“I consider it like Noma, the restaurant,” he stated. “At first, no one thought foraging their very own meals would work. Nevertheless it did what it believed in, and after some time, folks began to understand it.”
Soccer finds this type of reverse-engineered clarification compelling, bordering on irresistible. It takes what seems, at first, to be an unsettlingly opaque type of success — an unheralded group instantly coalescing and crystallizing into one thing formidable — and transforms it right into a story, one with a starting, a center and an finish, one with an interior logical construction.
The attraction is clear: It means there’s a recipe that may be adopted, a technique that may be packaged, a end result that may be replicated. All you want is a group to institute the identical type of rules as Nordsjaelland — a concentrate on and a perception in youth; an emphasis on type as a vector for victory; a world outlook, as manifested within the collaboration with Proper to Dream, an academy with its roots in Ghana that purchased the membership six years in the past — and, in time, your nationwide group, too, can have a quarterfinal in opposition to the Czechs.
Laursen is aware of that’s magical considering. Whereas he sees Denmark’s renaissance as vindication for Nordsjaelland’s work — the membership, he stated, thinks of itself as a “college,” the most effective place for youngsters to finish their training in order that they’re able to exit into the world, an account that Damsgaard, now with the Italian membership Sampdoria, has endorsed — he doesn’t fake that it has modified Danish soccer.
Nordsjaelland, he stated, continues to be an outlier: youthful than most of its opponents, with a much less “tactical, bodily” type, much less more likely to place appreciable emphasis on set items. His hope is that its function in Denmark’s success can result in a “breakthrough within the Danish consciousness.” However he is aware of that Nordsjaelland couldn’t be a beneficiary if it was additionally the trigger.
The truth is way messier, much more complicated. There isn’t a one single issue behind Denmark’s rise, no order than might be simply retrofitted.