Scale is essential to the story of Iceland. This summer, at the European Championship in France, Iceland will be the smallest country at the tournament in terms of population. With a total population of around 330,000, it is thought to be the smallest country to have made it to a major football final.
According to Uefa, by January this year, nearly 27,000 Icelandic fans had applied for tickets to their side's games in Group F, which also includes Portugal, Austria and Hungary. That, a simple calculator will inform you, is approximately 8 per cent of the entire population of the country. Their co-manager Heimir Hallgrimsson reckons that ultimately, as much as 20 per cent of Iceland could turn up in France to support the national team when the tournament gets underway on June 10.
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In their much acclaimed book Soccernomics, authors Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski conduct a survey to find the European country that loves football most. Based on research of varying degrees of credibility, and three categories – how many play, how many go to stadiums and how many watch on TV – they realised results were skewed towards smaller sized countries.
For instance, Fifa research in 2006 estimated that 11 per cent of all Icelanders played football, and 7 per cent were registered with clubs. Using figures collected by a website, they also calculated that in 2013 around 4 per cent of the entire population of Iceland attended a football match in the top division. There are five divisions and the figure was down to 3.3 per cent in 2014. In another Fifa report of TV viewing figures for the 2010 World Cup, they found that on average 18.8 per cent of Iceland had watched live games.
Put together, then, Kuper and Szymanski concluded, Iceland was “Europe’s kookiest nation about football”.
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In January this year, one day before Iceland's friendly with the UAE in Dubai, Hallgrimsson, speaking exclusively to The National, all but foretold the 2-1 defeat his side would eventually suffer: "These opponents may be a little bit too tough for us right now."
There was no fatalism in his assessments, just a no-nonsense rational analysis of the factors likely to play against his side – the temperature, the fact his best players were not available, and that the second-string squad had not played since the Scandinavian leagues had ended between September and November.
It was so rational that it evoked the warning the writer and poet WH Auden once gave to a friend in his Letters from Iceland travelogue: "I think that, in the long run, the Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me."
It is this trait that stands out most in Iceland’s remarkable footballing rise. They have risen over a hundred spots in the Fifa rankings in the past five years and two years ago were on the brink of qualification for the World Cup.
They are now into Euro 2016 after an immense qualification in which this tiny, volcanic island beat Netherlands twice, and Czech Republic and Turkey once each on their way. The wins over Netherlands were huge moments in their history though you might not sense it from Hallgrimsson's reaction.
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“How did I feel?” he answered phlegmatically when asked after the Reykjavik encounter which Iceland won 2-0, and then paused. “Maybe strange to say but me and Lars [Lagerback, the veteran Swede who is co-manager of the side], we believe in these guys. Of course it was a big result because Holland did so well in the World Cup.”
The away win in Amsterdam nearly a year later – the first defeat Netherlands had suffered at home in a Euro qualifier in over half a century – Hallgrimsson sounded almost apologetic about. There were “all kinds of things that fell in our way,” he rationalised and downplayed: Iceland travelled “more or less really satisfied with a draw”.
In a similar vein, Iceland’s rise is merely a rational response to their small size and a climate which confines sporting activities indoors most of the year; their football league season runs from May to September and is the shortest in the world.
In 2000, having thought about the idea for years, the Iceland Football Aassociation (KSI) got together with local authorities and finally built its first indoor football house, with a full-sized pitch protected from the weather by a dome.
That was in Keflavik, a small town in the south-west. Since then, boosted by an economic boom (and buffered eventually by a subsequent bust in 2008) they have built six more full-sized indoor pitches, 12 half-size indoor pitches, 23 artificial pitches outdoors and over 150 artificial mini-pitches at schools around the country.
At around the same time, the KSI generated a coaching revolution. Sigurdur Ragnar Eyjolfsson, a former forward who played in England and Belgium, started working as a head of education at KSI in 2002, and instituted a Uefa coaching licence system in clubs. That allowed hundreds of amateurs to become qualified coaches, giving children everywhere access to highly developed coaching. Another recourse to scale: there are now nearly 700 Uefa A or B-qualified coaches in the country, or around 0.2 per cent of the entire population.
In combination these developments have turned Iceland football around. “It has just slowly evolved,” Hallgrimsson said. “The coaching education is fantastic and that combined with improved training facilities, that has of course had the effect that more kids are better than before both technically and we can train, develop the players 12 months a year.
