Viking’s two head coaches on Champions League adventure: ‘For us, it’s the best team in the world’

“W hen we recruit players, we say something bold.” The morning’s training session at Lyse Arena has finished and, over lunch, Morten Jensen is explaining how he and Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim have propelled Viking Stavanger from mediocrity to an implausible place among Europe’s elite. “We always tell them: ‘If you come to Viking and play for us, we’re going to be the best coaches you ever had.’”

It is a story more than a decade in the making for Jensen and Aarsheim, who were appointed joint head coaches in November 2020. On Tuesday they will oversee the club’s first home Champions League game, against Bayern Munich, the latest step in a journey that has brought shared success in every sense.

“We were talking on the phone one evening, it must have been around 2012 or 2013,” Aarsheim says, sitting across the table and recalling one of countless conversations between close friends who had first met on the semi-professional scene. “I worked in a bank, he was in the oil and gas industry, we both had local teams part-time. And I remember we said: ‘Hey, we should take a team together one day.’”

They are outwardly an odd couple. Aarsheim had played almost 300 games for Viking during the 1990s and 2000s. He cemented club legend status as a classy midfielder and captain, combining modest league successes with a handful of short Uefa Cup runs before starting to coach at Randaberg. Jensen’s attempts to forge a playing career at Viking had been stalled by injury; he had played college soccer in the United States before landing back in Norway’s lower divisions and managing tiny Havørn.

“He’s always calm, collected, analytical,” says Jensen of Aarsheim, five years his senior at 51. “His personality is not to be stubborn, but find solutions, so he’s always interested and seeking to learn new things. He can explode and be aggressive when he needs to, but it’s at the right time and there needs to be a reason.”

It is Aarsheim’s style to weigh words deliberately, a dash of swearing added for effect. The rhetoric falls to Jensen. “What’s impressive with Morten is how big he thinks and that he dares to tell it out loud,” Aarsheim says. “He talks about winning the league, the Champions League, everything, while I’m thinking: ‘Let’s just get a good team first.’ But it transmits. We put dreams to the players and put that flame inside for them to dream bigger. We don’t want players simply to be satisfied to play here.”

Viking have become an outstanding side themselves under Aarsheim and Jensen. “I think we have shown many players, young and a little bit older, that we see potential and can develop them,” Jensen says.

Their paths had converged, becoming assistants to the previous Viking head coach, Bjarne Berntsen, before both were due to be interviewed for his replacement. “They gave us the tasks independently,” Jensen remembers. “And we said: ‘What if we just come together? Would you fancy that?’”

“I ’m sat there thinking: ‘Jesus, are we really going for this?’” remembers Eirik Bjørnø, who was 29 and newly promoted to Viking’s chief executive officer position, when Aarsheim and Jensen turned up for their interview. The pair had everything planned, down to a 120-page dossier on how their team should play. At Jensen’s instigation, they had also prepared a special slide.

“Suddenly there’s this photo of a bunch of sheep,” Bjørnø says. “They had a big spiel about all the sheep, everyone following the main sheep. Then up pop these two wolves on the photo.” The sheep were, quite plainly, Viking’s competitors. As Jensen tells it: “We said: ‘Are you going to hire these two badass wolves? We’re going to eat up all the sheep.’”

Bjørnø and Viking’s sporting director, the former Manchester United and Fulham striker Erik Nevland, were persuaded. “We were at a place in history where we needed to do something different to become better,” says Nevland, who played for Viking across three stints and scored twice in a Uefa Cup win against Chelsea. “It was kind of: ‘Let’s go for it.’ It just made sense. It was a bit of a gamble but we were in a position where we could do that.”

Joint managers are vanishingly rare at the highest level. “It comes up all the time,” Nevland says. “When I talk to sporting directors from other countries it’s not Viking any more, it’s: ‘Oh, you’re the club with two head coaches.’ It’s something different but it’s a dynamic thing; it’s not like we will necessarily do it this way whenever they move on. It’s special, but why change something that works?”

