Originally published in Howler magazine

It was an unseasonably cold October night in the urban moonscape that is Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland. Typically, the subfreezing temperatures hold off until November, but the wind rolling in from Faxaflói Bay suggested the beginning of an even more brutal winter than usual. Nevertheless, a capacity crowd of 10,000 had shown up at Laugardalsvöllur, Iceland’s national stadium, a structure that is exposed to the elements from its openings behind either goal. Like most places in the capital city, which is a peninsula jutting into the North Sea, Laugardalsvöllur is a few minutes’ walk from the water, less if you’re traveling by freezing winter gale.



Despite the chill, the east stand was thrumming with energy thrown off by Tólfan (literally, “12”), the Iceland supporters group, 300 of whom had turned up to watch Strákarnir okkar (“Our Boys”) take on the Netherlands in a Euro 2016 qualifier. Joey, a Tólfan capo and a former drummer in several local rock bands, cycled through menacing beats as the crowd bellowed call-and-response numbers. The bleachers rattled with nervous excitement.

Iceland is a nation of 325,000 people situated on a spit of volcanic rock in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. In soccer terms, it’s little more than a travel nuisance for European giants like the Netherlands. The Oranje has reached three World Cup finals and invented the global paradigm – shifting strategy known as Total Football. Iceland had never qualified for a major tournament in 23 attempts. Dutch soccer history includes names such as Cruyff, Van Basten, Rijkaard, and Bergkamp. Iceland’s most famous player is Eidur Gudjohnsen, who played for Chelsea and Barcelona. In 1996, he and his father, Arnór, became the only father-son duo to play in the same international match, against Estonia.

But Iceland had gotten off to a surprisingly good start in Euro 2016 qualifying, recording 3–0 victories over both Turkey and Latvia, and were tied at the top of Group A with the Czech Republic. In the changing room below the stadium, Iceland co-managers Lars Lagerbäck and Heimir Hallgrímsson were impressing upon their players the need to stick to the same tactics that had helped achieve the earlier results: discipline, winning one-on-one battles, fluidity on the counterattack.

“It doesn’t matter who we play or what the score line is, we try to never change our priorities,” Hallgrímsson will tell me later. “We do not think of ourselves as a small country in these moments. We know we don’t have the individual players of Holland or Turkey. We win on unity and hard work and organization, and we have to be better than everyone else in these areas.”

On that night in October, they’d have to be better than a Dutch team that was virtually unchanged from the side that had finished third at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil just a few months earlier.

“If you meet somebody from Iceland, they’re almost delusional about their ability,” says Dadi Rafnsson, the director of youth coaching at Breidablik, an Icelandic Premier League side. “When [the national team] lines up against Holland, we’re not thinking, we’ll try not to lose so bad. We’re thinking, we’re going to beat them.”

Indeed, within minutes of kick-off, Iceland struck the first blow. On 10 minutes, an Iceland counterattack resulted in a foul just inside the Netherlands penalty area. Gylfi Sigurdsson, the Swansea City midfielder and Iceland’s lone player in the English Premier League, confidently converted the penalty. When the Dutch responded 15 minutes later, with Arjen Robben threading a ball onto the feet of Robin van Persie at the edge of the six-yard box, goalie Hannes Thor Halldórsson parried the shot out of play for a corner. Then, on the eve of half-time, after the Dutch failed to clear their lines following a corner kick, Sigurdsson pounced on a loose ball to volley it into the top of the net for a 2–0 lead.

In the second half, Iceland suffocated the Netherlands’ attack and remained a constant threat on the counter. When the final whistle sounded, signaling a 2–0 Iceland victory, the team, Tólfan, and the rest of the crowd celebrated the result as if it were the biggest in the nation’s history. Because it was.

Only 30 months earlier, Iceland had been No131 in Fifa’s world rankings. After the win over the Dutch, they found themselves at No28. (In December, when the country was 33rd, Howler contributor Brian Blickenstaff wrote in a story for Vice that Iceland had by far the most Fifa points per capita of any team ranked in the top 50; the U.S. was 50th by the same metric. Iceland peaked at No23 in July 2015, and at time of writing, the team had returned to 23rd.)

