The ultimate leveler: Bodø/Glimt has a secret weapon to bring down Europe’s giants

Located north of the Arctic Circle and needing to deal with brutal weather conditions, Norwegian soccer team Bodø/Glimt has an artificial playing field that’s built to handle just about anything.

Including much bigger rivals.

That could be bad news for Premier League giant Tottenham Hotspur when the teams meet in the Europa League semifinal second leg on Thursday.

Spurs leads 3-1 after the first game, but that advantage could look slender once play gets underway at the Aspmyra Stadion in the fishing town of Bodø, more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of Oslo.

Despite the town having a population of around 55,000, Bodø/Glimt — unheralded outside of Norway — continues to pull off shock wins against famous opponents on home turf.

And it is that artificial surface that seems to be such a leveler for teams unused to playing in sometimes Arctic conditions and away from traditional grass.

Evangelos Marinakis, president of Greek team Olympiakos, was critical after a 3-0 defeat in the Europa League in March, saying “we played on a pitch that is not like other European stadiums” and claiming one of his players “got injured due to the pitch conditions.”

Olympiakos won the second leg 2-1 at home, but was eliminated 4-2 on aggregate, with Marinakis lamenting: “what truly matters is what happened in the first match.”

Banned

It is certainly unusual to see a high level match like the semifinal of a major European competition played on artificial turf, which is criticized for the way the ball rolls and bounces in comparison to grass. Now it has happened twice in one season. Swedish club Djurgården hosted a Conference League semifinal last week that Chelsea won 4-1.

Sometimes called plastic pitches, they were banned in England in 1988 due to higher rates of injuries and inconsistent playability. But UEFA allows approved artificial pitches to be used up to and including the semifinals of its competitions - the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League.

“High level football in (a) plastic pitch is not high level football,” Fenerbahce manager Jose Mourinho said after a Champions League qualifying game against Lugano last July, which was also played on artificial turf. “The ball is slow, the players cannot dribble, they run with the ball and the ball stays behind. The game is slow, so honestly I don’t understand why UEFA allows Champions League in (a) plastic pitch.”

The Netherlands league has now banned artificial pitches from next season and Scottish top-tier clubs voted to ban them starting in the 2026-27 season.

World governing body FIFA also allows approved artificial surfaces for national-team games, but is relaying synthetic pitches as grass in NFL stadiums being used for the men’s 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Controversy in women’s soccer followed a decision by previous FIFA management to let the 2015 Women’s World Cup in Canada be played on artificial turf. Players including U.S. star Abby Wambach went to court trying to stop that claiming gender discrimination.

Advantage

Bodø/Glimt’s record at its 9,000-capacity stadium would certainly seem to point to an advantage and it has played a major role in it becoming the first Norwegian team to reach the semifinals of a top European club competition.

Besides Olympiakos, it has won home games against Lazio, Porto, Besiktas and FC Twente this season. It beat Red Star Belgrade in a home Champions League qualifier earlier in the campaign, but went out on aggregate.

It also thrashed Roma — then managed by Mourinho — 6-1 at home in the Conference League in 2021.

A source of encouragement for Tottenham is the fact that Bodø/Glimt has lost all four of its games against English opposition - including a 3-2 defeat at Manchester United this season.

Tottenham manager Ange Postcoglou, however, lost 5-1 on aggregate against the Norwegians when in charge of Celtic in 2022. That included a 2-0 defeat at the Aspmyra Stadion.

“It is on artificial grass, but it’s still a game of football and I’ve been there, I’ve played there with Celtic,” he said after the first leg last week. “I know the experience and what is important for us is that we need to replicate what we did today (in the first leg).

“Irrespective of the surface, if we’re as disciplined and organised as we were today, with and without the ball, it won’t matter what the surface is, I think it will make it really difficult for us to be stopped.”

Why artificial?

Bodø/Glimt’s stadium is one of the most northernly in world soccer at 67 degrees latitude. The town, on the west coast of Norway, is known as a destination to see the northern lights.

Unlike in most of Europe, the Norwegian soccer league starts in the spring and ends in the fall to avoid playing during the long winter. Bodø has less than an hour of sunlight on its shortest winter days, making maintaining the playing field expensive and difficult. Temperatures can dip toward the freezing point even in May.

Bodø/Glimt’s underground heating and synthetic turf allowed it to stage its quarterfinal against Lazio last month despite heavy snowfall completely covering the ground on the day of the game, which would have been unlikely on grass.

Tottenham midfielder Dejan Kulusevski predicted that the game in Bodø would be difficult because playing on artificial turf is almost like a “different sport.”

Bodø/Glimt defender Jostein Gundersen chuckled at his comment.

“I wonder what he thinks we should have done differently in Bodø,” Gundersen told Norwegian broadcaster TV2. “If he had seen where we’re located, it’s not so easy to have anything other than artificial turf.”

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James Robson is at https://twitter.com/jamesalanrobson

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer