In his own words, Thomas Berntsen had an unremarkable playing career that could be seen as remarkable relative to his talent. In his post-playing career, he spent over half a decade in management before moving into the world of sporting director, where he’s honed his craft since initially taking the role with Sarpsborg 08 in late-2012.
The 53-year-old, who came through the youth ranks at Strømmen as a player before going on to feature for the likes of Lillestrøm and Vålerenga, spent over a decade pulling the strings of the sporting project at Sarpsborg — a club that was just about four years old in its current incarnation when he arrived on the scene.
They had only just been promoted from the second tier, getting ready to take on their second-ever top-flight season when Berntsen was appointed the sporting director, but on his departure earlier this year, the club was embarking on its 11th straight top-tier campaign — a period that represents the vast majority of Sarpsborg 08’s history.
In the same vein, as Berntsen would admit, he had to extract every ounce of talent and ability he’d been blessed with via hard work and perseverance to make it to the level he did as a player; he would have to make the most of the resources provided for him by Sarpsborg.
In this data analysis of his time at Sarpsborg and how he made it a success, we will use a combination of data, statistics and other kinds of research into Berntsen and his decade-long tenure at Sarpsborg to show how, exactly, he made that period a highly successful one for him and the club, leading to his eventual move to a historically more prestigious side in Allsvenskan competitors, AIK Fotboll.
Stabilising and developing the club
While on-the-pitch success is always paramount when dealing with football clubs, when you look at a sporting director’s role, one must take into account a lot more than just on-the-pitch success and consider how their success manifests itself in different ways, leading to various potential indicators of success.
Take Sarpsborg’s stadium development, for instance. The club’s success during Berntsen’s time at the club resulted in significant upgrades to the ground, leading to potentially higher income and a healthier future for the club, in addition to a better experience for supporters — all-around good stuff directly resulting from the club’s success that Berntsen can realistically take some credit in helping the club to achieve.
The first thing Sarpsborg had to do in order to ensure this kind of progress would be attainable for the newly-formed club was to achieve Eliteserien stability, resulting in greater income and a chance to compete for places in Europe, where their accounts could really enjoy a healthy injection of cash.
Berntsen’s first season at the club, the 2013 campaign, was the only one following their 2012 promotion in which Sarpsborg finished in the danger zone; their 14th place finish that season meant they would compete in a relegation playoff clash with Ranheim — the winners of the second-tier promotion playoffs.
As we now know, Sarpsborg emerged victorious from that clash, setting them up for success leading into the future.
They made sure not to put themselves in that precarious position again and have avoided the danger zone in every campaign since, firmly establishing themselves as a mid-table side in the Norwegian top-flight.
They even managed to reach the heights of third in 2017, qualifying them for the 2018/19 UEFA Europa League under Geir Bakke — a coach we wrote about during his time at Lillestrøm here at Total Football Analysis and who currently manages struggling Vålerenga.
Though they swiftly returned to the mid-table pack afterwards, this season represents a triumph for the Berntsen-Bakke duo.
In addition to league position, we can use Sarpsborg’s squad value by season (as per Transfermarkt) to generate an idea of how the club developed over the decade in which Berntsen oversaw the sporting project.
Almost immediately, Sarpsborg began to look like a more formidable outfit in terms of the squad of players. While their first two seasons following the 2012 promotion saw them enter the campaign with the fourth-lowest squad value of Eliteserien’s 16 teams, they shot up to eighth for a few seasons before even reaching the height of the second-most valuable squad in 2019.
As this graph shows, they have hovered between fifth and sixth in the most recent seasons, indicative of a real leap in the club’s stature over the last 10 years.
It’s important to note that this improvement in the club’s value has not been achieved through big money investment, however, rather through intelligent investments, along with good coaching and development of the playing squad to enhance the attractiveness and, indeed, the quality of their players.
Profitability in the transfer market
During the Berntsen years, Sarpsborg ended up with a hefty profit of about €16.21m in the transfer market (this was calculated using Transfermarkt’s information on Sarpsborg’s transfer activity during these years, just looking purely at transfer fees paid and received, not wages, sell-on percentages, etc.).
When looking at transfers in vs transfers out, purely in terms of numbers (not including loans either way or, in this instance, promotions from the youth academy), we can see that Sarpsborg’s incomings and outgoings tended to mirror one another to a large degree over this period.
However, on the money side of things, we see that as Berntsen really got settled in during his tenure, starting at about the five-year mark, the money the club was making from outgoing transfers shot up.
Despite this, the money being spent on incoming transfers remained low-to-non-existent — perhaps partly due to the impact of the pandemic but also a result of Sarpsborg’s buy-low-sell-high recruitment strategy and the nature of the smaller markets they operate in to purchase players.
In a highly-insightful interview with English language Norwegian football podcast: ‘Reverse Nisselue’, Berntsen provided some insight on his background and his view on recruitment for a club like Sarpsborg as well as football as a whole.
Essentially, the 53-year-old, who has a Masters Degree in Economics, which seems to have provided him with some valuable knowledge for operating effectively in his current role, explained that there is always a bigger fish coming to entice your best players away and the dream of one day growing to the stage where you don’t need to sell your best players — as a Sarpsborg — is one based in fantasy rather than reality.
Berntsen’s model at Sarpsborg was never about building a group of players that they would hope to keep together for the long-term and achieve success and establish themselves, together, as Norway’s best team. Though that would certainly have been nice.
