SIGGI BALDURSSON looks every bit the veteran percussionist. He leans back on a creaking office chair. A pair of bongo drums straddles his thighs. He pats the skin with thumb, little finger, thumb, little finger until he sees me. He rests his palm on the drum. ‘Tea?’ he offers.
Blown-up images from the Iceland Airwaves festival decorate this open-plan office on the corner of Hlemmur Square. The bus station at the centre of the square has been converted into a trendy food hall but the yellow single-deckers still heave past the door.
Siggi flicks on the kettle and suggests a game of ping-pong on the orange table that acts as the focal point of the room. I explain the concept of my book while wondering how he manages to generate such devilish topspin.
Siggi is a well-known figure in the Icelandic music scene, although the tight-knit nature of the scene means everyone is relatively well known. Siggi was part of the punk scene that blossomed in the early 1980s. His face is round and ruddy, nothing like the punk pastiness associated with safety-pin-through-the-ear anaemia. His eyes twinkle behind thin-rimmed glasses as he reminisces. ‘Back in those days we were underground kids from Reykjavík. We were not in popular pop bands; we didn’t play the school parties and country dances and stuff like that. We were into art, quote unquote.’
Siggi emerged from the underground as the drummer in The Sugarcubes, the alternative rock band that thrust Björk into the limelight. They were the darlings of the NME in an era when the English musical press could act as a trampoline for obscure artists. Siggi now runs Iceland Music – a promotional agency for Icelandic musicians – from this bohemian office.
On the side he is still involved with Bad Taste (Smekkleysa in Icelandic), a non-profit record label established in 1986 to incubate sounds that were viable artistically if not commercially.
The American military base at Keflavík inspired Icelandic rock music. ‘The American forces radio was the most defining element,’ Siggi explains. ‘We were all listening to American forces radio. Keflavík became known as “Rock City”. That was where the first “popular” pop bands came from. It was rock ’n’ roll, basically.’
The kettle boils. Siggi brews green tea in a china pot and we settle on a table that wobbles enough to distract but not enough for either of us to do anything about it.
Siggi remembers a name and chuckles to himself. Rúnar Júlíusson, a rock star. Keflavík was his stage in the early 1970s. He also played football for Iceland and married the Icelandic beauty queen. ‘All at the same time,’ Siggi marvels. ‘He was a gentleman’s gentleman.’
The echoes of that era still reverberate through the PA system on matchdays in Keflavík. That is where the best half-time playlist in Iceland blasts out, curated by indie kid Björn from his cosy booth on the halfway line.
It might seem strange to talk about music in a book about football, but there are surprising similarities: the conditions that allow Iceland to punch above its weight in music are also the source of much of Iceland’s footballing success.
The Sugarcubes and Björk emerged from Reykjavík to achieve global acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s. Sigur Rós, Múm, Of Monsters and Men and Kaleo followed. Icelandic musical émigrés have also flourished beyond the basecamp genres of rock and alternative. The composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who died tragically in 2018, received an Oscar nomination in 2015 for his work on the soundtrack for the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything. Hildur Guðnadóttir, who used to share a studio with Jóhannsson, won an Oscar for her composition of the score for Joker, released in 2019.
There are items that sit firmly in the centre of the Venn diagram of music and football. For instance, local authorities subsidise young people to pursue music and sport. Every municipality in Iceland is obliged to fund a music school. As a result, there are 87 such schools across the country, with an estimated 12,000 students enrolled at any one time. Lilja Alfreðsdóttir – the Icelandic Minister of Education, Science, and Culture – explains the rationale: ‘If you look at philosophers like Socrates, he put emphasis on music and sports. You need exercise in order to feel good and have certain self-esteem, and it’s the same with music. It helps you harmonise and value information. His writings are applicable today and it’s for these exact reasons that we subsidise sports and music.’
Music and football in Iceland share another commonality: they both benefit from Iceland being a small nation. First, because smallness is conducive to the swift exchange of knowledge. Second, because the impact of positive role models is amplified in a small country.
Siggi pours a pale stream of tea from a height. ‘In smaller societies you have a psychological meandering that goes on. People constantly believe they can do things and there’s more of a team effort. “What do we need to do this? OK, let’s get our shit together. I’ll do this, you do that, let’s organise.” That’s an interesting element if you look at it from a sociological point of view. We always talk about “per capita” because we get away with all sorts of shit here if you look at it per capita.’
