How a little-known team from Norway is slaying Europe’s football elite

[MILAN] The year that Inter Milan last won the Champions League, in the 2009/10 season, Bodo/Glimt finished sixth in the second division of Norway’s football league.

The gulf in the respective sizes and international reputations of these two clubs is wide.

But Inter, one of the most storied clubs ever to exist – 20-time Serie A champions and three-time European champions – were beaten on Tuesday (Feb 24) in the knockout playoffs of the Champions League, and beaten easily, by “a team from a small town up north”, as Bodo/Glimt’s head coach Kjetil Knutsen put it after the match.

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

This was not just a plucky upstart taking down a faded giant: Inter is 10 points clear at the top of Serie A and has reached the Champions League final in two of the past three seasons.

It also was not a fluke, or a mugging that Bodo did not deserve. The team hammered Inter in the first leg of the matchup in Norway and kept it at arm’s length in the second. Despite producing less possession (71 per cent to 29 per cent) and fewer shots (30 to seven) in Milan, Bodo never looked in real danger.

This is Bodo’s first season in the Champions League, having come through the qualifiers to reach the league phase, but it also looked likely to go out rather quietly at that stage: After six of its eight games, it stood at 32nd in the standings, having not recorded a win.

It had to beat Manchester City and then Atletico Madrid to stand a chance of even reaching these playoffs, which it somehow managed, but surely the Norwegian team would not be able to pull off another upset? As it turns out, it very much could.

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

SEE ALSO

Cristiano Ronaldo buys a 25% stake in Spanish football club Almería

It is also worth pointing out that Bodo is playing in its offseason: The Norwegian league finished in November, and while the end of the domestic season coincided with the team’s revival in Europe, and it has not lost since, it goes against conventional wisdom that a team can succeed without the rhythm of regular football matches.

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

Effective strategy

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.

This strategy has worked in recent years, when the team was merely bloodying the noses of the big boys in European football’s two lesser competitions, the Europa League and the Conference League, and it is still working at the highest level, and with some gusto.

Is this 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; Deportivo La Coruna producing an astonishing comeback to beat Milan in 2003-04; or maybe Monaco beating Manchester City in 2016-17. Bodo’s achievement is different from all of those.

It is certainly one of the more extraordinary runs of form the Champions League has ever seen. It is also, as the 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 – has won four consecutive games against teams from those nations in the Champions League or its predecessor, the European Cup. That team in 1972 was Ajax Amsterdam, which went on to win the whole thing.

This is not the first time Bodo/Glimt has made an Italian giant look small: In 2021, it hammered Jose Mourinho’s Roma 6-1 in the Europa Conference League.

Up next for the Norwegian club is Sporting Lisbon from Portugal. You would not bet on it being their last miracle, either. NYTIMES