Good Morning ☀️,

It’s Lucas here, your Chief Predictions Officer at What Are the Odds?

Today, we look at what makes the current Norway squad so great. Spoiler alert — it’s not what some of the lazier journalists in the sports media think it is. But more on that soon.

First, here’s what’s ahead.

What’s ahead in today’s edition of What Are the Odds?:

• Are Norway’s coddled kids the reason for its success? 👶

• This weekend’s complete match schedule. 🗓️

• Our Argentina vs Switzerland prediction. ✅

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This weekend, we’ve got 2 matches coming up. (Note: all dates and times are in Eastern Time)

🇳🇴 Norway vs. England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

• Date: Saturday 11 July; 17:00 (ET)

• Venue: Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens
  

🇦🇷 Argentina vs. Switzerland 🇨🇭

• Date: Saturday 11 July; 21:00 (ET)

• Venue: Arrowhead Stadium, Kansas City

Want to get the best odds on this match?

Another day, another lazy journalist at the Guardian. And while yesterday’s story was (maybe…) excusable laziness (after all, who else besides us in the sports news media’s out there pulling up Part 121 narrowbody charter fleet inventories…?), today’s example of lazy journalism is just plain… wrong.

Anyway, before we get ahead of ourselves, here’s the headline:

No league tables, no trophies: how Norway made sport fun for kids – and built a football team that beat Brazil

Now, to be fair, it’s a lovely piece in a quaint, heartwarming way. The argument basically says that because Norway’s sports federation banned league tables/results in kids sports while also encouraging those kids to be multi-sport, Norway thereby produced a national team that was capable of knocking out Brazil.

Or, in simpler terms, the argument is basically, “coddle the kids and those kids will beat Brazil.”

Cute story, right?

The only problem is, when you actually look into it — when you look at the stats and the history — Norway’s system suddenly doesn’t look that great.

So let’s start with the history bit, since this is what the entire Guardian argument rests on.

First, the background on the system. Norway’s children’s rights in sports were first adopted in 1987. Yes, there was a 2007 update (which we’ll touch on later). But the basic rights and the actual substance here — the multi-sports; the “don’t make the kids take this sports stuff too seriously” — dates back to 1987.

Now look at what Norway did with it. Norway has only qualified for four World Cups ever: 1938, 1994, 1998, and 2026. One of those came before the rules even existed. And the other two came before national team players had passed through the new system — if you work out who was actually raised under the 1987 version, a child would have to have been born around 1980 or later to have even partially “benefited” from it in any meaningful way.

In other words, the first players who passed through the 1987 system weren’t hitting their prime until at least the late ‘90s (and even they were the outliers — the late-90s squad was primarily born in the late sixties through mid seventies).

So now let’s ask ourselves — What did Norway actually achieve in that post-late-90s window?

Well, after Euro 2000, they failed to qualify for twelve consecutive major tournaments, right through to 2025. No World Cups. No Euros. Nothing.

In other words, this system of coddled, multi-sport children the Guardian wants to credit with Norway’s success… well, they’re arguably some of the worst Norway’s ever had insofar as soccer’s concerned.

Now, to be totally fair, the 1987 system isn’t exactly the same as what’s currently in place. There was a 2007 revision (a revision which Haaland was six years old for). So there’s an argument to be made that the new system has actually produced something special — a “special” team that qualified for the World Cup and went on to beat Brazil.

But even that claim is a bit… misleading.

Let’s start with the obvious part — the part where beating Brazil is presented as somehow being special. That’s totally misleading given the history.

As it turns out, Norway is actually undefeated against Brazil. Read that again. Norway is undefeated against Brazil. So this wasn’t some one-off event. In fact, Norway had already beaten Brazil once before in a World Cup at the 1998 edition — the last World Cup Norway qualified for before the coddled generations took over. And that win was against a Brazilian side that was arguably at its peak (they were champions in ‘94 and ‘02, and were runners-up in 98); a Brazilian side packed with names like Ronaldo, Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos. So in a way, that feat was more impressive than today’s victory.

And yeah, Norway pulled off that victory with Egil Olsen’s long-ball team — Tore André Flo, Henning Berg, Ole Gunnar Solskjær. Men who were mostly born in the late sixties to early seventies. In fact, the youngest player on that squad was John Carew (born 1979), followed by Espen Baardsen (1977), then Steffen Iversen (1976). And between them, they had 2 matches played and 2 substitutions. In other words, this squad was pretty much 100% raised outside the framework the Guardian wants to credit with creating some miraculous Brazil-beating machine.

So that leads us to the next question — what’s the real explanation behind Norway’s miracle World Cup performance?

Anyone have any guesses? (No prizes for guessing — it’s kinda obvious.)

Yep, that’s right — Norway’s success is, in large part, riding on the shoulders of one very special 6’4” giant.