“Before it was only during the summer so we had to do something different in the winter time. We did all the indoor sports in winter: gymnastics, basketball, handball. Normally the Icelandic player is good in motor skills – he has been doing a lot of sports through the week from five years old until 16-17. The emphasis is from school level.
“I think the difference in Iceland is that it is an amateur country, it doesn’t matter where you live. You don’t need to go to the best club to get the best coaching. The FA has done a marvellous thing in educating the coaches everywhere. That’s a major, major benefit – it doesn’t matter where you live, it’s all amateur clubs and there’s not such a big difference between standards of coaching of the champions and the first division.”
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Is this success sustainable? Despite the long-term development, it might still be tempting to see this Iceland side as a golden generation of exceptionally gifted players who have developed together under a recently enlightened system.
Do not give in to that temptation. Their Under 21 side is also currently among the best in Europe. And the benefits of this infrastructural evolution are being seen in other team sports, including basketball and handball.
That, as Hallgrimsson pointed out, is in itself unusual that as small a country as Iceland should be as proficient at team sports as it currently is: the trend for such countries is to produce a glut of individual talent.
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So clearly this goes deeper. “I hope so, I hope so,” is as much caution Hallgrimmson would throw at the wind. That might be because he is aware the continuing success of Icelandic football could, in fact, become a hindrance. The league is semi-professional so should it aspire to any greater status, it could disturb the ecosystem in which it currently operates.
“You know how football is. If we get richer, the teams get richer and they will start getting players from abroad. So what happens then our younger players won’t get the senior experience as early as they do today.
“If a good player is 19 he is playing senior football. If he is good enough he will play. There are younger players who have played at the top here. They get experience at a young age. That is a real advantage.”
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Hallgrimsson is a bit of a story himself. He is actually a qualified dentist who has been coaching in one capacity or another since he was 17. He was a late developer physically, which is what pushed him into coaching. He then took up a succession of positions with youth teams and in women’s football before he got the national job.
That was still quite a leap and it helped that initially he joined Lagerback as an assistant. Two years later, he stepped up as a co-manager, which is an unusual arrangement at any level but somehow, in the words and deeds of Iceland, it makes perfect sense, as if it was the natural order.
“l learnt a lot from him because like I said its an amateur league and an amateur country so the next step was learning slowly,” Hallgrimmson said.
Co-managing “has been easy because since the day we started working together four years ago, even though I was assistant, Lars always made me feel like we took decisions together. He always made me feel like we were joint managers. So the next step wasn’t a big difference.
“What I think is most important is we allow each other to shine. Not trying to talk while the other is talking. We switch meetings so I’m not talking while he is and vice versa. We do that for trainings too. We’re not trying to do everything together but we plan it together before we go so it’s easy if you talk together and like each other.”
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Hallgrimmsson takes sole charge after the Euros, though there is such order about the team and the entire Icelandic football project that the change is unlikely to faze either the players or the coach. A “formula” has been found that works. Sure there may be a bit more work, but not much in the way the team prepares and plays will change.
That style is precisely what you might expect of a team of Iceland’s profile: small pool of players, not many operating at the highest echelons of European football but physically competitive and improving technically all the time.
To an international side, they bring the tightly knit ethos of a club side, having grown up and developed together. They run for each other, they fight for each other and if someone is in trouble, there is always another close to him.
They do not mind long spells without the ball, or that other teams will pass the ball more and with greater accuracy. They do not mind that other teams will have more gifted individuals, or with greater experience of the big stage.
They know they have to be better organised defensively, that they have to work that much harder. They do not fret at playing two strikers upfront because it is an unfashionable way of approaching modern football. They know they need as many players upfront when they do attack so as to maximise their chances of scoring: it is simply a rational response.
Therefore, the group they find themselves in is not the worst place to be. As they were among the lowest seeds, any group was going to be tough even in this expanded tournament.
“We fancy our chances against anyone,” Hallgrimmson said. “We’ve shown that through the last two [qualifying] competitions, that if we prepare well, if we are ready, a little bit lucky with players and everyone is fit, we can hurt anyone, we can win. We’re not afraid. We know there’s not going to be a single easy game.”
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