The island has only 21,508 registered soccer players, fewer than the state of Rhode Island. In Euro 2012 qualifying, Iceland won just one game out of eight, a 1–0 victory at home against Cyprus. But now, in Euro 2016 qualifying, the team led Group A with eight goals scored, none conceded, and nine points from three matches. Excellent form, and an expanded field for next summer’s event, meant that after 23 missed opportunities, entry to one of the sport’s biggest tournaments was finally, and utterly improbably, within reach.

But the team’s success didn’t come out of nowhere. It is less a variation on a biblical tale – David felling a series of Goliaths with a few well-placed free kicks – than an evolutionary adaptation. Iceland’s ascent is the culmination of a more-than-20-year project that has turned what had been little more than a seasonal hobby into a national passion.

Icelanders have long seen themselves, quite literally, as giants: Iceland has won more World’s Strongest Man medals (17) than any country other than the US. But in soccer, their team has never before been larger than a minnow. By the mid-1990s, the Icelandic football association, KSÍ, had endured nearly 50 years of futility, and its members had seen enough. They believed it was time to develop a national team that could compete with and challenge the best in the world.

For anyone who has ever been to Iceland, it seemed a patently ridiculous notion. Before you arrive there, you are told it is vast but sparse. But its vastness and sparseness still shock. The Ring Road that circles the island is pure landscape, interrupted every now and again by villages of four or five houses that appear more like mirages than communities. Even greater Reykjavík, where the majority of Icelanders live, is more of a big town than a small city, which makes sense when you realize that fewer people live there than in a place called Surprise, Arizona. And yet KSÍ believed it could turn this place into a world soccer power?

“You have to realize when you are a small island like we are, we are not a leading nation in creating new ideas in the game,” says Geir Thorsteinsson, KSÍ president since 2007 and a key member of the FA since the early ’90s. “You must go out and find new ideas and new methods and not stick to the old English style of playing.”

Up to the turn of the 21st century, only a few Icelanders had ventured abroad to play in Europe’s biggest leagues. Before Gudjohnsen, the most notable was Stuttgart legend Ásgeir “Sigi” Sigurvinsson, who led the Bundesliga side’s midfield from 1982 to 1990. The majority who started playing soccer eventually dropped the sport and pursued more stable lives in the fishing industry, Iceland’s biggest employer and the producer of its principal exports. KSÍ is made up largely of former soccer players, including Sigurvinsson, who remember all too well spending the interminable winters indoors, with limited access to outdoor gravel pitches where gale-force winds and impromptu hailstorms infringed upon the few hours of daylight. Stuck with the climate they were born with – at least until the polar ice caps melt – they realized that their first step toward competing with the soccer elite was to improve the sport’s infrastructure. And to improve the infrastructure, they believed, they needed a better climate. So they created one.

KSÍ mulled over plans for an indoor “football house” for years before it built its first, in 2000, in Keflavík, near the international airport. But the results were immediate. Players could now train year-round and benefit from the joint forces of consistency and repetition.

“It happened quicker than we hoped for, but after the first steps, after the first house, everyone saw the possibilities with such facilities,” Thorsteinsson says.

An indoor football house is just what it sounds like: a full-size soccer field roofed by a dome that protects the pitch from the elements. The houses in Iceland come in all sizes, many equipped with locker rooms, medical training facilities, concession stands, and seating for fans. Indeed, some can hold thousands of spectators. After the success in Keflavík, a veritable football housing boom ensued, made possible by an economic upturn unlike any that Iceland had ever experienced. The nation’s banks, up to this point quiet domestic lenders overseen by the government, became privatized and began to issue bonds to investors abroad. In no time, a giant bubble was created. The nation’s stock market shot up 900% between 2002 and 2008. By 2007, Iceland’s banking assets were worth seven times the country’s GDP. For KSÍ, this cash meant more money for more projects.

“It certainly gave a boost to the building of facilities, just like it did in every area of our society,” says Ómar Smárason, KSÍ’s marketing director. “There seemed to be endless resources of money flowing around, and municipalities had relatively easy access to loans.”

The bubble burst with the global financial crisis in 2008, and indoor stadium construction slowed but didn’t dry up. Youth registration remained steady, allowing the sport to withstand the economic collapse.

Johann Gudmundsson takes on Memphis Depay of Holland. Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

Today Iceland boasts 11 houses (seven full-size, four half-size), and once the four currently in development are complete, it will have more of these structures than any other country in the world. The initial project eventually expanded to include construction of more than 100 outdoor artificial-turf mini-pitches as well as 22 full-size undersoil-heated artificial pitches.