Erling Haaland.

Even before the actual World Cup campaign kicked off, Haaland was already at the center of Norway’s success — his 16 goals in eight qualifiers equaled Lewandowski’s European record. But let’s not spend too long on the qualifiers, because that’s not the campaign where Norway started getting all this attention. So instead, let’s just look at the current World Cup campaign.

This where it gets hard to argue the Norway system is in any way special. Norway has scored 11 goals across five matches (their tally shows 12, but one of those was an own goal by Iraq’s Hussein). And seven of those (64%) were scored by Haaland. The only other goals have come from Thelo Aasgaard, Leo Østigård, Marcus Holmgren Pedersen, and Antonio Nusa, who each have a single goal to their names. Meanwhile, the rest of the squad’s contribution is assists, led by Andreas Schjelderup and Martin Ødegaard with three, and Patrick Berg with two.

In other words, Norway’s current team is little more than an elaborate delivery mechanism whose only real job is to get the ball to Haaland (and stop the other team from scoring… which they’re not really doing a good job of… but we’ll get to that soon). And, to be fair, they’ve done a decent job on the delivery gig. But delivering the ball is no good if there’s no one to finish, and so the question remains — without Haaland, who’d actually be finishing? Sure, maybe a few other names might have stepped up and contributed a little more. But whether their combined efforts would’ve matched Haaland’s output is doubtful.

And let’s not forget that the goals scored tally tends to flatter Norway quite a bit. With nine conceded across five matches (and concessions in every single game they’ve played), they’re conceding at nearly two goals a game, which isn’t exactly an elite defense. And that tends to indicate Norway is very much built around attacking firepower more than anything else — attacking firepower which is very much reliant on a key man, who just so happens to be the exception rather than the rule.

But still, maybe there’s still a case to be made here that Norway’s system at least contributed something to the squad in general, and Haaland in particular. After all, in what’s probably the most evocative part of the whole article, the Guardian waxes lyrical about the beauty of multi-sport childhoods, holding up Haaland’s infamous leap (which supposedly carries something from handball) and his power (which supposedly carries something from cross-country skiing) as examples.

And to be fair to the Guardian here, they do at least present a couple of control cases — Ørjan Nyland, and Alexander Sørloth — to show these traits showing up in other players. But let’s take a moment to consider what, exactly, these traits are actually contributing.

Let’s start with Nyland — Norway’s goalie — since the Guardian seems to want to build a small romance around him. The piece tells the heroic tale of how he saved a penalty using a skier’s spring whilst clawing away a deflection like a handball player — fine images that clearly show how Norway’s multi-sports allowance has developed wunderkids… right?

But let’s be serious here — he’s also had to pick up the ball out of his own net nine times in five games. So really, just how much are those skier’s springs and handball-esque deflections really contributing to quality football here?

As for Alexander Sørloth — another huge Norwegian forward who spent his childhood split between football, handball and speed skating (and another son of athlete parents… but we’ll get to that later) — Sørloth has zero goals and zero assists (and is currently ranked #1101) at this World Cup, which doesn’t exactly scream “this guy’s an elite forward” now, does it?

And while we’re on the topic of controls, the Guardian also offers up Norway’s four straight Winter Olympic medal-table wins as somehow being further supporting evidence of the system delivering on its supposed promises (a small country outperforming giants).

But there are a bunch of other factors at play here. Notably, there’s the fact that these are cold, expensive sports — the exact kind of thing that a cold Northern European country that just so happens to have one of the top-10 GDP-per-capitas in the world should excel at. There’s also the fact these sports are only really contested seriously by about a dozen nations, so this isn’t exactly a great sign of international domination.

Still, even by this stage, there’s still one more thing we’re not giving the Guardian full credit for. Specifically, the fact it’s pointing more towards the 2007 revisions to Norway’s “Children’s Rights in Sport” framework as being what made this current team.

Unfortunately, the most telling paragraph here — one about Nyland the goalkeeper — notes he was 17 when the 2007 revision landed, so he was never shaped by it (although he was covered by 1987’s version). And curiously, the Guardian handles this by saying he proves the law didn't invent the instinct — rather, it merely formalised it.

Read that again — if Norwegian kids were already wandering between handball and skiing and football before anyone legislated it, because Norway is small and cold and rich and full of clubs, then the law is basically little more than a post-hoc formalization of a culture that already existed; writing something down is not the same as causing it.

In any case, one could still make the argument that the 2007 updates were more than just the formalization of a pre-existing cultural pattern. There were, arguably, significant revisions. However, while the 2007 updates were significant in some respects — notably, it explicitly names the rights as belonging to the children themselves — for the most part it was effectively small modifications insofar as the system itself “treated” children. At least in the Guardian’s crediting it is concerned. The multi-sports, “don’t expose young kids to anything more serious than fun local competition” framework was already well-established, both formally and culturally.