Their efforts bore spectacular fruit last year, beating a previously imperious Bodø/Glimt to the Eliteserien title. Viking had been a dominant force in Norway during the 1970s but had not been champions since 1991. They had even been relegated in 2017. “In the first two years we learned a lot of things that we’ll never do again,” says Jensen. Finishing 11th in 2022 brought a keener focus on developing local players; those who, like their managers and the similarly homespun Bjørnø‑Nevland double act, know what it entails to represent this mountain-fringed port city in Norway’s south-west.

“We’ve done it with a lot of people that care for each other,” Bjørnø says. “We’re trying to enjoy the ride together, and that makes us a lot stronger. When you have success together, it makes such a big difference when you actually feel that you’re friends.”

Nevland sees more benefits from such an intense local flavour. “It just gives us a feeling that everything we do means more,” he says. “The decisions you make are a little bit more thorough because it’s so important for the region and everyone you know. If it’s for my brother or my neighbour, you know all the decisions impact them in some kind of way.”

Stavanger, enriched hugely by the discovery of oil 200 miles off shore in 1969, can adore its football team again. “There had been something underlying that was missing for the people here,” Jensen says. “We wanted to play entertaining football and move our people. And maybe that’s the most fun part: it’s not the Champions League or the title win, it’s seeing how many kids are running around with Viking jerseys around the city and in the schools. A decade ago you would only see Manchester United and Liverpool shirts. That’s the one thing I am most proud of.”

A video meeting longer than 10 minutes would risk losing the players’ attention. This one earlier in the day has focused on ways to exploit the high press of SK Brann, fierce rivals from up the coast who Viking must visit for an awkward test four days before facing Bayern. “They killed us last year out there, remember that,” Jensen tells the squad, assembled in a television room next to the changing areas, shortly before it winds up. “We thought we were going to be there, but they ran over us, they challenged us, they had more energy.”

Aarsheim generally oversees Viking’s defensive drills; Jensen focuses on attack. They have shown Viking’s players 10 short clips, selected by a six-strong staff during a coaches’ meeting that started at 8.30am. All bets are off in these highly charged derbies against Brann. The focus is on how Viking can impose their style and minimise the effect of an intense, raucous environment. “We’re going to be better in the first duel, we’re going to be better than them in the second-ball phase, it’s going to be important,” Aarsheim says.

It is raining lightly by the time training starts. Aarsheim clenches his fists on the touchline when one of the crossfield switches Viking have been practising finishes with a tap-in. In the centre circle, Jensen is telling their forwards how to escape the Brann press. Later in the session, they watch side-by-side from seats in the stand.

The tone is businesslike, positive, collaborative. But who gets to play good or bad cop if necessary? “I think we mix it up and sometimes we plan it,” Aarsheim says. “Yeah, we do that as a tool sometimes,” Jensen continues. “But we don’t believe in shouting and yelling at them. It’s not going to make them better footballers. So we try to develop their football intelligence, but also the people. I think our strongest asset is in man-managing.”

They are often asked what happens if they disagree over, for example, a selection issue. “Then we’ll discuss, loudly sometimes, with the rest of our staff in the coaching room and will both have to defend our choices and reasoning to them,” Jensen says. “We’ll all discuss it until we have an agreement. But 99% of the time we are pretty agreed in terms of who to use in a particular game so it’s very seldom we waste time over that.”

Aarsheim takes over. “I can read Morten in one second. If he really wants something from his stomach then I sense it: ‘OK, let’s go with that.’ It’s never been a problem.”

The fit is instinctive and has become second nature to Viking’s team, too. “You can see the respect and loyalty they have to each other,” says Zlatko Tripic, the long‑serving captain, speaking under calmer skies after the session. “They give a lot of responsibility to the players and let us discuss things. If you ask everyone in the dressing room, there is huge respect for how they deal with things and have given us this comfort and confidence.”

It is a self-assuredness Viking hope can help them trouble Bayern. Nothing appears off limits in Norwegian football’s recent run of fairytales. “This should be the best period of their lives,” says Jensen of a squad that, 72 hours later, heed the warnings and win 2-0 in Bergen. “It’s our job to make them do the best they can,” Aarsheim says. “For us, Viking is Barcelona. The players have to understand that we see Viking as more than a club. In our heads, it’s the best team in the world.”