The relationship between population and achievement is misunderstood, he opines: ‘We’re always led to believe that success in arts and sports is a selective process. That’s why the Russians are so good at skiing, or whatever. If you filter down you’ll find three super skiers because there are so many of them. But you can create some serious competition in a small place if you just focus on it.
‘There is something about the focus and single-mindedness of how people do things here that creates good musicians and good sportsmen. I also think it’s an element of idiot savant.’
He takes my pen and scribbles a phrase in Icelandic. Huginn ber mig hálfa leið.
‘It’s an Icelandic saying from the old days. It means “The mind will carry you halfway there.” If you believe you can actually do something, you’ve got a good head start. You need to have that belief that you are actually going to succeed. That’s what I call idiot savant. It makes sense. “I don’t know any better, so why shouldn’t I succeed at this? Why not?”’
This is what Viðar Halldórsson, a sociologist at the University of Iceland, calls the ‘Icelandic Madness’. He defines it as a collective identity, shared by Icelandic sports teams, shaped by the belief that an Icelander can do anything if they see an end goal and play with their hearts as well as their heads. The infectious confidence that the Icelandic football team secrete is symptomatic of the ‘madness’.
‘That plays very strongly in the Icelandic character, how I understand it having lived abroad for long periods of time,’ Siggi continues. ‘If we allow ourselves the luxury of generalising, there is definitely a funny aspect to this Icelandic character. There’s a lot of ambition and a lot of belief that we can actually get away with all sorts of shit.
‘I think that’s why they call us the Italians of the North. We seem to have this need to bend the rules. I think that’s historical. This nation grows out of a farming and fishing culture, which demands that you go out and do shit when it’s possible to do so. When the fish are swimming you have to go out and get them. When the sun is up you have to cut the grass and dry it. That carves into people’s mentalities over a period of time. You feel you can bend the rules. That mentality can be very good if you’re in the creative industries. But it’s probably very bad if you’re a banker.’
He pauses while the wires in his brain make connections and spark. ‘There is a very creative element in football as well, which is partially what makes it interesting.’
Örvar Smárason – a founding member of Múm, an experimental group formed in Reykjavík in 1997 – believes that creative element is what binds football and music above all else. ‘Football is all about creating something,’ he says. ‘It’s about moments of chaos within a structure. That’s something both footballers and musicians need to have, and they need to have it constantly, not just once.’
Retirement beckons for those who can no longer summon that spontaneity. ‘This is why you see footballers hit a wall. They seem tired but I don’t think it’s just their legs that go after another long season. It’s also a burnout of the creative spark. It’s unquantifiable. It’s hard to put your finger on that spark, therefore it’s hard to get it back.’
While Icelandic football and music both rely on resourcefulness to overachieve, there is a difference in the aesthetic of the outcome. The musicians pride themselves on being innovative, or even unique, in their pursuit of a beautiful sound. Few people would argue, on the other hand, that Iceland play football that is innovative or conventionally attractive. It is based on structure and discipline rather than flair. But even if the style of play does not facilitate individual creativity, Iceland has to be creative to get 11 good players on the pitch in the first place. Music and football rely on similar creative processes that lead to very different outcomes.
Örvar is a football obsessive with a tattoo to prove it. The Valur crest is inked on the inside of his right bicep. He has recently returned from a trip to Istanbul to watch Beşiktaş when we meet in a Reykjavík coffee house. A structured interview quickly disintegrates into a conversation between two anoraks. Yet talking about music does not come naturally to Örvar.
‘It kind of bores me,’ he sighs. ‘It’s often about a side of music that seems natural to journalists but makes less and less sense to me. They’re thinking about it from the outside. When you’re actually doing the work and seeing it from the inside, it sometimes feels fake to talk about it like that. But if I was a professional footballer I would probably think everyone was talking shit and creating a narrative around me.’
Sunday League football was Örvar’s level, until his knee went. And while he may not talk freely about music in itself, the parallels with football interest him.
‘You need to lay the foundations for everything. You need to put yourself in a situation where creativity takes over. In football the physical work, tactical work, technical work is all to put yourself in that situation where the little spark can take over. It’s similar to music in so many ways, but people only see the top layer of things. Things like hope and passion often fit better into the narrative, so creativity is overlooked.’
