One thing for all expectant England fans to bear in mind before Saturday night’s World Cup quarter-final is that Norway are ranked sixth in the world, and, of the nations left in the competition, they are the top-ranked country. This may explain why Norwegian fans, representing a country of only 5.6 million (roughly the same size as Scotland), have taken so much pleasure in their national team’s progress so far.
You may have worked out that the rankings to which I am referring have nothing to do with football. Norway is in sixth position in the World Happiness Report, an annual index which measures a people’s satisfaction quotient, based on GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption. For comparison, the United Kingdom comes 29th, sandwiched between Lithuania and Serbia.
So, whatever happens in Miami at the weekend, the fans of Norway can be proud that, by an accident of birth, they live in a country which is in many ways an exemplar for how a modern civic society should work.
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the Viking Row – the choreographed after-match celebration in which players join supporters pretending they are rowing in a Viking longboat, and which has become the viral sensation of the World Cup – but Norwegians are reserved people, and the fundament of their inter-relationship as citizens is based on a social code that was established almost a century ago, called Janteloven (the law of Jante).