At the same time, KSÍ set about improving its level of coaching. Prior to the late 1990s, soccer instruction at the youth level in Iceland was mostly conducted by parents with limited knowledge of the game. But as players like Sigurvinsson returned from careers abroad, they brought with them the understanding that, at the highest levels of the sport, there was a direct line from experienced youth coaching to player success.

By 2006, prospective coaches could earn their Uefa A and B licenses – higher-tiered coaching badges required to coach national European competitions – within Iceland, rather than needing to travel abroad. Soon enough, qualified coaches were flooding the Icelandic club and academy system. By the latest count, there are 184 Uefa A-qualified coaches and 594 B-coaches in the nation. Put another way, for every 500 Icelanders, there is a Uefa-qualified soccer coach. The biggest clubs have B (and even A) coaches teaching kids as young as six. For comparison, England has around 5,000 Uefa B – qualified coaches for a country of 53 million, or one coach for every 10,000 people.

Nowhere are the improvements more evident than in Kópavogur, a suburb just outside Reykjavík that is home to Breidablik, one of the top teams in the Úrvalsdeild, Iceland’s top league. The club has completely adopted all of KSÍ’s infrastructure improvements and become, in the process, a monument to Iceland’s soccer revolution. Its football house, built in a wave of boom-time construction in 2002, is a cavernous, sturdy steel-beamed concrete warehouse with a full-size Polytan field. It can hold up to 2,000 spectators, though it still needs to fine-tune the acoustics of its PA system, which plays songs such as MC Hammer’s U Can’t Touch This at a volume that alternates between faint and deafening.

Since being promoted to the Úrvalsdeild in 2005, Breidablik has won one league title, in 2010, and two of the last three Icelandic League Cups. It has developed a reputation within the country as a production line for U-14 teams and older in players who achieve success beyond the country’s borders, including Swansea City midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, Real Sociedad forward Alfred Finnbogason, Charlton Athletic winger Jóhann Berg Gudmundsson, and Columbus Crew winger Kristinn Steindórsson. (US international Aron Jóhannsson, whose Icelandic parents raised him in the country, also spent a year at Breidablik.)

In March, I watched an Icelandic Cup game inside the football house with Rafnsson, the team’s director of youth coaching, who tells me that several teenagers on Breidablik’s current roster have recently had tryouts with European clubs. For all the improvements in Iceland’s youth program, there are limits to what its homegrown talents can accomplish in the country’s five-tiered league pyramid, which is entirely semiprofessional. To truly make a career of the sport, players must channel their seafaring ancestors and set sail for Europe. But even if any of them are picked up by a Continental side, success is far from assured. While more than 70 Icelanders ply their trade in Continental leagues, for every Gylfi Sigurdsson, there are 20 Icelandic players who enter youth systems across Europe at 16 or 17 only to return home due to lack of playing time.

“I would say we are world-class from six to 14, and even after that we have a lot of good things here,” says Rafnsson. “But we lack [resources] after the age of 15.”

The current national team pool is evidence of the gulf between Icelandic sides and Europe. Of the 23-man squad who faced the Czech Republic in a June 2015 qualifier, 21 play abroad. But all of the 23 – and the 40 or so who make up the national team pool – were brought up in the Icelandic club system.

‘Don’t tell anyone you’re a dentist!’

Now 20 years on from the KSÍ’s initial development efforts, the new system has produced its best generation of players. Rafnsson echoes KSÍ president Thorsteinsson when he credits the success to the construction of indoor pitches and better coaching, but he adds that those improvements would have meant little without duglegur. The word has no direct English translation. I ask him what it means.

“You know how in the United States, you say ‘good job’ or ‘good boy’?’” Rafnsson says. “In Iceland, we say, ‘Hard work! That was some hard work you did there.’”

No one in Icelandic soccer, it seems, has worked harder than Heimir Hallgrímsson. The national team co-manager is an outlier, a people person in a country not known for geniality. Since 2013, Hallgrímsson has coached the team along with former Swedish international Lars Lagerbäck, and he will go solo after Euro 2016, when the Swede has said he will retire. Lagerbäck brings tactical knowledge and professional experience to the national side. Hallgrímsson serves as the duo’s eyes and ears in Iceland, checking on up-and-coming prospects and building relationships within the nation’s soccer community.

