The coach who died once and now leads Norway in a World Cup quarterfinal

5 min readJul 11, 2026 06:30 AM Ståle Solbakken has already died once. Saturday, he coaches Norway against England anyway.
The first shock from the defibrillator did nothing. More than 150 joules had shocked the body that had already stopped breathing. It was the second shock, moments later, that gave his heart a new life on a training pitch in Copenhagen on March 13, 2001. He remembers none of it. “I remember nothing,” he told VG. The day has been erased entirely, a blank space where his own death should be.
Club doctor Frank Odgaard began compressions immediately, continuing until the ambulance arrived, then used the defibrillator himself. Solbakken did not breathe for seven minutes. He was pronounced clinically dead. His parents flew in from Norway; his mother, he has said, began planning his funeral over the North Sea, before anyone knew whether his brain had survived what his heart had not.
He surfaced thirty hours later in intensive care, thrashing, and was put back under.
Doctors later tested the pacemaker they’d fitted stopping his heart on purpose, briefly, to see if the device would catch it. “In the end, you disappear,” he told NRK’s Drivkraft programme. “They take your life… and then they send you back to life.” In the gap before it did, Solbakken saw something. “It was a lovely light blue,” he told the same programme, describing a tunnel that opened in the dark. Residual brain activity, doctors told him.
Second Chance
He was 33, still fit enough to imagine playing until 36. What stopped him wasn’t the fear for his own body, but the thought of what he would ask of everyone around him if he stayed. He didn’t want teammates and opponents wondering, every time he went down, if it was real this time. “Will he get up, or will he stay lying there?” was the question he didn’t want anyone else carrying, he later explained. So he retired, and within a year was coaching Norwegian second-tier club HamKam. The team’s revival under him was dramatic enough that the press started calling him Ståle Salvatore, Italian for saviour, without anyone seeming to notice they were describing a man who had himself beaten death only a year before.
Eight Danish league titles at Copenhagen followed, along with rougher spells at Cologne and Wolves, before Norway made him their national coach in 2020. He had last played for the country at the 1998 World Cup, their previous appearance at the tournament, and twenty-eight years later, he’s the manager who took them back.Story continues below this ad
His heart interrupted him once more along the way. In 2009, running across a pitch, his legs simply gave out beneath him, the pacemaker doing exactly the job it was implanted for. “What the hell is going on?” was his first thought, he later recalled. He was fine within the hour. This May, days before naming the World Cup squad, a journal’s microphone set his pacemaker vibrating, something it hadn’t done since 2009. He finished the interview anyway, then drove himself to the hospital to be checked. Cleared, he kept his evening plans and appeared on a live podcast as scheduled. It turned out to be the microphone’s magnet. “There was full service,” he joked to VG afterwards, as if he’d dropped in for nothing more than a coffee.
New Perspective
A second ordeal hit him last year. Three weeks before Norway’s World Cup qualifying campaign began, Solbakken’s mother died. The camp that followed was already fraught with political controversy over a qualifier against Israel, and his own grief, he later admitted to Dagbladet, had to wait its turn. It was only once the camp ended that it caught up with him. He has a word for that, in Norwegian: overfallet. The ambush. The mother who once began planning his funeral was the one he had to bury, quietly, in the middle of trying to get her country back to the World Cup.
Anniken Solbakken, married to him for more than thirty years, was the one he found first when Norway beat Senegal 3-2 in June to reach the knockout stage. He climbed into the stands to find her and kiss her, while Erling Haaland led the rest of the squad through a subway-platform dance the internet had already turned into a ritual. “Things like that change you a little bit,” Solbakken told FIFA.com of the collapse, “especially in the short term.”
Norway face England in the quarter-final on Saturday. Whatever happens, Solbakken will be on the touchline, a pacemaker keeping time he was never supposed to have.