Now, none of this is to say Norway’s system is bad. There’s still an argument to be made here that nuts and bolts of it — no results tables under about 11, no national championships under 13, no scouting kids away from their local club, and multi-sports participation — are good for a nine-year-old who gets to be bad at football without a scoreboard telling them this is no longer fun.

But as everyone knows (or, at least, should know), one can’t define “good” and “bad” without first discussing what defines good and bad — a sharp knife is not “good” merely because it is a sharp knife. It’s only in using it for a purpose that we discover its goodness or badness. It is good at cutting meats. It is bad at cutting metals.

And if we apply this same reasoning to Norway’s sporting system, and define goodness as that which serves the narrow case the Guardian wants to present as its crowning achievement — elite performance at a World Cup — then all the evidence seems to point the other way.

Norway’s coddled kids approach has not produced elite footballers.

To put this entire thing simply — exceptions don’t prove the rule. You cannot run a policy for nigh on four decades, watch it coincide with the barrenest stretch in the country’s football history, and then suddenly claim “the whole thing’s brilliant” the moment an otherwise mediocre team wins the lottery and lands one of the greatest football talents of this generation.

⚽ Argentina vs Switzerland
🏟️ 2026 FIFA World Cup
📅 Sunday 12 July; 03:00 (Europe/Paris)

• Why we’re watching: It’s the World Cup Quarterfinals. Duh!

• Top 3 Stats:

  • Argentina is currently #2 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 5W/0D/0L, 14 goals scored and 5 conceded after 5 World Cup matches.

  • Switzerland is currently #14 in the FIFA World Rankings, and has 3W/2D/0L, 9 goals scored and 3 conceded after 5 World Cup matches.

  • Argentina is undefeated in seven games in this fixture with 5 wins, 2 draws, and an aggregate score of Argentina 15-3 Switzerland.

• CXSports says: Under normal circumstances, this kind of match up would look like little more than a formality. And the head-to-head record does little to dispel that: seven meetings, seven Swiss failures, and a cumulative 15-3 on aggregate (although the last matchup was in 2014, so maybe it’s not so relevant… but we’ll see). And once you add the weight of Messi into the equation (eight goals in five matches), the case for Argentina almost looks obvious.
  
  But now look at the context. This is a quarterfinal, which is already odds-defying for Switzerland, who haven’t made a World Cup quarterfinal since 1954. So, already, Switzerland is arguably performing above their historical average. And if you look at how Argentina got here — barely scraping by against tournament debutants Cape Verde, then trailing Egypt 2-0 until, with eleven minutes remaining, they managed a heroic (miraculous!?) three goals after the 78th minute.
  
  Also, let’s not forget that they’ve got a defense that’s now being consistently breached now that the knockout stages are underway. And the mechanism is identical each time — a flat midfield compresses the centre, full-backs push high, and acres of space in the wide channels open up — space that both Cape Verde and Egypt exploited without much sophistication.
  
  Switzerland, meanwhile, has not trailed at any point in this entire campaign (qualifiers included). And they’ve conceded zero goals since the knockout stages commenced. So, in a way, Switzerland’s looking far more dangerous than a World #14 (who entered the tournament as #19) has any right to be.
  
  Of course, as usually, there’s a complication here. In this case, it’s Johan Manzambi, who’s got three goals, and whose pace (and willingness) to stretch a back line is precisely the weapon needed against Argentina’s wide-channel frailty. He’s already missed the Colombia game injured and is now in a race against time. Without him, Switzerland probably still has the defense to hold Argentina on a tight leash, but might have the weapon needed to really punish them.
  
  As for how that plays out in practice, the last head-to-head (2014) is potentially instructive — Switzerland kept that one tight for a full 118 minutes! And they still lost anyway, because, let’s face it, Argentina doesn’t need many chances, particularly with Messi in his current form.
  
  Therefore, we should probably expect frustration for Argentina here — Switzerland’s already done it before, and their current defense looks like they’re up to the task. But unless Manzambi’s fit, we’re not really expecting Switzerland to have much of a shot at getting its nose in front here. So let’s just say this has a good chance of finishing one of two ways at full time — either Argentina edges it, or Switzerland manages to keep it to a draw.

• Score prediction: 2-1 for Argentina or 1-1 Draw

Bet Option #1

• Bet: Double Chance (Argentina / Draw)

• Odds Range: 1.11-1.18

Bet Option #2

• Bet: Over/Under (Under 3.5)

• Odds Range: 1.15-1.26

Make your sportsbook work for you!

That’s a wrap for the weekend. We’ll be back on Monday as we look ahead to the semifinals.

Until then, enjoy the football… and beware the lazy journalists reporting on it.