Hallgrímsson grew up in the remote Westman Islands, an archipelago off the southern coast of Iceland that is home to 8 million puffins, 80 volcanoes, and 4,135 people. It was there that he honed his social skills in his main job as the village dentist.

“That is, in Iceland, probably my main job, and has been,” Hallgrímsson says with a laugh. “For a coach it sounds strange, I know. When I was doing my pro license in England, they said, ‘Don’t tell anyone you’re a dentist!’ But I never think that education can do you any harm. I’m proud of being a dentist.”

We are speaking on a mid-March morning via Skype. Hallgrímsson is in Heimaey, his hometown, where he is tending to his dental practice. He still works part-time but will stop when he becomes the sole Iceland manager. Behind him, through the bay windows that frame his living room, sits his quaint village shadowed by jutting volcanic formations. Much like his bucolic but implicitly dangerous surroundings (many of the volcanoes are active), Hallgrímsson is not what he first appears. The unassuming dentist is deeply competitive, his easygoing nature belying a fierce ambition.

Hallgrímsson rose through the ranks at the local Westman club, Íthróttabandalag Vestmannaeyja (often and mercifully shortened to ÍBV), where he started as a player in 1986. In the mid-2000s, as manager of the women’s team, he won two Icelandic Cups. Then he took over the men, whom he led to the Europa League qualifying stages in three consecutive seasons.

“My time there was really fun, but I thought we couldn’t do any better than that, so I stopped,” he says.

That’s when KSÍ came calling. Thorsteinsson first asked Hallgrímsson to assist Lagerbäck and, as the two coaches developed a relationship, eventually made them co-managers. Thorsteinsson says that while Hallgrímsson didn’t have the track record of more accomplished Icelandic coaches, he saw an “ambitious, organized, and clever guy.”

“Normally, [KSÍ] would have the coaches from the champions, and I think it’s good for the national team to have a coach that had to work hard for his results, not just one who had the best players,” Hallgrímsson says. “It relates to the national team. Usually we don’t have the ball more than the opponents – we have it less – so I think in that way it suits a coach from a small club to be the national team coach.”

‘This age group is really good, and probably one of the best Iceland has ever had.’ Photograph: Sigtryggur Johannsson/Reuters

Around this time, the current crop of Iceland’s internationals, the first group to benefit from the country’s biodome boom, was coming of age. This included Sigurdsson, Finnbogason, FC Nantes striker Kolbeinn Sigthórsson, and Cardiff City central midfielder Aron Einar Gunnarsson. In qualifying for the 2011 European U21 championship, the team thumped the defending champion, Germany, 4–1, and went on to make it into the tournament for the first time in the country’s history.

“This age group is really good, and probably one of the best Iceland has ever had,” Hallgrímsson says. “One went to play abroad. Then the next one went and tried to play better. They’ve pushed each other to get better and better, and they’ve also played a lot of games together, so when it comes to the national team, they know each other, how they run, how they react, so that’s a good thing.”

Perhaps the best evidence of this came during 2014 World Cup qualifying, against Switzerland at Bern’s Stade de Suisse. Iceland was in the middle of the group after six matches, and the Swiss were looking to lock up a place in Brazil. Iceland scored within three minutes, the 24-year-old Gudmundsson’s first international goal in a competitive match, but the Swiss regrouped and then rampaged, scoring four unanswered goals on either side of halftime. With the score 4–1, the game fit the presiding narrative: seasoned European nation walks over Iceland on its way to the World Cup.

Little by little, though, Iceland battled back. Striker Kolbeinn Sigthórsson netted in the 56th minute. Then Gudmundsson unleashed another screamer in the 68th to make it 4 – 3. In the first minute of added time, Gudmundsson completed the comeback – and his hat trick – with a spectacular curled strike.

“After that game, it was easy to say, no matter what the score was at half-time, no matter who we were playing: ‘Remember Switzerland,’” Hallgrímsson says. “The belief we got after that game was brilliant.”

Iceland finished qualifying unbeaten, drawing against old rivals Norway in the final match to finish second in the group and force a two-leg playoff with Croatia, with the winner booking a ticket to Brazil. More than 70% of the country tuned in to the second leg in Zagreb, where Iceland came within minutes of qualification but, ultimately, fell short. The result hardly mattered. The nation had gotten the soccer bug.