Their goal had to be one much more based in reality, and that saw them hoping to give talented players with a nice upside a platform to showcase their talents to the bigger clubs that would be hoping to use Norway as a chance to find good value players who could realistically improve the quality of their squads.
This saw plenty of players leave Sarpsborg for places like Belgium, France, England and even traditionally bigger Norwegian clubs — all the time generating a profit for Sarpsborg. Sometimes, these clubs would flip those players for a profit yet again — perhaps with a nice sell-on percentage for Sarpsborg, too — nevertheless, every time they sold these players to these ‘bigger’ clubs from more prestigious leagues, Sarpsborg made money.
They would repeat the process, going back to the well repeatedly, providing undervalued and talented footballers with a platform to show off their abilities and essentially use the young Eliteserien club as a stepping stone to greater things.
It was a mutually beneficial relationship, however, as the motivated players hoping to put themselves in the shop window for your Genks, Lorients and Sheffield Uniteds would improve Sarpsborg’s standing in the Norwegian top-flight, ultimately helping them to establish themselves as Eliteserien regulars and generate income that could be reinvested in all areas of the club, leading to development all-around.
This development resulted directly from Berntsen’s competence in laying out and implementing a sound strategy for the sporting project, which he demonstrated an excellent ability to do.
Intelligent recruitment
For our final section, we’re going to analyse where Sarpsborg were shopping for their undervalued talents during the Berntsen era and how the club consistently managed to sign players for extremely little before going on to sell them for mega profit. This sounds like a good plan but one that’s much, much easier said than done — if it were that easy to achieve, every club would do it, right?
Firstly, the personal element of the sporting director role can’t be ignored. Things like being personable, building a network of contacts and negotiation experience are all critical elements of this role where you’re dealing with people and at the end of the day, as sound as your strategy may seem on paper, if you’re terrible at dealing with people and nobody is keen on working with you, you’re not going to get very far.
It is quite difficult to analyse these aspects without more access to the man himself, however, as is the case with things like building a certain culture around the club and ensuring the players being signed were the right ‘fits’ in that respect so that they could take the ball and run with it when provided with the Sarpsborg platform.
It’s clear from listening to Berntsen in recent and older interviews that he loves seeing his team full of players in peak physical condition. Even after his recent move to AIK, when questioned about the types of players he envisions coming into the club, he stressed the importance of running capacity and excellent conditioning.
When he and Bakke worked together at Sarpsborg, this combination of Berntsen’s vision and Bakke’s coaching created a pressing machine for a few years, with Sarpsborg ending up with the lowest PPDA in Norway’s top-flight in both 2018 and 2019, while they clocked the second-lowest PPDA in 2017 — indicating a sustained high pressing intensity.
This was a natural approach for Bakke, given that Berntsen likes to recruit players with the physical capacity to press a lot.
Figure 5 highlights from where all of Sarpsborg’s signings came during the Berntsen years. The bigger the pink circle, the more frequently this market was entered. This map includes youth academy promotions.
With or without academy graduates, Norway was Sarpsborg’s most-used market by some distance during the Berntsen years, perhaps an inevitable result of geography and convenience as well as the sporting director’s connections and knowledge of the area.
Neighbouring countries Sweden, Denmark and Iceland also received plenty of attention. Berntsen demonstrated an excellent ability to spot and sign undervalued talents in these regions before profiting on the signings substantially, displaying an incredible brain for when to buy and when to sell; this will be helpful for the sporting director’s new job at AIK, where the expectations and spotlight will be far greater than at Sarpsborg.
What’s perhaps more interesting than all of this, however, is how much Sarpsborg branched out into different regions during this time, from Costa Rica to Australia, Kazakhstan to Nigeria.
One market, in particular, that Sarpsborg focused heavily on at this time was the Senegalese market (particularly the club: ‘Oslo Football Academy Dakar’), which was Sarpsborg’s fourth-most used market, trailing only Norway, Sweden and Denmark, during the Berntsen years.
Africa is incredibly rich in footballing talent but vastly untapped at the same time. Oslo Football Academy Dakar is owned by agent Youssoupha Fall, who has facilitated the transfers of players like Krépin Diatta and Ismaila Coulibaly, both of whom were signed by Sarpsborg for a low fee compared to their ability and sold for millions.
These are just two examples of players produced by this club who got an opportunity to showcase their abilities for Sarpsborg in order to launch their careers in Europe. Should Fall reinvest any windfall from these transfers and others in his academy, we could see plenty more Diattas and Coulibalys in the years to come for intelligent clubs to take a chance on.
To cut it short, African markets are incredibly undervalued and Sarpsborg, during the Berntsen era, were very clever to take a bet on talent from Oslo Football Academy Dakar, who immediately improved the stature and quality of their club before going on to generate millions in revenue.
This was an example of excellent recruitment strategy from Berntsen and his team, highlighting his intelligence as a sporting director and one reason why he helped his team make an enormous transfer profit compared to what they spent in his decade at the helm.
Conclusion
To conclude this analysis, we hope we’ve shone a light on how and why Thomas Berntsen helped Sarpsborg to be so successful during his decade at the club.
While he’s arrived at AIK at a bad moment for the Swedish giants, if he’s given the time to lay out and implement a plan for the sporting project as he did with Sarpsborg, I’d be optimistic about Gnaget’s chances of bouncing back from their ongoing campaign to forget and competing at the business end of Allsvenskan, just as his Sarpsborg side had been.
As for Sarpsborg, hopefully, Berntsen leaves the club in a place where they can move forward without him but remain as competitive as they have been due to the culture and strategies that has been embodied in the young club, but only time will tell.
