The most important game in Bodø/Glimt’s history is two hours away, and the stadium is empty. Journalists begin working at the press center, which occupies classrooms at a private school, “perhaps the only one in the state”, says an employee. It doesn’t seem like improvisation, but more a matter of logic, rationally using the space of a sports venue with 8,270 seats.
The school serves the club’s youth players, who are evidently not in class on the night the main team faces Sporting in the round of 16 of the Champions League. A delivery man arrives with a stack of pizzas for the journalists, courtesy of the club.
Fans? The majority remain in the city center. There’s no point rushing to the stadium if it’s a ten-minute walk away. It’s so close that it’s a luxury to take the bus. Of the four municipal lines, two pass through Apsmyra.
The army of yellow shirts forms little by little. A department store livens up the promenade with a loudspeaker and the soundtrack that livens up Glimt’s games, the northernmost team on the planet to reach the knockout stages of the Champions League.
“Playing the first one at home in our case is an advantage”, says Øystein Strømsnes, who organizes a warm-up at the Bådin factory, the local brewery. “When we build the result here, the opponents enter the second game under a lot of pressure. They still see us as underdogs.”
The brewery’s loading and unloading area has tables, music and a big screen to broadcast the game. “Most people go to the stadium,” says Strømsnes, but not before consuming 500 to 1,000 liters of beer.
Interestingly, the party doesn’t happen when Glimt plays outside. “The majority prefers to watch it at home. Not to mention that we would need to pay a lot more to have the game on the big screen”, says the promoter in reference to the fee that bars and restaurants pay to the TV rights holder. Again logic speaks stronger.
Glimt’s success is already having an impact on business. According to Andreas Myrvold, owner of Bådin, who, “like everyone else”, started brewing beer in his backyard in 2012, the team’s increasingly frequent forays abroad are taking the city and the beer to new markets. “In one of these, we were able to supply supermarkets in London”, celebrates Myrvold.
Across town, Ørjan Hansen, dressed in a yellow suit, prepares to go to Apsmyra. The technology company he works for, Frontline, encourages clothing resembling the team’s main uniform whenever it plays at home. “When the game is away, we stay in the office, as the bosses set up a pub for just that.”
The most important game in the history of Bodø/Glimt is half an hour away and the yellows are already filling the streets around the stadium. The inclement weather at the beginning of the week gave a respite and the ice trap only deserves its name because children climb a mountain of snow, accumulated in front of the main gate, to sing the songs that used to play in the city center. And that soon a fifth of the local population, within Apsmyra, will repeat it non-stop for 90 minutes.
The most important game in Bodø/Glimt’s history begins and all the simplicity attributed to the small club from northern Norway becomes folklore. Coach Kjetil Knutsen’s team is a block painted yellow that advances and retreats compactly. There is no attacker left up front, there is no defender who does not advance along with the rest of the team in attack.
And there is no move that the fans don’t celebrate. From a throw to a retreat for the goalkeeper, any movement deserves celebration and applause as long as it makes sense in the incessant search for the “mål”, the goal. And 3 came, as if that were logical. Again.
“This is Apsmyra”, shouts the small stadium in the final minutes, as if it were necessary to explain to the Portuguese what happened. Something that from 2028 will no longer exist. A new arena is under construction in the city. With 10 thousand seats. Logic.
“It’s a machine, it goes back and forth on the field and wins. We’re already used to it,” says the volunteer, whose name is unpronounceable enough to require registration. Glimt 3-0 Sporting, and the prospect that a new, most important game in history is just the next one on the calendar.
