Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United preseason continues at manager’s hometown club Kristiansund in Premier League side’s second home of Norway
- Old Trafford side’s Scandinavian supporters’ club is their biggest outside Britain, although it lags behind Liverpool’s
- United will be cheered on to make it five wins from five in Oslo but history suggests they will not end the season as champions
Manchester United’s preseason tour moved from China, the world’s most populous country, to Norway, whose entire 5.2 million population is less than those living in Hong Kong.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s team play newly promoted Kristiansund, from the manager’s hometown, in Oslo. Kristiansund may be 350 miles north of Oslo, but Norway doesn’t do big stadiums – at least those big enough to justify United’s usual match fees. Yet United are vastly popular in Norway and it was wrong that the club didn’t play there for a decade until 2012, opting for games in bigger stadiums and farther-flung destinations.
They've made amends since with a game in 2017 and this one – the penultimate match of a so far successful preseason which has seen four straight wins. Solskjaer still wants to sign players, though the saga of Sporting Lisbon’s Bruno Fernandes is being driven by the player’s agent. United’s level of interest is thought to have been exaggerated by the agent and Portuguese media. Romelu Lukaku and Matteo Darmian, neither of whom travelled to Oslo, are the most likely departures.
United’s Scandinavian Supporters’ Club, set up in 1981, is, by a distance, the club’s biggest at 43,000 members – just short of its peak in 2013. United are big in Asia, Australia, Africa and the US, but there is no supporters’ club as big as their Scandinavian branch.
That’s paid-up members, not easy-to-garner likes on social media. Around 39,000 are in Norway – almost 1 per cent of the entire population. If those statistics were replicated in Great Britain, United would have four million members, not fewer than 200,000.