For many Icelandic musicians, the foundations of creativity that Örvar refers to take the form of a tight community underpinned by collaboration and support. Nick Prior – a sociologist from the University of Edinburgh – argues that tight-knit networks are the best way to explain the number of successful Icelandic musicians. In a 2015 study titled ‘It’s a Social Thing, Not a Nature Thing’, Prior lamented the misconception that all Icelandic musicians draw inspiration from the natural environment. ‘It is rare to find a review of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós that does not describe their music as “glacial”,’ he rued.
Björk is a high-profile example of an artist who does draw inspiration from the trees and tundra, as shown by her Biophilia project that started life in 2010 as a concept album made up of ten tracks with links to the natural world. Most musicians, however, mention the Reykjavík ‘scene’ when asked about their inspiration. Prior sees an intimacy in the scene that he refers to as ‘Village-like’. Everyone knows everyone. Genres merge as artists share instruments, equipment and the limited rehearsal spaces.
Siggi has seen Prior’s ‘Village-like properties’ in action across several decades. ‘There is a lot of bleed between genres. I think they call it “cross-pollination” between sectors and style types. It makes for a very creative community. You have people from the contemporary music scene collaborating with the metal scene, who also collaborate with people from the electronic scene, the indie-rock scene or the jazz scene. I’m not saying it’s all a big mix; there are very distinct scenes here. But there is movement between them that we don’t normally see in bigger communities.’
Siggi is unequivocal about the root of such healthy musical collaboration. ‘It’s because of the smallness of the community. The music community is exceptionally creative and active – they’re spewing out more creative, interesting music per capita than anywhere else in the world – but it’s also quite small and tight.’
Jón Jónsson is not like Siggi or Örvar. He is a pop star without pretensions. He did not spend his youth getting lost in Led Zeppelin through a haze of sweet smoke. ‘Give me a Coldplay CD and I’m happy,’ he quips. Jón is a familiar face in Iceland, and not just for his easy-listening music. He presents the Icelandic coverage of the Eurovision Song Contest and, until he retired in January 2018, played football at the highest level in Iceland. He spent most of his career at FH and won the Icelandic title in 2012 and 2015. Incidentally, his father is Jón Rúnar Halldórsson.
Although Jón is not, to use his own words, ‘artsy’, he appreciates the inclusivity of the music scene. ‘What is beautiful about the scene is how small it is. And even though it’s competitive, people are still willing to help each other. There are lots of people playing in different bands. The same guys are recording and producing all the stuff.
‘That really helps when it comes to the exchange of knowledge. Sometimes it’s just in the subconscious. Let’s say that one time you play with a new drummer and he does something cool. You’d be like, “Hey, this is nice.” The drummer isn’t saying, “We should do this.” But you pick it up.’
Most people view smallness as detrimental to producing talent. Admittedly, if we were to create a country ideally suited for success in international football, we would fill it with more inhabitants than are scattered across Iceland. The discourse around Icelandic football, as with music, marvels that a small nation can flourish but overlooks the ways in which smallness contributes to that success.
While Icelandic football benefited from moving closer to the European knowledge network in the 1990s, it also benefits from the tight networks that can only exist in a small community. Take Icelandic youth coaching as an example. Heads of youth from every Icelandic club convene at monthly meetings organised by the KSÍ. They have a platform to exchange ideas and discuss the common problems they face. Their coaching philosophies blend like jazz and rap in the dingy rehearsal rooms of Reykjavík.
These meetings would not be possible in a bigger country, where logistics and bureaucracy restrict collaboration. Indeed, the KSÍ’s entire approach to coach education is bathed in the principles of inclusivity and outreach to isolated parts of the country. If a budding coach cannot travel to Reykjavík for a course, the course travels to the coach. This only works because the community of coaches is small enough to manage centrally.
Former technical director of the KSÍ, Siggi Eyjólfsson, sculpted a holistic approach to coach education in Iceland. He has since worked in China, most recently as the head coach of the women’s national team. There are innumerable differences between Iceland and China, but Eyjólfsson homes in on two. First, the demographics could scarcely be more different: according to the 2010 Chinese census, there are 201 cities in China with a population greater than that of Iceland. Second, football infrastructure in China lags behind Iceland, where the game is stitched into the fabric of society.
