
Football, fire and ice: the inside story of Iceland’s remarkable rise (2016) - Tomte
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/jun/08/iceland-stunning-rise-euro-2016-gylfi-sigurdsson-lars-lagerback
======
avar
Disclaimer: Am Icelandic, very generally proud of how my country punches above
its weight in sports.

Having said that it's unbelievable how a publication like The Guardian can
write an article about UEFA 2016 with claims like "smallest nation ever to
reach a major tournament", without mentioning that 2016 is the first year
where 24 teams compete, instead of 16 as has been the case since 1996. Before
that it was 8 for a while, and 4 when the tournament first started in the 60s.

Iceland's been getting consistently better at football for decades now, and it
beat England last year in the tournament showing that it could play with the
big boys. But _obviously_ if the tournament is expanded from 16 to 24 teams,
an increase of 50%, it's going to be the first year that some small team
qualifies.

~~~
gwern
They do mention it:

"For all the alluring backstory, questions still remain. Chiefly there is that
brittleness. Iceland are ready. Iceland have a great system. But are they
actually any good? Most riffs on this story tend to overlook the fact Iceland
had plenty of luck in qualifying.

 _The expanded tournament helped._ Other teams played poorly. Iceland tended
to sit behind the ball, scoring from knockdowns and set pieces. Even in the
key home defeat of Holland they had 26% of possession."

------
smcl
This is an excellent story and pretty fascinating to hear the background of
it. If any non-Europeans or football fans don't know what's up, Iceland has
the population of a small city and very little history as a footballing
nation, yet they managed to progress into the later stages of the European
Championships, knocking out former footballing greats like England (and giving
Portugal - the winners of the tournament - a scare) along the way.

Also it's funny to see the Guardian continue to live up to its "Grauniad"
nickname once again - the FIRST non-headline sentence has "Iceland travel Euro
2016..." should be "Iceland travel _to_ Euro 2016...". I once for fun kept a
tumblr with screenshots of these but it became very boring because:

1\. there's usually one glaringly obvious mistake in nearly every single
article

2\. they never seem to issue corrections, so screenshotting is pointless (this
one's over half a year old)

3\. they're otherwise a good paper/site, so it feels a bit harsh to point this
out (even if it is just for fun)

~~~
scholia
_> This is an excellent story_

Agreed: I highly recommend it.

 _> there's usually one glaringly obvious mistake in nearly every single
article_

An actual mistake or a typographical error? It compares very favorably to the
error rate in Donald Trump tweets!

 _> they never seem to issue corrections,_

The Guardian is famous for publishing a "Corrections & Clarifications" column
[1], and collected clarifications have even been published in book form [2].

However, typographical errors are rarely included, though they do get
corrected on the website.

 _> so screenshotting is pointless_

Yes, screen-shotting is pointless. However, you can email the quoted line(s)
and a link to the Guardian global readers' editor at
guardian.readers@theguardian.com

Hope that helps!

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/series/correctionsan...](https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/series/correctionsandclarifications)

[2] Books [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corrections-
Clarifications-2002-May...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corrections-
Clarifications-2002-Mayes-Ian/dp/1843541734)
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/CORRECTIONS-CLARIFICATIONS-Ian-
Maye...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/CORRECTIONS-CLARIFICATIONS-Ian-
Mayes/dp/1841156035) [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Correct-Best-Corrections-
Clari...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-Correct-Best-Corrections-
Clarifications/dp/1843544652)

~~~
smcl
Haha by "screenshotting is pointless" I meant that capturing a funny moment
for posterity is pointless since it'll probably be there for years to come.
But yes the whole endeavour was pointless when you think about it.

~~~
scholia
My apologies for mis-reading you.

I have a bee in my bonnet about (PR) people who send me images of things when
I have to retype the contents ;-)

------
pitt1980
I remember reading this story last summer and finding it really fascinating

the part I really liked was the part that talked about the spread of coaches:

"Fine. But how have they done it? For once there is a fairly easy answer. This
is a command economy kind of fairytale, managed from the top down. There are
three clear strands. The first of these is coaching.

Arrigo Sacchi famously suggested elite coaching should be open to people from
any walk of life, from elevator operators to stockbrokers. At the end of the
last century the Icelandic FA put this into practice. Bolstered by the TV
money pouring into every Uefa country, Iceland set up an open, hugely popular
training scheme. Currently this nation of 335,000 has around 600 qualified
coaches, 400 with Uefa B licences, or one per 825 people. To put this into
context, in England this number falls to one per 11,000.

