’ brains after Knutsen has done the same with their bodies.

One concept he brought from his previous life was ‘the ring’, which calls for the players to come together in a circle after they have conceded a goal to discuss what has gone wrong.

“When it comes to flight safety, it was really important that we immediately stood up and were honest about our mistakes,” he told Sky Sports last year. “It was not to blame each individual, but we understood that we needed to learn from it. You can make a mistake and survive, but the next one, you could do the same one and you could kill yourself. It was really important to share the mistakes, so you weren’t afraid of them. That was a must.

So, to summarise: they do things differently. But when you’re from where they’re from, and the size they are, you have to do things differently.

Is their win over Inter the biggest upset in the history of the Champions League knockout stages? It could well be. Other nominations might include Dynamo Kyiv beating Real Madrid in 1999 (but they had Andriy Shevchenko, a talismanic striker, and were managed by the legendary Valeriy Lobanovskiy); Deportivo La Coruna producing an astonishing comeback to beat Milan in 2003-04 (but they were Spanish champions a few years earlier); or maybe Monaco beating Manchester City in 2016-17 (but they had Kylian Mbappe, Radamel Falcao and Bernardo Silva, who all went on to become international superstars). This is different from all of those.

It’s certainly one of the more extraordinary runs of form the Champions League has ever seen. It is also, as the football data firm Opta pointed out, the first time since 1972 that a team from outside the top five European leagues – England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France – have won four consecutive games against sides from those nations in the Champions League, or its predecessor, the European Cup. That team in 1972 was Ajax, who went on to win the whole thing.

This isn’t the first time Bodo/Glimt have made an Italian giant look small: in 2021 they hammered Jose Mourinho’s Roma 6-1 in the Europa Conference League. It’s either Sporting or Manchester City next. You wouldn’t bet on it being their last miracle, either.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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