A Tale of Two Norwegians

Football (soccer) forward Erling Haaland is scoring goals at an incredible rate. In fact, he is on par or better than the best players ever in the game:

Source: FIFA and graph by The Athletic

Playing for the Norwegian national team, he is on the cusp of a historical feat: qualifying for the FIFA World Cup, which will be played in the USA, Mexico and Canada next June. Norway hasn’t qualified since 1998!

Let’s have a look at the Qualification standings with two games remaining:

With a win over Estonia, they could seal the deal even before the last match against Italy, thanks to the monstrous goal difference of +26 as opposed to +10 for Italy, thanks to Haaland.

Of course, football is a team sport, and Haaland would not be able to shine with a very weak team. The backbone of the team is also excellent: Sørloth (Atlético Madrid) has a great partnership with Haaland in attack, Martin Ødegaard (Arsenal) is the creative attacking midfielder and the beating heart of the team. Other players in midfield and defence are playing for top European teams (Brentford, Dortmund, Benfica,…)

Just as in chess, we can calculate Elo ratings from past results; the website eloratings.net calculates Elo ratings for soccer countries. Current European Champions Spain are the top Elo team in the world. What if I normalise Spain’s Elo to that of Magnus (2839.7), so that we can compare and contrast how competitive football and chess are? I'm reminding you that one can add or subtract Elo to all the players of the pool because the only thing that matters for Elo changes and expected results is solely a function of Elo difference (if you struggle with this, let me know, and maybe I’ll write about Elo).

If Spain is Magnus, then reigning world champions Argentina is Anish, France is equivalent to world #29 Andreikin, and Norway at #16 is comparable to the estimated author and world #590 Mauricio Flores-Rios. This shows how tight the margins are in chess and how significant the skill gaps are in traditional sports like soccer (football).

Norway was #3 seed by average Elo for the Chennai 2022 Olympiad and #6 for the 2024 Olympiad. In both cases, they severely underperformed, ending #59 and #16. Magnus is, by all objective and subjective measures, the greatest player of all time. The rest of the line-up consists of strong grandmasters like Ariyan Tari, Hammer, and Joan-Sebastian Christansen. So I dug into the data: what is happening here? Is Magnus underperforming in team formats? I look at the four Olympiads and two Euros that Magnus played. As a test sample, I looked at the four European Club Cups that Magnus played. The distribution of Elo gained/lost over a tournament is an excellent measure of under- or overperformance, adjusted for expectation.

The results are shocking: the Norwegian players are losing 5.5 Elo points on average per tournament, and in the Euro Club Cup they have gained 2.6. A two-sample t-test shows a 0.2% chance of this difference occurring by chance alone between the two groups.

If Magnus were a poor team player, his teammates would play poorly at the European Club Cup alongside him. That is not the case. It must be other factors specific to the Norwegian team that have caused his teammates to lose a total of 132 Elo points. I do not know what the problem is, and I’m not in a position to speculate.

Magnus and Erling, source: Magnus Carlsen on x.

We know that Magnus cares deeply about team formats and wants Norway to win on the international chess scene. I think this will eventually happen as they sort out whatever the problem(s) are. Norway is a country that punches above its weight in many sports. In endurance sports, their performance is outstanding, which has led the rest of the world to study the ins and outs of their performance:

Brad Culp has a detailed book and has been on many podcasts. The Norwegian method is not “one weird trick” or a secret, but a well documented bio-psycho-social approach that has paid massive dividends. Norwegians are competent and dedicated, and I’d love to see them challenge India and the USA in the future.

If you want to read nerdy stuff about team analytics click this.

If you want to read about the psychology of team chess click this.