How Norway are setting themselves up for a brighter future

With the senior team set to have a shot at reaching the Euro 2025 semi-finals on Wednesday night, plenty of work is going on behind the scenes to ensure it's not a one-off...

Norway’s current era of superstars could soon be followed by another…Image: Paul Terry / Sportimage

Norway may have managed to negotiate a major tournament group stage with minimal issues for the first time in too long for a nation which boasts the likes of Caroline Graham Hansen, Ada Hegerberg and more, but thinks might well be set up for a positive future too.

If the sight of young SK Brann superstar Signe Gaupset lighting up the 2025 European Championships when brought into the team for their final game against Iceland didn’t whet the collective appetite, the fact there are potentially more Gaupset’s on the way certainly should.

Earlier in the year, Norway’s Under 17s reached the final of the Under 17s European Championships for the first time, with future superstar Marie Preus the leading scorer in the competition, scoring a hat-trick in the first match, following that up with goals in both the semi-final and final itself.

At Under 23s level, the team finished second in a competitive league with some of the top nations in Europe in a round-robin of fixtures over the past 12 months, and the Under 23s head coach, Per Inge Jacobsen, who is working with the senior team during the current senior tournament, sees no reason why Norway doesn’t have a bright future ahead, and points to the new Under 23s set up as critical for player development.

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“To have a level between the youth teams and the senior national teams, to monitor players who are closest to the first team, is so important,” says Jacobsen. “It’s been a little bit different from camp to camp, sometimes we have had players who have come back from injury and in some cases falling out of the first team, some come up from the younger age groups.”

Indeed, when Norway’s Under 23s beat Spain’s equivalent 4-0 in February 2024, then just turned 28-year-old forward Synne Jensen scored twice, while others such as Synne Skinnes Hansen and Emilie Woldvik have also featured as overage players.

“It’s important for us to help these players in the training group to get to a higher level, so all the players have the chance to be in the best possible position or the senior team.

“We work very closely with the clubs; I think that’s important. One, of course we want to keep developing players, but we also want to make sure they don’t get injured, that way they would lose years of development.”