Molde

Molde sits on the north side of the Romsdal fjord. The football club there started as International, and settled on Molde FK.

The first trophy came in 1994, the Norwegian Cup, and the town waited another eleven years for the second. The league title, the one that mattered, did not arrive until 2011 — a hundred years after the founding, in a country where Rosenborg had spent two decades treating the championship as their own. Molde won it again the following season, and have taken it three more times since.

Rosenborg remain the measure of things. The two have met 104 times; Rosenborg have won 54 of them, Molde 34. Nobody has given the fixture a name, and it does not need one — the record does the talking. Closer to home there is Aalesund down the coast and Kristiansund up it, both near enough for a bus.

The ground holds 11 249, which is roughly half the population of the town. It was built as Molde Stadion and now carries the Aker name, sitting hard against the water, and on the two or three nights a season when European football comes north the whole thing feels several sizes too small for the occasion.

The blue shirts and white shorts have not changed. What has changed is the pattern of the honours list: five league titles in eleven years, six cups, four of them since 2013, the last of those in 2023. A club that spent eighty-three years without a trophy has spent the last decade collecting them.