The result is a spread of expertise right down to the lowest level. “Here you
need a Uefa B licence to coach from under-10 level up and half of the Uefa B
licence to coach under-eights,” Dagur Sveinn Dagbjartsson of the Icelandic FA
says. This isn’t simply box-ticking. The Uefa B is one step off the level
needed to coach a professional team in England. Yelling dads it ain’t.

Dagur is coordinator of the Icelandic FA’s coach education programme. Boyish
and studious, like so many other people around here he has a genuine
fascination with the systems being put into place. “Even if you start training
at four years old you get good quality coaching. Every coach in Iceland gets
paid, we don’t have any amateurs. Every kid who plays pays an annual fee and
can go and train with a professional club. My own kid started when he was
three. One coach had the Uefa A licence and one the B licence.” "

\------------- \--------------

its interesting to think about what sort of advantage the institutional spread
of knowledge is

~~~
maaaats
One of my former soccer coaches has always said that he thinks the best
coaches should be on the lower/young levels, later it's "too late" for a good
coach to save them anyway. Not sure if I totally agree, but interesting
thought.

------
Bamberg
How Iceland Football National Team Was Selected: Total inhabitants = 332,529

Women ....................................... -165,259

Men <18 years old ........................... -40,546

Overweight .................................. -22,136

Busy in whale sightseeing industry........... -1,246

Busy in earthquake surveillance.............. -314

Busy in volcano surveillance................. -164

Busy as sheepherders......................... -1,934

Busy sheep shearing.......................... -1,464

Imprisoned bankers........................... -23

Blind........................................ -194

Sick......................................... -7,564

Working in hospitals, police, fire brigade... -564

Icelandic fans in stadium.................... -8,781

Team doctor and physiotherapist.............. -2

Teams massage therapist and water carrier.... -2

Busy managing national football team......... -7

Rest......................................... 23

[https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/4psdbh/how_the_icel...](https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/4psdbh/how_the_iceland_football_national_team_was/)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
_(The coach is from Sweden)_

You missed the punch line!

As an aside, obviously, those numbers are obviously cherry-picked, but they
appear to be mostly selected based on facts. You can find some census figures
in this booklet:
[http://www.statice.is/media/49863/icelandinfigures2016.pdf](http://www.statice.is/media/49863/icelandinfigures2016.pdf)
(The booklet says that of 111k men, 2.6% (or about 2900) are involved in the
sum of all non-aquatic agricultural activities; I couldn't find precise
details on sheep farming.) Nonetheless, I'm particularly curious about the
listed ratio of sheepherders (shepherds?) to sheep shearers, at 1,934 vs.
1,464

The numbers seem to imply that sheep shearing takes 75% as long as sheep
herding. I imagined that one sheep shearer would have sufficient capacity to
service a large number of shepherds. Each sheep is typically sheared once per
year, and it might take two or three minutes per sheep. But the shepherd must
manage the sheep year round. Even with modern automated feeding equipment,
farm tractors, and, of course, the requisite sheepdogs, I can't imagine that
one shepherd could generate nearly enough sheep to keep a shearer busy for 9
months per year. Even assuming the shearer requires 5 minutes per sheep and
only does shearing 30 hours per week for 4 weeks per month, that's 13,000
sheep per shepherd.

The same answer illuminates a couple things about our industries, too: If a
task only needs to be performed a couple times a year, a freelancer will need
many, many clients! And conversely, if you can automate or outsource day-to-
day operations, you can get a lot more done than if you have to process
everything manually!

~~~
avar
Leaving aside that these numbers seem like some April Fools' gag...

    
    
        > But the shepherd must manage the sheep year round.
    

You're obviously just making stuff up and not familiar with how this is done
in Iceland.

Sheep aren't being constantly herded around. During the winter they're inside
a barn because everything is covered in snow, during the entirety of the
summer they free range getting fatter, raising lambs etc. In the autumn
there's a big coordinated herding event (göngur) where farmers and volunteers
in an entire area coordinate to herd all the free-range sheep into pens for
the winter.

So literally nobody in the country works as a full-time sheepherder. Since
it's all over in a matter of days.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> You're obviously just making stuff up

I am passingly familiar with sheep and cattle management on a small farm in
the US, and based my assumptions on this process.

> and not familiar with how this is done in Iceland.

That, however, is true. Your description is fascinating! So Icelandic
shepherds aren't managing the sheep during the summer? No feeding, medicating,
breeding, etc?

------
dsfyu404ed
How can one write an entire article about sports in Iceland and not include
even a passing mention Formula Off Road?

This is a travesty.

