28/06/2026
I know nothing about football.
Ask me about offside and I'll give you the same look a dog gives you when you show it a card trick. "Que?". For the longest time I thought VAR was a Swedish furniture chain.
But I do know a thing or two about AI. And this week, AI and I have been sitting together like two detectives with pipes and magnifying glasses, digging into a little mystery: what did Ståle Solbakken REALLY use the France match for?
Because the man got himself a gift. A match he didn't need to win. Norway were already through. And when you don't need the points, you can suddenly spend 90 minutes on something other than chasing goals — a bit like how you "work from home" when the boss is out of town.
Solbakken says it was about resting tired legs, and that's probably true — apparently six of them had cramp after Senegal, so they were about as fresh as I am after carrying all the groceries in one trip. But a national team manager doesn't exactly lay all his cards on the table in front of a swarm of journalists and microphones. That would be like showing your poker hand to the whole table and asking if they think it's any good.
So I asked AI to think like an old-school strategist — Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, John Boyd, the whole beard-wearing, peacetime-averse gang — and look at the match as a spy mission rather than a 4–1 humiliation. And out fell one pattern that's almost embarrassingly obvious:
France are barely dangerous when they have to build up play slowly. In those moments they're about as terrifying as a labrador. But in the three or four seconds right after the opponent loses the ball — THAT'S when they transform. That's when Mbappé and Dembélé suddenly sprint 60 metres like someone just announced free ice cream at the other end of the pitch.
And the best part? Solbakken practically confirmed it himself. "They're not going to score on counters," he said before the match. Then Norway lost the ball a couple of times and got countered into oblivion. 4–1, and a hat-trick for Dembélé. It's a bit like saying "the cat is NOT allowed on the sofa" and then turning around to find the cat on the sofa holding the remote.
But here's the part I think is genuinely clever. A good strategist flips the whole question on its head. He doesn't ask "how do we stop Mbappé?" — the rest of the world has been trying that for ten years without cracking it. Instead he asks: "how do we stop Mbappé from ever ending up in the situation he's the best in the world at exploiting?" That's the difference between trying to catch lightning, and simply not standing out in a thunderstorm holding a golf club.
Now, I know there's always someone who'll clutch their scarf and say this is a disgrace, that you play to win every game, every time, and that fielding the reserves is basically surrender. I have a soft spot for that view — it just doesn't survive contact with the bracket. Even I, the man who thinks a "false nine" is a dodgy bank note, can read a schedule: by NOT winning, Norway didn't dodge anyone. They landed Ivory Coast — a side Solbakken himself calls one of the physically strongest in the tournament — plus a journey about four times longer than the group winners get. So if this was cowardice, it was the kind of cowardice that hands you the harder opponent and the longer flight. The cushy-looking draw — Sweden, the very team some would have you believe is the one to be feared — went instead to France, the side that actually won the group. Strange surrender, that, when "losing" sends the scary opponent to your rival and keeps the tough one for yourself.
And "play to win every game" sounds noble until you notice nobody actually does it. Sprinters don't empty the tank in the heats. Tennis players coast through the early rounds before a Grand Slam and rest stars in team ties. "Don't spend what you'll need later" isn't cheating — it's just the difference between play to win the match and play to win the tournament. They sound like the same sentence. They are not. Solbakken wasn't playing to lose a game. He was playing to win a World Cup, and over nine weeks with a 26-man squad, the bravest move is sometimes to rest the lion so he can roar in the round that counts.
Norway probably won't meet France again before a possible final (and if it happens, I promise to pretend I understood football all along). But the lesson itself — that the margins against the very best teams are decided in a handful of seconds, not over 90 minutes — that's something they carry into every match from here on out.
And no, before anyone asks: this gives away nothing the opponents don't already know. The papers are chewing over tactics around the clock as it is. This is just a fun thought experiment for those of us on the sidelines — and a rather nice example of how far you can actually get with AI in a field where your own expertise stops at "Que?".
