Viking's two head coaches out to feast on Bayern Munich after wolfish gamble
Morten Jensen and Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim have spent more than a decade plotting an unlikely route from Norwegian football's margins to the top table of the European game. On Tuesday the joint head coaches will oversee Viking Stavanger's first home Champions League fixture, against Bayern Munich — the latest landmark in a story built on friendship, ambition and one audacious job interview.
"When we recruit players, we say something bold," Jensen said over lunch at Lyse Arena, shortly after the morning's training session had finished. "We always tell them: 'If you come to Viking and play for us, we're going to be the best coaches you ever had.'"
'We should take a team together one day'
The partnership was conceived long before it became official. "We were talking on the phone one evening, it must have been around 2012 or 2013," Aarsheim recalled, sitting across the table. "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 played almost 300 games for Viking during the 1990s and 2000s, cementing his status as a club legend 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 own attempts to forge a playing career at Viking were 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," Jensen said of Aarsheim, who is 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 said. "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."
The sheep, the wolves and a 120-page dossier
Their paths converged as 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 remembered. "And we said: 'What if we just come together? Would you fancy that?'"
Eirik Bjørnø, then 29 and newly promoted to Viking's chief executive role, recalls the pair turning up for that interview with 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 said. "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, quite plainly, were 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," Nevland said. "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."
Making the two-headed model work
Joint managers are vanishingly rare at the highest level. "It comes up all the time," Nevland said. "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, and had even been relegated in 2017. "In the first two years we learned a lot of things that we'll never do again," Jensen said. 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 the mountain-fringed port city in Norway's south-west.
"We've done it with a lot of people that care for each other," Bjørnø said. "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 said. "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."
A city falls back in love with its team
Stavanger, enriched hugely by the discovery of oil 200 miles offshore in 1969, can adore its football team again. "There had been something underlying that was missing for the people here," Jensen said. "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."
Brann first, then Bayern
Before Bayern's visit, however, comes a far more familiar kind of test. A video meeting earlier in the day focused on ways to exploit the high press of SK Brann, fierce rivals from up the coast whom Viking must visit for an awkward derby four days before facing the German giants.
"They killed us last year out there, remember that," Jensen told the squad, assembled in a television room next to the changing areas. "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 showed the players 10 short clips, selected by a six-strong staff during a coaches' meeting that began at 8.30am. All bets are off in these highly charged derbies. 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 said.
It was raining lightly by the time training started. Aarsheim clenched his fists on the touchline when one of the crossfield switches Viking had been practising finished with a tap-in. In the centre circle, Jensen told their forwards how to escape the Brann press. Later in the session, they watched side-by-side from seats in the stand. The tone was 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 said. "Yeah, we do that as a tool sometimes," Jensen continued. "But we don't believe in shouting and yelling."