Norway's Secret Weapon: Why Fun Actually Works in Sports

Erling Haaland is out here winning at the World Cup while doing line dances in cowboy boots and posting Snapchat selfies with the energy of someone on the best summer of their life. Meanwhile, elite athletes from other nations are locked in hyperbaric chambers, grinding through suffering-based excellence playbooks, and generally treating sport like a medieval penance ritual.

So what’s really happening here? Norway just sent Brazil home from the tournament with a 6-foot-4 striker who seems to be having more fun than your friend group on spring break. And it turns out this isn’t a coincidence—it’s a completely different philosophy about how greatness actually gets built.

According to performance coach and University of Michigan professor Brad Stulberg, author of The Way of Excellence, the contrast between Norway’s approach and America’s obsession with grit-and-suffering tells us something crucial: the cultures that win don’t necessarily do it by making young athletes choose between fun and winning. Norway’s youth sports programs operate under what they literally call the“Joy of Sport.”No public rankings for kids. No A teams and travel squads at age 7. Kids play multiple sports before specializing. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the moment a coach spots talent, they’re already pushing early professionalization—rankings, specialization, the whole suffocating machinery.

The math here is simple: Norway has fewer than 6 million people. It can’t afford to burn out promising kids before they’re teenagers because a bad experience at age 8 might eliminate the next Erling Haaland before you even know he exists. So the pipeline has to stay wide open and fun. And somehow this approach produces world-beaters in winter sports, beach volleyball, triathlon, cycling, and now soccer at the highest level. It completely demolishes the theory that participation trophies turn you into a snowflake.

Haaland himself embodies this both/and logic that American sports culture struggles with. He’s a ferocious competitor on the pitch—the“Striking Viking”who runs at defenders like something out of a Norse myth. But he’s also genuinely, visibly enjoying himself. The misconception, Stulberg points out, is that these things are incompatible. That you have to be angry and resentful and operating from a chip on your shoulder to be elite. In reality, the best performers aren’t either/or—they’re both/and. They can be killers while having fun. Steph Curry does it. And even Michael Jordan, the poster child for the“suffer for greatness”movement, won all his championships under Phil Jackson—the zen, compassion, joy coach—not during his earlier years of pure rage.

The American sports-parenting conversation has gotten caught in a false binary: either we hold hands and sing and nobody cares about winning, or we ruthlessly optimize everything because only victory matters. Reality is messier and smarter than that. The goal at youth level isn’t the trophy. It’s developing athletes and people—building self-confidence, teaching how to win and lose, creating venues where effort has concrete correlation to results. That’s not soft. That’s the foundation of everything.

But here’s the honest check: we’re not having this conversation if Norway’s already out of the tournament. Winning still has to happen. The difference is what you’re willing to sacrifice to get there, and whether you’ve confused the grinding part with the whole point.