There exists in Iceland a kind of anti-hierarchy rarely seen in a capitalist society. It bleeds into every part of the culture. You find it by watching Björk, Iceland’s most famous export since Leif Eriksson, walk the streets of Reykjavík without incident or interruption. You find it in Jón Gnarr, the stand-up comedian who was elected mayor of Reykjavík, Iceland’s largest city. You find it in Heimir Hallgrímsson, the dentist who also happens to manage the national team.

And you find it at Ölver, the sports bar and prematch watering hole for Tólfan. There, a couple of hours before home matches kick off, Hallgrímsson visits for a quick pregame chat. He answers questions, talks tactics, and reveals the starting XI for the first time.

“It’s important to have somebody like Heimir,” says Kristinn “Kris” Jonsson, the Tólfan treasurer. “He and Lagerbäck have changed the relationship between the supporters and KSÍ. If we were working in no-man’s-land without the support he’s giving us, I don’t think we would have the same energy.”

Hallgrímsson says the support for the national team before Tólfan’s rise a few years back was “limited.” Jonsson is more blunt.

“The atmosphere at the stadium has gone from being a good place to listen to a needle drop to being a place where the atmosphere and support for the team is put at the forefront,” he says. “That is what Tólfan has done.”

Tucked into the concrete-slabbed Glæsibær retail park on the outskirts of Reykjavík proper, Ölver is spacious and well lit, with multiple viewing spaces dotted with TVs and a few scarves tacked to the wall. I arrive there, 45 minutes before the late-afternoon kickoff for the team’s Euro qualifier in Kazakhstan, and the place is bursting with energy. Tolfán is already in full voice—and well down the road of many, many Carlsbergs. (There are plenty of good Icelandic beers, including the ubiquitous Viking, but Carlsberg seems to be the beer of choice for ultras across Northern Europe.)

Nobody made the 3,200-mile trip to Astana, so the full group has gathered here for the match. Icelandic calls of “Skál!” or “Cheers!” volley off the support beams, and Joey, the former rock drummer, sets the tempo from the front of the viewing area. Burly men with bad haircuts, barrel guts, and big smiles clasp arms around neighboring shoulders and belt the Tólfan anthems.

Almost everyone in attendance is wearing the Tólfan jersey, a discounted version of the Iceland kit designed and distributed by the group’s leaders, with No12 on the back. Personalization is free. Many have chosen nicknames, or nicknames have been chosen for them. As the treasurer, Jonsson reluctantly goes by the alias MoneyPenny. The Old Fox, an ancient-looking man with a silver ponytail, attends each match with a sword, shield, and cowbell. One table features the King, the Don, and the Plan, none of whom would look out of place as a wildling general in Game of Thrones. There is Pizza Baker, Scar, Mr Cab Driver, Superman, and Benni Bongo, the last of whom bangs on a bongo drum throughout the match.

The game starts slowly as each team sniffs out its opponent. Eventually, Iceland seizes on a poor clearance. Eidur Gudjohnsen, universally beloved over a nearly 20-year career in the Icelandic side, is played in and manages to poke the ball past the keeper for a 1-0 lead. Ölver erupts. The crowd starts on Gudjohnsen’s song – to the tune of one-hit wonder Bruce Channel’s Hey! Baby – and doesn’t stop until 12 minutes later, when a perfect Sigurdsson free kick finds the head of midfielder Birkir Bjarnason to double Iceland’s advantage. Near the end of the match, a series of uninterrupted passes sparks a series of olés from the faithful.

Iceland wins the match 3–0, and after the final whistle, the Tolfán floods outside to the covered walkway for a post-game rendition of the national anthem. They fire flares into the night sky. Joey, who looks like a terrifying, wild-eyed hooligan but turns out to be the nicest guy of the bunch, takes me aside to both offer me a shot of whiskey and effuse over Tólfan’s most recent exploit, when they booked an entire passenger plane and made a 36-hour journey for the Euro qualifier in the Czech Republic.

“We have been to Norway, to Croatia, to Czech Republic,” he says. “If we get to France, I will quit my job before I miss it.”

They did get to France. And to think, all it’s taken is two decades, a complete infrastructure overhaul, an economic boom, hundreds of coaches, a dedicated supporters trust, and a village dentist.