There is no need for extended metaphors drawing upon Iceland’s geography, harsh weather conditions, or Viking past to bring colour to its football.

With a population under 400,000, the country is the smallest nation to have qualified for a World Cup, but it was no unexplained miracle – and nor do I intend to authoritatively explain it to you here.

Three-and-a-half years had passed since Hannes Þór Halldórsson saved a Lionel Messi penalty in Russia when I touched down in Keflavik, 50 kilometres from the capital, Reykjavik. I was there for football, and football only.

On my first night, I missed the Northern Lights illuminating the Kopavogur sky where I was staying; on my second day, discussion about a long and slowly erupting volcano was nothing more than idle chat to occupy the taxi driver more than myself; and by the time I left, the most touristic endeavour I had participated in was paying $10.00 for a pint.

In the days leading up to my arrival and on the flight from London Gatwick itself, I had been reading Matthew McGinn’s excellent book ‘Against The Elements: The Eruption of Icelandic Football’, and now I was ready to dive out of the pages and into the cold reality.

Two of my first encounters in Iceland made it perfectly clear this was not the isolated, backwater island some believe it – ignorantly or otherwise – to be: my taxi driver from the airport was Chinese and fielded numerous calls in Icelandic as he drove me along the coast and the woman who served me my lunch upon arrival in town was Croatian. One person would later tell me that in his teacher friend’s class of 25 pupils, only two were born in Iceland.

The connectivity to the world that Iceland has cleverly cultivated itself and the global population it is building, enticed by the high standards of living and low levels of crime, pollution, and traffic, was immediately evident.

More specifically than football, I was there for Venezuelan football – Venezuelan footballers in Iceland. A curious anomaly not lost on myself or with anyone I had spoken to about it, but not as far-fetched as it sounds. When I told the Croatian waitress why I was in her adopted country she replied, “Wow, that’s so cool, two of my colleagues are Venezuelan.”

On 12 May 2021, Octavio Paez became the first player from Venezuela to debut in Iceland’s top division – the Pepsi Max deild karla – and although his stay with Leiknir Reykjavik was short and uneventful, he has now been quickly followed by a further two of his countrymen: Juan Camilo Pérez and Jésus Yendis, both 23 and both statistically the two best left backs Liga FUTVE had to offer in 2021.

Usually an attack-minded midfielder, Perez has just signed for Breiðablik on a two-year deal some seven years after he scored his first professional goal aged 15 years, 8 months, and 26 days. I would stay with him whilst in Iceland, acting as his translator and general right hand after intermediating between the club and his agent Karim Assafo for the transfer. Before he arrived though, it was Yendis’ new club Knattspyrnufélagið Fram that I would first visit.

When I arrived at Framheimili, the club’s multi-sport headquarters, at 10:15 a.m. it was still pitch black. The sun would not make an appearance until gone 11 and for the first 15 minutes, I was left unattended to freely walk around the warmly lit premises. I knew the club was historic – I had read of their 18 league titles – but was still taken aback when I realised the club was over 100 years old, founded in 1908 and boasting the fact of being the only Icelandic club to have competitively faced both Real Madrid and Barcelona.

“I played against Barcelona,” said my guide for the morning, Jón Sveinsson. But Jón wasn’t a guide, Jón was Fram’s Head Coach and one of their most decorated players in history.

The centre back had over 300 appearances, three league titles, and three Icelandic Cups with the club as a player and the 2021 Second Division title as boss. And yet his mention of the honour of playing at the Nou Camp was not boastful, it was simply said with unassuming pride.

In fact, this grounded sense was omnipresent from all I met in Icelandic football, paired with an almost unhealthy self-deprecation most prevalent in the hard-to-shake attitude that their football isn’t professional, despite the league having professional status and many of the clubs being run on professional terms.

“When we say ‘professional football’, we often just mean football abroad,” Hermann, a coach and backroom staffer at Breiðablik told me a couple of days later. I felt Icelanders excluding themselves from the term ‘professional’ through this linguistic framing was self-harm, but Hermann flipped my view in an instant with an astute comparison and a convincing glint in his eyes.

“If you take Alfreð Finnbogason for example, who now plays in the Bundesliga, he never would have made it as a professional if he was English. At 15 he was no good and if you’re no good at 15 in England, you’re cut. He got good at 19.”

That year, Finnbogason made his senior team debut and followed it up aged 20 in 2009 with 13 goals in 18 league games and the Icelandic Cup, Breiðablik’s first major honour. Now he is 32 and the scorer of Iceland’s first-ever World Cup goal.

“Some want us to have an academy system in the country, but this is an example of why I don’t, I’d like it to stay how it is.”

How it is exactly is that all children aged between 4 and 19 have a right to access training at a football club, be it reigning league champions Vikingur, the most successful club in history KR Reykjavik, or third division Tindastóll. It doesn’t matter if you’re the next big thing or a tubby kid with two left feet: you don’t get one crack at the whip, you get 15 years of highly qualified coaching and all the opportunity that comes with it.

“This is why we don’t miss a player,” another coach would tell me during my stay.

Yet this is more than a mandatory government dictum, it is an Icelandic way of life. Beyond football, in other sports and endeavours such as music and art, access and high-quality exposure is a right for the country’s youth. Football’s part in this relationship was succinctly and insightfully revealed to me when Jón summarised the function of Fram to me as “here to serve the community.”

