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- Norway – Northern Ireland, at 8:45 p.m. Wednesday
ULLEVAAL (Dagbladet): Erling Braut Haaland (20) and Norway prepare for the game against Northern Ireland on Wednesday. At the same time, the audience figures for the two previous international matches are clear.
On Thursday, Norway played the European Championship playoff against Serbia. At most, TV 2, which is the licensee, had 980,000 viewers. In the match that followed against Romania on Sunday, the corresponding figure was 585,000 spectators.
Thus, almost 400,000 viewers disappeared in just three days. Sports editor Vegard Jansen Hagen on TV 2 acknowledges that the drop is big, but not as big as he feared.
– He was afraid of numbers, he says about the Romanian party.
– I thought we would start in the dark basement and build from there. But I think we have started to build from a good place. It shows that people have not given up on the project.
Norway-Serbia and Norway-Romania had two different starting points. The first match was about the playoffs for the final of the European Championship next year, and who would face the winner of Scotland-Israel in the final of the playoffs. It was win or lose.
When Norway lost 1-2, several Norwegians interested in soccer experienced that the air was leaving the balloon. Norway-Romania was the group’s match in the Nations League. There are still three games left.
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– The numbers are strong in their own way, says Jansen Hagen.
– The Serbia match, with around a million spectators, shows the potential when expectations are created for these decisive matches. We are a starving nation. There aren’t many things that gather around a million viewers, really, so it’s fun.
– But, continue:
– So the result was a brutal recession. In many ways, we and the national team started again on Sunday. There was a different type of opponent, a different premise, and a different broadcast time. Around 600,000 viewers… I actually thought it was going to be worse. The Serbian match was a setback. The rebuilding started at a better level than he feared.
Spectators who were seated were valued for the time spent. Norway won 4-0, after a great play by Erling Braut Haaland, Martin Ødegaard and Birger Meling.
– You say you were afraid of the audience. What do you put in this?
– So I had in mind that we could be 100,000 below where we finished. But we had almost 600,000 viewers between 6:00 PM and 8:00 PM on a Sunday. It’s off-peak and has a different universe, so to speak. There is no doubt that many spectators were lost en route from the Eurocup playoffs. But at the risk of sounding like “Comic Ali”: I have to say, I’m pretty happy with the numbers.
TV 2 has the rights to the football of the national team until 2028. In this there is a lot of potential fun with Martin Ødegaard and Signal Iduna Park giant Erling Braut Haaland.
– We have faith in this over time. We have a generation that is reasonably unique, which means there are reasonable reasons to have high expectations for the national team in the future, says Jansen Hagen.
– Now it has been 20 years of hiking in the desert without a championship. Expectations piled up again and then ended with a stomach splash. So I understand that some had to take a break from the Norwegian national football team.
The king of the castle in the air
Against Northern Ireland on Wednesday, there are new opportunities. Austria leads the group in the Nations League ahead of Norway. In the following places are Romania and Northern Ireland. The group’s victory provides an additional opportunity to reach the World Cup final in 2022.
The regular World Cup qualifier will be held next year.
LEAGUE OF NATIONS
| Austria | 3 | two | 0 | one | 5 | – | 4 | 6 |
| Norway | 3 | two | 0 | one | 10 | – | 3 | 6 |
| Romania | 3 | one | one | one | 4 | – | 7 | 4 |
| North Ireland | 3 | 0 | one | two | two | – | 7 | one |
