Viking FK’s Unique Co-Management Faces Major Challenge
Norwegian champions Viking FK walk into the MHP Arena on Wednesday carrying one of European football’s great curiosities: a team with two head coaches, and no hierarchy between them.
Morten Jensen and Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim have shared the job, the pressure and the power since January 2021. Not as manager and assistant. As equals.
What began as an unconventional experiment in Stavanger has hardened into a clear identity. Viking don’t just tolerate co-management; they thrive on it.
A Partnership That Rewrote the Club’s Story
Plenty of clubs talk about collective leadership. Viking built it into the job description.
Jensen and Lunde Aarsheim split everything on matchday. Tactical calls. Substitutions. Media duties. Training load. The players answer to both, and both answer for the team.
The results have turned a curiosity into a model.
Under their joint command, Viking climbed from hopeful challengers to standard-bearers in Norway. The breakthrough came in 2025, when they finally dragged the Eliteserien trophy back to Stavanger after a 34-year wait. A generation of frustration wiped away by a duo who refuse to be separated on the touchline.
Since then, Viking have stayed lodged in the sharp end of the table, trading blows at the top with Bodo/Glimt and refusing to slip back into the pack. The novelty has given way to something more threatening: consistency.
This is not a stopgap. It’s a philosophy.
The Captain as Conduit
Every structure needs a hinge, and on the pitch that role belongs to Zlatko Tripic.
The captain is more than a leader of the dressing room. He is the living conduit for the shared vision coming from the technical area. When two voices speak, Tripic translates them into a single, coherent performance.
He has done it with substance, not slogans. In the Champions League play-off against Dinamo Zagreb, Tripic scored in both legs, dragging Viking over the line and into the main stage of Europe’s elite competition for the first time since 1992.
That double felt like a closing of one chapter of the club’s history and the opening of another. The long exile from the Champions League is over; the co-coaches now step into the glare they have been chasing.
“Overwhelming” – and Just the Start
The play-off win over Dinamo Zagreb did more than secure a place in the group phase. It validated the project.
Jensen did not hide what it meant, calling the achievement “overwhelming and everything we’ve ever dreamed of.” The emotion spoke to the scale of the journey: from a club searching for its way back to the top of Norwegian football to one that now carries its domestic title and an unusual blueprint into Europe.
Lunde Aarsheim’s connection runs even deeper. He is eighth on Viking’s all-time appearance list as a player, a man whose fingerprints are all over the club’s modern history. Now he stands beside Jensen in the technical area, shaping a new era with the same badge on his chest.
A 1,150-Kilometre Examination
Next comes VfB Stuttgart, the Bundesliga backdrop, the MHP Arena and a 1,150-kilometre trip from Stavanger that feels longer in footballing terms than it does on the map.
This is where the theory meets the test.
Viking arrive not as tourists, but as champions of Norway and as a side built on a clear, if unusual, idea of leadership. The co-coaches will again stitch together a gameplan, share the decisions and trust the structure that has carried them this far.
The task is stark: impose that shared vision in one of Europe’s toughest environments and chase a result that would echo far beyond Stavanger.
If Viking can bend a Champions League night in Germany to the will of two coaches and one captain, the question will no longer be why they do it differently.
It will be who dares to copy them.
