EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — When was the first time you noticed Norway fans’ now-infamous “Viking Row?”
Maybe it was when a group of fans rowed up an escalator in downtown Boston, or when thousands of proud Norwegians rowed together in Times Square, or in the stands at any of Norway’s three group games.
Maybe it was when rowers interrupted the soft claps at last weekend’s Traveller’s Championship PGA Tour event, when Norwegian players Vikor Hovland and Kristoffer Reitan were followed by rowers. (Hovland, for his part, was so buoyed by the “electric” chants that he won Monday’s playoff over Scottie Scheffler.)
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It typically starts with the blowing of a traditional Norse horn before everyone sits down on the floor in a formation resembling a Viking longboat. From there, the leader bangs a drum — slowly at first, but quickening with every beat — while the fans row their arms back in unison and chant, “Row!”
Norway’s players have seen it, too. It was all over star striker Erling Haaland‘s social media algorithm, and the squad even performed a row in front of its fans after a 3-2 win over Senegal that guaranteed it a place in the knockout rounds, led by captain Martin Ødegaard banging a drum.
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The viral World Cup Viking row makes its way to the Norwegian Parliament
Playing at their first World Cup in almost 30 years, Norway have been as adamant as any side that their main objective is simply to have fun.
The row has, without a doubt, taken the World Cup by storm, similar to how Iceland’s “Thunder Clap” took over Euro 2016. Soccer chants are typically organic, with roots that are hard to retrace. The row, however, is different.
The story of how it was created — and how it became a World Cup phenomenon — starts in a bar less than six months ago, with a notepad of songs, and one particular Norway fan fixated upon creating a chant that would put his country on the football map and take over the World Cup.
It was a cold winter night when the row’s inventor, Ole Frøystad, an elementary school teacher, entered a bar in a northern suburb of Oslo. In his pocket, he had a list of 10-15 chants he’d spent weeks creating, each one intended to make sure the world would not forget that Norway would be playing at their first World Cup since 1998.
One of the chants though, the “Viking Row,” was his jewel in the crown. It’s the one he was most excited to share with Torstein Olijberg, a museum coordinator who is among the leaders of the Norwegian supporters group. Olijberg is the person banging the drum for the row at games.
“I talked to them through all of them, but I’m like, ‘This one is, like, the one,'” Frøystad told ESPN. “It had became a goal [to create an epic chant], a kind of a dream of mine to do it. So I sat down and learned a lot last year about different chants and walked around during the day listening to music, just trying to go through different motions and think about what could have an impact.
“I wanted it to be short. I wanted it to be easy. I wanted it to be hard. I wanted to have culture in it, and I wanted it to have a massive impact.”
Frøystad won’t reveal what other options he had for the group — he plans to put them into action at a later date — but he was sure that the “Viking Row” was his standout idea.
It came to him one day when he remembered a game he’d seen over a decade prior when he visited Norwegian side Rosenberg. He remembered how three stands of the stadium would take turns chanting the club’s name to each other: “RO!” “SEN!” BERG!” in a booming symphony. The atmosphere generated by the chant had stuck with him. Then he thought about the action of Iceland’s “Viking Clap,” which starts slow and crescendos into rapid claps.
Once he decided to add the rowing motion, it was game over.
“I’m like, well, that’s exactly what the Vikings did. They rowed into battle,” Frøystad said. “They took in their sails, they put out their horses and they rode into shore. … It was just like a light bulb. With the movement and the way we move the body, it’s going to be like a wave at the stadium. It’s going to be amazing.”
It didn’t take long for Olijberg and other leaders of the supporters group to get on board, and they decided to try it out for the first time in March in a friendly against Switzerland. It was one of the final games Norway would play before the World Cup. However, it wasn’t an instant sensation.
“It worked out OK,”Olijberg said. “It got some critiques that it looked silly.”
Frøystad knew why. The fans needed to put their backs into it and use proper rowing form.
“For the second game after Switzerland, we all knew we had one more game in Norway [against Sweden] before we left for the World Cup,” Frøystad said. “We had one more trial.”
So Frøystad went to work. He produced social media videos instructing fans exactly how to row. They got the videos on local news channels.
“I properly explained, ‘OK, put your hands forward, bend forward,'” Frøystad said. “‘If you don’t use your back when you row, it’s not going to be visible. It’s just going to be audible.'”
There are no spoilers for what came next.
“After that game when I had a video of it, I’m like, ‘Yeah, maybe I should just post this. That’d be fun on my account,'” Frøystad said. “I didn’t have a lot of followers. It’s just a regular Instagram account. So I posted that video, and it took off. Now it has 38 million views and almost 3 million likes. This is before the World Cup started.
“That’s when I realized: This is going to be insane when we go to the World Cup.”
Maybe the row was spurred by the momentum of Norway’s opening two wins, riding the wave of positive momentum. Or maybe it’s the other way round.
In recent years, the Norwegian FA have made a conscious effort in recent years to build better relationships with supporters groups, in turn building a team that represents them. Their main star, Haaland, is as proud a Norwegian as you will find. In March, he paid 1.3 million Norwegian krones ($136,000) to buy a one-of-a-kind 16th-century Viking history book and put it on public display in his hometown Byrne. Before the tournament, Norway’s players posed as Vikings on the shore in full battle regalia.
In some ways it is playing on a stereotype — and there has been some backlash from commentators in Norway who say the Vikings, for all their looting and pillaging from as early as 800 A.D., are not to be aspired to — but there are parallels to be drawn. Just ask Terje Leiren, a retired professor who was knighted by Norwegian king Harald V for his services to researching Scandinavian history and the vikings.
“Viking, the word itself, it’s a verb that becomes a noun because it is the act of going away, leaving and to go raiding was to be a Viking,” Leiren says. “Those who did that became known as Vikings.” It is a symbol he agrees can be transposed onto Norway’s World Cup team — a side who have left their homeland in search of glory (albeit with far less violence) elsewhere. “It’s sort of a metaphor, that’s sort of what they’re doing,” Leiren adds.
The “Viking row,” then, is a perfect fit for a team that is hoping to go beyond their best-ever result from 1998 when Norway reached the round of 16. First up in the knockout stages is the Ivory Coast in the round of 32.
Still, not everyone is quite as excited. While Ødegaard and Haaland have been keen to talk it up, Norway’s manager, Ståle Solbakken, has taken a different tone. “It’s fun for the fans,” Solbakken said after the win against Senegal. “We will not be rowing after the World Cup, but this can be a gimmick during the tournament.”
For their part, Frøystad and Olijberg actually agree. They will both be out in the United States for the remainder of the tournament, finding ways to afford match-after-match, dreaming of Norway making their deepest run ever. But the “Viking Row” might not live beyond this tournament.
After all, Frøystad has plenty more chants in his head, and another 14 on his notepad.
