Why Norway plays more freely than Scotland

Guest post: William Kemp Bruce

Guest post: William Kemp Bruce

Win or lose, the fact that Norway is playing England in the quarter-finals of the World Cup is a major triumph for a country of just over 5 million people. That is the same population as Scotland. What is Norway doing that Scotland doesn't?

Scotland has developed a lot of talent in recent years. The academy structure and club teams are actually quite successful and a pretty big win in Scottish football. Scotland did as well or better in the World Cup this year as it has for half a century.

But we are clearly not doing as well as Norway. One difference is the freedom to play. Many Norwegian kids live five or ten minutes’ walk or cycle from an all-weather pitch. These are generally left unlocked and have push-button lights so the kids can go in and play until 10 or 11 pm at night. The kids can play as long as they wish, often totally unsupervised.

It was really different for us growing up in Edinburgh. People complain about gangs of kids wandering around bored and boisterous. We would love to have played football but we couldn’t access the pitches.

We did try to play on Leith Links - the only flat bit is the cricket pitch and we got kicked off that a dozen times a summer. And you can’t really play in other parts of the park where people are walking their dogs or playing with their toddlers.

The all-weather pitches are locked almost all the time. Leith Academy has a 12-foot fence with spikes on the top. Portobello is a bit lower. There are a few commercial ones as well. They all sit empty and unused most of the time after school hours - and even during them. Opportunities to play football at school can be pretty limited.

An hour at Portobello Power League is £77 - even if you muster a full team of 14 and split the cost that is more than a fiver each. For a while there was a scheme that made it one pound each for an hour - but after that ended we couldn’t play there again for six years until we were earning.

I remember as a teenager we would try to scale the fences to get into closed and empty pitches. Sometimes we got in. A few times kids hurt themselves. A friend of mine fell eight feet and bashed his head - of course he never mentioned it to his parents. Another boy I know lost part of his finger because he was wearing a ring that got caught in a link of the fence as he fell.

Sometimes security guards would catch us and let us out the gates. They would always blame insurance for why we couldn’t play on the totally empty pitch. Norwegian law seems to manage this differently - insurance is handled collectively and the pitch owners are only liable for faulty equipment. When state lottery money is given for faciltiies, it comes with the rule that they have to be left open and not be padlocked up. Unsupervised access is the norm.

Scotland in contrast can sometimes feels like a hostile environment for young people. Kids wandering about in groups are seen as a problem - yet we are not trusted to have access to the spaces we need to play football together. (There are some programmes to open pitches up but they are rare and targeted at areas of high deprivation so they don’t reach most kids.)

You can join a youth team to train a couple of times a week. It is great to have coaching - but the love of the game really develops when you are playing with your mates just for fun. You need time when there isn’t an adult telling you what to do or saying “what went wrong boys?” when you lose a game.

I hear from older friends and relatives that street fitba was once played everywhere in Scotland. My gran’s cousin David Ross used to kick a tennis ball to school every day from Primary one. “We dribbled round cars, played in the playground and in the park often till it got cold and dark. I still play with the same joy and enthusiasm now!”

Being able to play without adult intervention in the street and parks from a young age was probably the norm in most countries back then. Norway is unusual because it made a decision not to let the old culture of free play be swept away as it has been in most developed countries.

Norway is a rich country thanks to its sovereign wealth fund. They also manage insurance risk differently. But this is not just about money or the legal system. Norway has intentionally brought free play into the modern world by building open-access facilities to support it. Norwegian children have unsupervised access to all-weather pitches and indoor halls where parent volunteers are trusted to lock up at the end of the night. It is hard to imagine that happening here.

When the Norwegian team steps out in the World Cup quarter-finals, it won’t just be because of their elite athlete programmes. It will be because of a culture where a group of 10-year-olds can walk down the road, push a button on a light pole, and kick a ball about together without having to ask permission.