One of the A-League and Australia’s most recent football exports, Alex Gersbach, joined reigning Norwegian champions and league leaders Rosenborg BK earlier this year.
Not only is he now among the ranks of players moving from the A-League to Europe, he also joins a club that has so far been on its way to regaining the domination of a past era from which valuable lessons can be drawn for many throughout football.
2016 will mark 20 years since the greatest night in the history of Rosenborg BK. The club from Trondheim with 23 League titles to its credit from 1967 to 2015, far and away the most successful club in Norway, sent shockwaves throughout Europe when they defeated AC Milan 2-1 at the San Siro to qualify for the quarter-finals of the Champions League for the first time, courtesy of goals from Harald Brattbakk and Vegard Heggem. They became the first Norwegian club to do so, while they were utterly dominant domestically in winning 13 Tippeligaen titles from 1992 to 2004 – one of the longest runs in the history of football. In retrospect, this can be seen as a Golden Age for the Norwegian game, with the national team under Egil Olsen also qualifying for two consecutive World Cups.
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The story of Rosenborg BK, its rise to dominance, successes in Europe and the relative decline in its fortunes before the present period, almost sounds like a microcosm of Norwegian, and to an extent Scandinavian, football in general. A particular fact of football in the Nordic countries – Sweden, Denmark and Norway, and to varying degrees also Iceland and Finland – is that the region was slower than most to embrace fulltime professionalism, and thus these countries also became prolific exporters of players earlier than others. There is also the fact that fans in these countries divided their attention and loyalties between local and overseas, particularly English, competitions. Sweden had been the most successful at international level, and also provided Scandinavia’s only European Cup finalists (Malmö FF in 1979) and UEFA Cup winners (IFK Göteborg in 1982 and 1987). Denmark and Norway, on the other hand, had their occasional moments at both club and international level – for instance, there was Norway’s legendary win over England in 1981 – but before the 1980s further success remained elusive.
That began to change when Scandinavia gradually embraced the reality of professionalism and modernisation of football structures, with the domestic leagues in Denmark and Norway going fully professional by the 1990s. At Rosenborg, the return of Nils Arne Eggen as coach in 1988 was to begin their period of transformation and unprecedented domination over the domestic game. Eggen had coached Rosenborg with varying success before, and he would remain in charge (save for a one-year sabbatical in 1998) until 2002. Whereas the success of the national team under Egil Olsen was built around a system that was renown and derided for its use of the long ball, Eggen had his Rosenborg teams playing to a very different style, utilising a fluid 4-3-3 formation and attacking football, with an emphasis on local talent and cherry-picking Norway’s best domestic players.
The club always had its share of quality – in the 60s and 70s it was striker Odd Iversen (father of Steffen Iversen), in the 80s it was goalkeeper Ola By Rise and playmaker Sverre Brandhaug. Mainstays during Rosenborg’s 90s dominance included Bent Skammelsrud, Roar Strand, Mini Jakobsen, Karl-Petter Løken, Erik Hoftun and Bjørn Otto Bragstad. Players like Harald Brattbakk, Steffen Iversen, Oyvind Leonhardsen, Stig Inge Bjørnebye and Vegard Heggem among others left to try their luck abroad, but were always replaced with the cream of domestic talent. That was further enabled by lucrative Champions’ League appearances, with Rosenborg continuously appearing in the group stage in an era when the competition was being expanded.
In Europe, Rosenborg not only claimed the scalp of AC Milan, they also beat Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund. Much like the national team under Olsen (who beat Brazil twice), there was an unbelievable confidence at the club that they could take on and live with the best teams in Europe, which they did. They were not the only Norwegian side to get good results on the continent – SK Brann and Vålerenga both reached the quarter-finals of the now defunct Cup-Winners’ Cup, while in 2002 Viking eliminated Claudio Ranieri’s Chelsea from the UEFA Cup. This demonstrated that Norwegian club football, while also a nursery for exporting players, had attained a decent standard in its own right and Norway’s UEFA ranking even allowed two Champions’ League spots for a time.
Look out for part two of our look at Rosenborg later tonight on Outside90.
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