Viking Stavanger host Bayern Munich on Tuesday for the first home Champions League game in the club’s history, the latest landmark in the joint tenure of head coaches Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim and Morten Jensen.
The partnership was set in motion long before either man reached the top of Norwegian football. The two friends first met on the semi-professional scene, and it was a phone call around 2012 or 2013 that planted the idea. Aarsheim was working in a bank at the time and Jensen in the oil and gas industry, and both were coaching local teams part-time. As Aarsheim remembers it, they agreed they should take a team together one day.
It is a pairing of contrasts. Aarsheim made almost 300 appearances for Viking across the 1990s and 2000s, captaining the club as a midfielder and combining modest league success with a handful of short Uefa Cup runs before he began coaching at Randaberg. Jensen’s attempts to build a playing career at Viking were derailed by injury; he had played college soccer in the United States, returned to Norway’s lower divisions and managed the tiny club Havørn.
Their temperaments are described as complementary. Jensen calls Aarsheim, five years his senior at 51, calm, collected and analytical — a man whose instinct is not to be stubborn but to find solutions, who can be aggressive when he needs to be but only for a reason. Aarsheim says Jensen’s strength is how big he thinks and his willingness to say it out loud, talking about winning the league and the Champions League while he himself is thinking about building a good team first. That ambition transmits, he adds: they put dreams in front of the players and want them to dream bigger rather than simply be satisfied to play at the club.
When they recruit, Jensen says, they say something bold — that anyone who joins Viking will have the best coaches they have ever had.
Both men had worked as assistants to Viking’s previous head coach, Bjarne Berntsen, and were due to be interviewed to replace him. Instead they asked to come together. Eirik Bjørnø, then 29 and newly promoted to chief executive, remembers sitting in the room as the pair arrived with everything planned, down to a 120-page dossier on how their team should play — and a slide that suddenly showed a flock of sheep. The sheep were Viking’s competitors; the two wolves on the image were the men who wanted the job. “Are you going to hire these two badass wolves?” their pitch ran. “We’re going to eat up all the sheep.”
Bjørnø and the sporting director Erik Nevland were persuaded. Nevland, the former Manchester United and Fulham striker who played for Viking across three spells and scored twice in a Uefa Cup win against Chelsea, says the club had reached a point where it needed to do something different to get better, and that the appointment, while a gamble, made sense given the position they were in.
Joint managers are vanishingly rare at the highest level. Nevland says the question comes up constantly: when he speaks to sporting directors abroad, Viking is no longer identified by its name but as “the club with two head coaches”. It is a dynamic arrangement rather than a fixed template for the future, he suggests. “It’s special, but why change something that works?”
The approach has delivered results. Last year Viking beat a previously imperious Bodø/Glimt to win the Eliteserien, the club’s first Norwegian title since 1991. It is a striking recovery for a side that had been relegated in 2017 and that finished 11th in 2022, a season that prompted a sharper focus on developing local players — those who, like their managers and the similarly homespun Bjørnø-Nevland double act, understand what it means to represent the mountain-fringed port city in Norway’s south-west.
Stavanger, enriched by the discovery of oil 200 miles offshore in 1969, can adore its football team again. Jensen says the most enjoyable part is not the Champions League or the title win but seeing how many children now run around the city and its schools in Viking jerseys, where a decade ago only Manchester United and Liverpool shirts were on show. “That’s the one thing I am most proud of,” he says. Nevland sees further benefits in such a local flavour, arguing that it gives everything the club does more meaning and makes decisions more thorough because of how much they matter to the region.
In the days before facing Bayern, Viking’s attention was fixed on a different fixture: a trip to fierce rivals SK Brann. A video meeting longer than 10 minutes would risk losing the players’ attention, so the staff showed 10 short clips, selected by a six-strong group during a coaches’ meeting that began at 8.30am, focused on how Viking could impose their style and minimise the effect of an intense, raucous away environment. Jensen reminded the squad that Brann had overrun them the previous year, challenging them and showing more energy. Aarsheim stressed the importance of being better in the first duel and in the second-ball phase. Viking won 2-0 in Bergen.
On the training pitch the division of labour is clear: Aarsheim generally oversees the defensive drills and Jensen the attacking work. They do not believe in shouting and yelling at players, preferring to develop their football intelligence as well as the people themselves, and consider man-management their strongest asset. Asked who plays good cop and bad cop, they say they mix it up and sometimes plan it deliberately as a tool.
When they disagree, over a selection issue for example, they will debate it — sometimes loudly — with the rest of the coaching staff in the room, each having to defend their choices and reasoning until there is agreement. Jensen says that 99% of the time the two are already of the same mind on who to use, so little time is wasted. Aarsheim says he can read Jensen in a second and senses when something matters to him from the stomach.
Zlatko Tripic, the long-serving captain, says the respect and loyalty the pair show each other is visible to the squad, that they hand responsibility to the players and let them discuss things, and that the dressing room has huge respect for how they handle situations. That self-assurance is what Viking hope can help them trouble Bayern. “For us, Viking is Barcelona,” Aarsheim says. “The players have to understand that we see Viking as more than a club. In our heads, it’s the best team in the world.”