It was not a corporate platitude and nor did it come in response to a formulaic interview question. Stood in a large function room in which we hadn’t even bothered to turn the lights on, Jón used their home pitch visible through the window and his gloved hand to illustrate his own career and the growth of the league.

Four losses to Barcelona weren’t his only tie to the Catalan giants. Long before Giovani and Jonathan Dos Santos were scouted and brought to La Masia and went on to become Mexico internationals, Jón had played in the US’s Major Indoor Soccer League with their father, a Brazilian midfielder named Zizinho. Over numerous trips back to the States, Jón saw the two boys grow up with obvious talent and potential for the big time.

Jón’s conventional football career, however, remained in Iceland and now the club legend is at the start of the newest project in Fram’s long and illustrious history. In April or May, their new facilities and the 3000-capacity stadium will be ready, complete with outdoor swimming pools (heated, of course), a gym, an activation training room, a yoga room, a handball court, and multiple training pitches.

The move is slightly American. Fram is relocating nine kilometres across Reykjavik, not just for new facilities but for a new catchment area of fans. In Úlfarsárdalur, east Reykjavik, new housing and apartment blocks are going up at a considerable rate, and in a country where the vast majority of children play for the club nearest to their front door, it’s a smart business decision that still squarely falls within the football club’s inherited and anointed ethos of serving the community.

With the club newly promoted back to the top flight after a record-breaking season that saw them score the most (58), concede the fewest (17) and win the title unbeaten with a 18-4-0 record, including one game that saw them snatch a point in the closing seconds, Úlfarsárdalur should be fertile ground to attract new fans or simply pre-existing ones more inclined to brave the chilly winds now the club is on their doorstep.

Assisting Jón, who has a day job as a Health and Safety Manager in the construction industry, are Manager of Football Operations Daði Guðmundsson and Technical Director and Assistant Coach Aðalsteinn Aðalsteinsson. Somehow, Guðmundsson has even more appearances for Fram than Jón - over 400. 

It’s this club, steeped in the community and tradition that Jesus Yendis joins, contrastingly from a club founded in Venezuela as recently as February 2015. The timing of the move could not have been more perfect for Icelandic referee Bragi Bergmann, who just so happens to also write poetry.

Twenty years ago, Fram were in the middle of a dire seven or eight years in which a miraculous escape from relegation seemed to happen every season. Bergmann penned a poem in which he credited God as an obviously paid-up member of the club. In December 2021, with Christmas round the corner and a new signing with the full name Jesus Natividad Yendis Gomez, he did not miss the opportunity to add a second verse. “And now they have his son,” it concludes.

While Yendis is yet to depart Venezuela for his new home, Pérez settled quickly at Breiðablik, although his first session could not have been a hotter baptism of fire.

Óskar Hrafn Þorvaldsson, like Jón, won the Second Division title recently, but more impressively with the team he had only just a season earlier been promoted from the Third Division with: Íþróttafélagið Grótta. It was their one and only top flight campaign but it was not under Óskar’s guidance that they were relegated. After the promotion with Grótta, he took the reins at Breiðablik.

An obsessive coach underpinned by a fascination with data analytics and a post-playing career in journalism, the former international defender created a Breiðablik side that didn’t just outscore every team in the division (55) with a goal difference double that of anyone else (+34) but they had the highest average possession in the league, too, and the highest metrics for pressing and counter-pressing across all Scandinavian top flights. Somehow, they missed out on the league title by a single point.

“It’s madness, isn’t it?” he asked me as he walked off the training pitch at Kópavogsvöllur. He had the smile of a man marvelling at his own anarchy. His team were halfway through their coach’s own twang of ‘Murderball’, the high-intensity, relentless training drill Marcelo Bielsa has his players live and die by.

At the essence of this practice match exercise are three key rules: everyone marks their opposite man, the ball never goes out of play, and the players never stop running. If the ball goes off the pitch or a goal is scored, the game continues with one of the coaches chucking another back into play elsewhere on the pitch to restart with a transition and keep the pace at 100%.

To watch it in the flesh from the proximity of the touchline was like witnessing a FIFA videogame come to life. It was direct, rapid, and on the naked eye completely unhinged. Yet with once-a-week repetition and continual tactical instruction, it becomes automated chaos.

“This is why we run teams over.”

That evening, Juan Camilo Perez had fallen asleep by 8pm. He woke up in the middle of the night, ate chicken and rice, and went back to sleep. I had to wake him at 10:30 the next morning.

Whilst he slept, I walked to a local sports bar in sideways rain and snow to meet with Hjörvar Haflidason, a former goalkeeper who had even spent time at Stoke, who now runs the popular Icelandic podcast Dr. Football. To my embarrassment, I was two hours late, having fallen asleep in the afternoon darkness.

“We’ve been waiting for you for two hours!” one anonymous voice chided me with. But it wasn’t an anonymous person, it was an Icelandic international defender. And he wasn’t the only player sat round the table, either. Hjörvar had invited me to watch the Chelsea vs. Tottenham League Cup semi-final tie. Yet he hadn’t thought to mention it was to join his friends, many of whom were still active professionals.

My embarrassment was compounded, but that was Icelandic football in a nutshell: self-deprecating, well-grounded, and right there: within the community.