Viking FK's Dual-Coach Model: A Bold Experiment in Champions League
Norwegian champions Viking FK walk into the MHP Arena on Wednesday night carrying more than just underdog hopes. They bring one of the most radical ideas in European football: a team with two head coaches sharing one job, one vision, and now one of the biggest stages.
Since January 2021, Morten Jensen and Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim have run Viking as true equals. Not manager and assistant. Not mentor and apprentice. Two head coaches, side by side, splitting everything from tactics to training to media duties.
It sounded like a short-term workaround when it started. It became a philosophy.
And it has changed the club.
A partnership that rewrote Viking’s story
Under Jensen and Lunde Aarsheim, Viking climbed back to the summit of Norwegian football and stayed there. The club, starved of a league title for more than three decades, finally broke through again in 2025, lifting their first Eliteserien crown in 34 years.
That wasn’t a one-off surge. Viking’s dual-leadership model has hardened them into perennial contenders, keeping them in the thick of the title race with Bodo/Glimt and restoring the Stavanger side as a force at home.
The success has spilled into Europe. Their play-off victory over Dinamo Zagreb didn’t just secure group-stage football; it served as a loud vindication of the co-coaching setup on a continental stage. After that win, Jensen called the achievement “overwhelming and everything we’ve ever dreamed of.” The emotion matched the journey: a club rebuilt by two men refusing to fit the traditional mould.
Shared power, shared pressure
This is not a cosmetic arrangement. On matchdays, Jensen and Lunde Aarsheim share the technical area and the decision-making. They divide the workload, the preparation, the post-match scrutiny. Both carry the authority of a head coach.
Their bond with Viking runs deep. Lunde Aarsheim is more than a coach; he is part of the club’s fabric, sitting eighth on Viking’s all-time appearance list as a player. That history helps anchor a project that might otherwise feel experimental. At Viking, it feels natural.
On the pitch, one man has become the extension of that dual brain: Zlatko Tripic.
The captain is the hinge between the coaches’ shared vision and the players’ execution. His influence is not theoretical. In the play-off against Dinamo Zagreb, Tripic scored in both legs, driving Viking to their first Champions League main-stage appearance since 1992. When the club needed a voice and a finish, he provided both.
Now the trio – two on the touchline, one with the armband – step into Germany together.
Stavanger to Stuttgart: a philosophy on tour
The journey from Stavanger to Stuttgart spans roughly 1,150 kilometres. For Viking, it might feel longer. It stretches from domestic resurgence to a night where their methods face the glare of the Champions League.
At the MHP Arena, Viking will not just be tested on talent. Their entire structure goes under the microscope. Can a team guided by two equal head coaches stay clear in the heat of a high-stakes European tie? Can the clarity of their shared gameplan survive the noise, the tempo, the pressure?
Viking believe it can. They have evidence. Titles. Consistency. A path carved through qualifying rounds that many expected them to stumble on.
Now comes VfB Stuttgart, a club steeped in Bundesliga history, waiting to see what this Norwegian anomaly really looks like up close.
Viking will try to move the ball – and the story – their way. Execute the co-coaches’ plan cleanly. Lean on Tripic’s authority and timing. Trust a structure that has already dragged them out of the shadows of their own past.
If this dual-coach experiment can deliver a historic result in Germany, it stops being a curiosity.
It becomes a blueprint others might dare to copy.
