IMAGO

9 February 2024 - 6:00 PM

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IMAGO | Rosenborg finished last season ninth, their worst showing in 46 years.

Reviving Rosenborg: How a skiing ace plans to restore football glory

  • Norway’s most successful club have fallen on hard times since the end of the last decade, having to dramatically cut back its budget while struggling in the league.
  • In an exclusive interview the Trondheim club’s youthful CEO Tore Berdal lays out his vision for the future, tells us that the worst is over and describes how his career as an athlete informs his life as an executive.
  • Why it matters: Rosenborg once won 13 consecutive titles and even in the last decade won four in a row. Like FC Basel they are dramatic proof that no dynasty lasts forever.
  • The perspective: Berdal was last year elected to the European Club Association board, but says that perceptions that the ECA only looks after the big clubs in big leagues are wrong. They “really takes into account the small teams.”

Trondheim - In the Brakka, the modest office complex fashioned out of a former German World War Two army barracks, the Rosenborg CEO, Tore Berdal, a 35 year-old former cross country ski champion, plots the renaissance of one of European football’s fallen dynasties.

It is now six years since his club, Norway’s most successful, last lift

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