“When it’s a good day, it’s absolutely stunning, so we’ll take that,” Laura Kaminski says with a laugh of Bergen, the rainy west coast of Norway she now calls home. The English coach, a promotion-winner at Crystal Palace, has taken Brann to her heart since her appointment in January — and the job itself has offered plenty to smile about.
Brann failed to qualify for the Women’s Champions League, going out after a 4-0 second-leg defeat by Austria Vienna, but they responded by winning a cup final against Aalesund to hand Kaminski her first major trophy on the continent. Her team are four points clear at the top of the league with seven games remaining.
At Brann she follows in the footsteps of her fellow Briton Martin Ho, and of Leif Smerud, the coach who replaced her at Crystal Palace and whom she has now succeeded at Norway’s reigning champions. Kaminski was sacked by Palace in February 2025, midway through the club’s first Women’s Super League campaign, and says a move to Norway “wasn’t on the cards”.
“I’d never really thought about it because I’d always been involved in jobs in England,” she says. The chance to be stretched in terms of European football, and to join an ambitious club that wants to fight for a title, was “a massive pull”.
After a much-needed break following her Palace exit — one that gave her “a lot of time to reflect on what happened there” — Kaminski was ready to go back into a No 1 job, having become a head coach for the first time at Palace in 2024 after working as an assistant. She had previously worked at promotion-winning Tottenham, for England’s women’s youth teams and at Charlton, and calls the journey a “great learning curve”.
Domestic opportunities did come up after Palace, but Kaminski felt the fit had to be right: “The person has to match the project.” Then her agent contacted her and a recruitment agency became involved, because Brann were looking for a new head coach. It happened quickly. “One minute you’re in London and 48 hours later you’re on a plane,” she says. She snapped it up in part because reaching a WSL club fighting for a title would have been difficult, she adds, and she remains on a journey in management after more than 15 years of coaching — she gained her Uefa A licence in 2018.
“I always dreamed of being something that I couldn’t see,” she says of a career begun when there were hardly any professional coaches, let alone female coaches. It was a labour of love, she recalls, juggling multiple jobs, always on the road and sometimes paying to do the job. The game has moved on a lot, she says, and is now in a different place where people can be rewarded for their skills.
Her 18 months at Palace, she says, taught her more than the previous 18 years. She was relieved of her duties, and although results peaked briefly under Smerud, the club were relegated. “It was a course you couldn’t buy,” Kaminski says of a period led by the chairman Steve Parish and great people at the club who stretched her in the role. Palace, she says, will always be her home and is a well-run club, but the spell was a crash course in how to function, especially when things are not going well and when things are stressful. She has reflected on elements she could have controlled better, and on others she believes were out of her hands.
Life in Norway has brought other changes. Flying to games has been “a huge change”, and she is enjoying the “fantastic scenery” of a country she senses is very proud of its football. Her obsession with the game endures: she watches constantly, still putting on a Bundesliga match and working out what she would do at half-time, and retains the hunger and drive from the years spent coaching “out in the cold and the rain in London”. Having won promotion in England with both Tottenham and Palace, she now wants to prove she can do it abroad.