If he were in charge of plotting the course of Chinese football, Eyjólfsson’s solution would be to reduce China to a constellation of smaller networks. If the Chinese government and football authorities were to designate one ‘football city’ with a population of, say, four million, it would be easier to create infrastructure and establish a culture there than across a sprawling nation of 1.4 billion.
The premise at the heart of Eyjólfsson’s theory is that tightening the network can increase cohesion, collaboration and, by extension, performance. Iceland’s demography is conducive to a tight internal network, particularly as two-thirds of the meagre population are clustered around the Reykjavík urban area.
It is possible, however, for a country to be too tightly tied. Networks are not inherently beneficial. Grétar Steinsson, chief European scout at Everton, warns that familiarity can stifle frank discussion, as appeasement becomes more important than free speech: ‘It’s very dangerous to have an opinion in a small nation because you get ridiculed on social media or forums for pointing out what nobody wants to hear.’
A forthright comment can be misconstrued as a personal dig. ‘Let’s say you offend someone,’ Grétar theorises, ‘a relative of theirs or someone they went to school with who works in the media. Straight away you need to be treading on eggshells. Sometimes it’s best to say, “Nah, I’ll leave it” because if I say something my family is going to be brought into it. You need to be very, very careful.
‘It’s very difficult to have a high-performance culture because everyone is so connected,’ he continues. ‘Conflict is part of high performance. But if you say something here everyone takes it personally. That’s why you don’t surround yourself with friends. There needs to be someone in the corner who says, “What about someone else?”’
In Iceland knowledge not only flows within football; the boundaries between different sports are porous. This is a product of the European multi-sport club model that prevails in Iceland. Manchester United is purely a football club, whereas Real Madrid has a successful basketball division and Barcelona’s handball team is among the best in Europe.
Freyr Alexandersson – assistant coach of the men’s national team and former head coach of the women’s – cites a colleague at Valur, where he first coached, as a formative influence. The colleague in question was a handball coach. Opposition analysis in handball is more meticulous than in football. Freyr extracted analysis techniques from his colleague at Valur and applied them to his own sport.
Heimir Hallgrímsson also eschews the benefits of collaboration between coaches of different sports: ‘There’s such easy access to other sports here. The coaches of other sports are your friends. You meet them and watch handball or basketball. In the end we all get what we want. We all get the best information.’
Iceland will always be collaborative. Given the meagre size of its population it cannot work any other way, and as Heimir and Freyr attest, that is clearly healthy when it comes to drawing inspiration from other sports. But it must collaborate without becoming cliquey. That said, despite Grétar’s legitimate concerns, Icelandic football appears to be collaborative in a way that is not restrictive to innovation. The KSÍ has taken bold decisions that may not have been unanimously welcome, such as employing Lars Lagerbäck on a contract that, by Icelandic standards, was extremely generous.
Although Grétar is talking about football, his words also apply to the incestuous corruption and shutting down of legitimate discussion that contributed to the financial crisis in 2008. Football must heed that warning and keep channels of communication open, regardless of whether the opinions that travel through them are hard to accept.
Outside the financial markets, 2008 was a watershed in other, positive, ways. The Icelandic handball team won the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics. Their place on the podium was unprecedented: Iceland had excelled at individual sports – particularly those that involve picking up, throwing or pushing heavy objects – but never at team sports.
Ólafur Stefánsson is the most successful Icelandic handball player in history. A gentle giant at 6ft 5in, he played 318 times for his country across 21 years and won the Icelandic Sports Personality of the Year award four times. His career has taken him to Germany, Spain, Denmark and Qatar. But above all else, he takes pride in that silver medal. Ólafur was the captain of that team.
The Olympians returned to Iceland as national heroes. They cruised through Reykjavík on the back of a flatbed lorry, soaking up applause from crowds who had never had such cause for sporting celebration. In grainy footage of the parade, Ólafur wears a dazed smile above the medal round his neck. He had been imagining the moment for a long time.
When I meet him, his thoughts are overflowing like pennies dropping from the shelf in an arcade. ‘I need to start drawing or something,’ he says, taking my notepad and pen. ‘I usually have my iPad with me. I’m a very visual guy.’
He begins to doodle. His energy flows through the pen and on to the page. His body language relaxes, as if a tap has opened to release the pressure. ‘You have mushrooms or plants that are single organisms,’ he says frantically, his narration dragged by the pen in his hand. ‘You have a whole network for one mushroom that stretches over a larger area. They’re all connected. They’re all one. But the mushrooms think they are separate because they don’t see underneath.’
