Iceland’s Plucky Soccer Team Is a Mystery to No One – Wall Street Journal

MARSEILLE, France—Ever since Birkir Bjarnason scored a miracle goal Tuesday that allowed Iceland to pull off a shocking 1-1 draw against Portugal in soccer’s European Championships, Steiney Skuladottir, a 26-year-old actress, has been imploring her roommate to reach out to the player.

It’s not just that her roommate might have a crush on the handsome blond-haired midfielder: They actually know each other. They dated in middle school.

“They never broke up properly,” Ms. Skuladottir said in an interview from Reykjavik. “Her current boyfriend understands it perfectly. They have to be together.”

Players on most national soccer teams in Europe are larger-than-life celebrities the public only comes to know through TV interviews and gossip columns. In Iceland, an island populated by 330,000 people, things are a bit different.

Ms. Skuladottir said she has plenty of friends who have gone out with players on the team. She and Iceland’s soccer heroes share dozens of mutual friends on Facebook. “Iceland is tiny,” she said. “Very tiny and we are all basically cousins.”

“If five people sit at a bar, at least one of them knows someone in the national football team,” said Una Hildardóttir, a 24-year-old student from Reykjavik. “And trust me, they will mention it.”

Iceland has never been a powerhouse on the international sporting stage. It has produced a few good soccer players who have built respectable careers around Europe, but until this year, the national team had never played at the European Championships or a World Cup.

Iceland has a grand total of four Olympic medals—none of them came from a Winter Games. The highlight was a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in team handball.

“If you don’t know someone in the national football team,” Ms. Hildardóttir said, “you definitely know someone in the national handball team.”

The day after the game, under the headline “Heroes,” one Reykjavik newspaper called them “Our boys” on the front page.

At Euro 2016 in France, Iceland has already broken one record: Its 23-man squad represents 0.007% of the country’s population. And the 8,000 fans who went to Saint-Etienne for the Portugal game, are “the greatest number of Icelanders ever to attend a single event in another country,” according to the country’s president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson.

Just hours after attending the match against Portugal, President Grimsson appeared at a sustainable energy conference in Brussels, where he told his own story about the team.

During Iceland’s fat financial years of the early 2000s, when hard currency was cheap and a hot dog cost $10, the country invested heavily in sporting infrastructure, building environmentally-friendly indoor halls around the country at a cost of between $5 million and $25 million each, which allowed a generation of youngsters to play soccer year-round.

“Without the clean energy-heated indoor football grounds, Iceland would not have succeeded against Portugal,” President Grímsson said.

Fifteen years ago, soccer wasn’t even a full-time sport in Iceland. Homegrown coaches with qualifications from UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, were about as rare in Iceland as camels.

Following an overhaul of the federation’s educational programs in the early 2000s, a funny thing happened: Coaching degrees became something of a hobby.

People signed up for courses so they could claim a piece of Icelandic soccer for themselves. And from 2002 to 2009, the number of coaches attending courses more than tripled.

Today, the boast in Iceland is that it has more UEFA-licensed coaches per capita than England does. And as a result, everyone in Iceland seems to be a soccer coach on the side—except for the national team’s co-head coach, Heimir Hallgrimsson who, in his spare time, is a practicing dentist.

“Maybe people think that to be a coach you have to have been a player, but everybody can go and get a coach degree,” said Arnar Bill Gunnarsson, the Icelandic soccer federation’s director of education.

The style of soccer Iceland’s coaches are teaching hasn’t impressed everyone.

After Tuesday’s draw, Portugal and Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet, who has scored more goals in his career than the Icelandic national team has scored in its history, slammed the Iceland team for its celebration, and for its playing style, in which it rarely touches the ball.

“I thought they had won the Euro cup, the way they celebrated,” Mr. Ronaldo said after the game. “When they don’t try to play, they just defend, defend, defend and play in counterattack. This is, in my opinion, a small mentality. This is why they’re not going to do [anything] in the Euro cup.”

The backlash was swift. One Icelandic player called him a “sore loser” and messages of support poured into the federation, according to team official Omar Smarason. Even the Icelandic president got in his diplomatic shot.

“I think we should be grateful for him for having given Iceland that extra dimension of publicity,” he said.

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an English-language culture magazine called the Reykjavik Grapevine did its part to spread the gospel of Icelandic soccer in the most Icelandic way it knew how—by turning the game into a Norse saga. In its ice-and-brimstone running commentary, the Portuguese players became “wilting manboys” and Iceland’s own morphed into Viking warriors, sealing their place in the hall of heroes.

“And now we smite them into tiny pieces of dust and destroy their goal with a ball set on fire by our volcanic thunder,” the Grapevine wrote midgame.

In the 48 hours that followed, the Grapevine’s Twitter account picked up more than 7,000 followers.

According to the Icelandic soccer federation, the team is expecting 10,000 traveling fans here in the south of France for its next game against Hungary and 12,000 for a match against Austria in Saint-Denis next week.

“We are everybody’s and anybody’s favorite second team now,” Mr. Smarason said.