He looks up as if the point is obvious. I frown. The result of his scribbling is four mushrooms protruding from the earth. They are connected by a network of squiggled roots.
It comes as little surprise that Ólafur dabbles in the esoteric. He applied for a medical degree as a young man. He now self-diagnoses this decision as Freudian – an attempt to follow the path of his absent father, who went to Sweden to pursue a career in medicine. Ólafur spent much of his childhood with his grandfather, a theologian and philosopher. He absorbed anecdotes about values and learned to question everything, to look beyond the apparent.
That denialist streak formed the contours of Ólafur’s character as a sportsman. He did not have a reference point for success when he was growing up. Icelandic teams achieved little and, therefore, there was an absence of role models. Instead, Ólafur created them on paper. He repeated the same drawing for years: a cluster of stick figures represented the Iceland national team. They stood on a platform: the Olympic podium. It had one level rather than three because Ólafur did not mind if the medal was gold, silver or bronze.
‘If you want a gold medal, it’s not just about writing down: “I want this.” You have to be a good enough “imaginer” – that’s what I call it – to actually be there. You have to know how that state of being would be. That’s why it’s so easy to bail out or get distracted; you don’t feel like you’ve lost anything because you haven’t felt what you were losing.’
He uses the example of the four-minute mile. The target eluded middle-distance runners until 1954, when Roger Bannister – a 25-year-old medical student from England – crossed the line with a time of 3:59.4. Six weeks later an Australian runner called John Landy ran a sub-four-minute mile. Over 1,400 athletes have achieved the feat since. ‘When one guy did it everybody came after,’ Ólafur says.
Three lines of text accompany his mushroom diagram. The first says ‘pure imagination’. The second says ‘see = belief’. The third says ‘belief = see’.
We often believe things to be impossible because we have never seen them done. Why persevere if there is no evidence that it is possible to succeed? By achieving the sub-four-minute mile, Bannister presented his fellow athletes with evidence that it was attainable.
Ólafur emphasises the importance of role models. He summons another example: in 1997 three Harvard psychologists instructed a group of Asian-American women to complete a mathematics test. The women performed better when the psychologists emphasised their ethnicity and the associated stereotype that Asian people are good with numbers, compared to when the psychologists emphasised their gender and the stereotype that men are better with numbers than women. The experiment showed that social identity can improve – or impede – performance in a mathematics test.
Ólafur argues that cultural capital can have a similar effect in sport. ‘If you come from a club or country that has no story of success, you identify yourself with that. Where nothing has ever happened, nothing will happen. But if, as an Icelander, you can relate to someone who has achieved something, something more will happen.’
The silver medal in 2008 carved a path through the mediocrity that the stars of the future could tread. It created a stereotype of sporting success that had not previously existed but that current and future athletes could identify with. The effect of this is amplified in Iceland, where most people have a social or familial link to one of the athletes.
‘Maybe what happened in 2008 gave Icelanders something to relate to,’ he muses. ‘Handball isn’t that big, but it’s the Olympics and it’s a medal. They’re Icelandic, I’m Icelandic. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe that triggered or opened something.’
A year after the Olympics, the Iceland women’s football team qualified for the European Championship to become the first senior football team from Iceland to feature in a major tournament. Two years after that, the men’s under-21 side also qualified for a continental competition, an event that marked the maturation of the best cohort of players Iceland has produced. Now those players have become influential role models, aided by the perception that they are still part of their communities, playing on behalf of their neighbours.
Senior figures within the KSÍ believe that Olympic medal caused a ripple effect that spread to other sports. It fostered confidence and expectation. Football coaches flocked to the handball players and staff to glean information. The handball players also recorded a motivational video for the women’s national team before their tournament debut in 2009.
While the proximity of success is a new thing in Icelandic football, it is well established in music, as Siggi Baldursson explains: ‘If you’re interested in taking your music abroad and you don’t personally know someone who has toured internationally, you can bet your uncle knows someone, or your sister’s friend knows someone. People have these role models and it plays into the idea of empowerment. People feel that this is a small community. “If she can do it, then yeah, we can do it.”’
After 2008, Icelanders did not need to be ‘imaginers’ like Ólafur. An Icelandic team was succeeding right before their eyes. The silver medal prompted a subtle change in the collective psyche from ‘Why us?’ to ‘Why not us?’