The game of soccer, or association football as it is properly called, is the world’s most popular team sport. Virtually every country on Earth plays the game in some form or another. It is both physically and intellectually demanding, requiring athletic skills and quick thinking.

Various civilisations lay claim to discovering the sport. There are records of soccerlike games having been played in China more than 2000 years ago. There has been found similar traces in ancient Greece, Japan and Mexico as well. But it was the Romans that played the game that spread throughout Europe and was probably the origin of modern soccer.

As stated in the first part, the English football-league has already been professional for over a century. The Norwegian league on the other hand has never been professional and the players are forced to do other labour in addition to make enough to make the ends meet. This causes the players to not to fully devote their lives the game. At the other side of the North Sea, the situation is completely different. The majority of the players make enough to live a life way over the national average, without doing anything else than what they love to do, football. This is of course and huge pull factor for Norwegian players that wish to do nothing else.

The English Football Association was established in 1863, nearly 40 years before the Norwegian. This has provided sizeable amounts of time for the English Premier League and its players to develop quite a lot compared with the Norwegian one. The point I am trying to make is that the English Premiere League, and the 1st division as well, keeps an overall higher performance-level of game. This is there for yet an other pull factor on Norwegian players that wish to develop their soccer skills further. This factor is slowly being eliminated as the Norwegian soccer is steadily improving compared with the British.

The last of the main factors is a push factor. This involve the Norwegian clubs who sell their star players to England simply because they need the money. Selling to British and other clubs abroad is also more profitable than trading players to other clubs within the state limits since the Norwegian Football Association has set an upper limit to the domestic transfer fee’s. On the other hand, are these fee’s considerable lower than what the players really are worth. An horror example of this is Ole Gunnar Solskjær, who got transferred from Molde to Manchester United a couple of years ago, he is now worth 10 times (10 million pounds) what Man U. paid. This is becoming a problem in Norwegian football, because foreign clubs buy young talents for pocket-change, which later becomes great assets worth millions for pounds. This both cheats the Norwegian clubs for considerable amounts of money and lowers the performance level in the Norwegian series by stripping it of any talent.

All in all, this transfer activity is healthy for the overall performance-level on the players by allowing them to extend their horizons and evolve their skills. This is good for the Norwegian national team, who grows while the players ripens abroad. But, this tendency is bad for the domestic teams who loses key players to abroad clubs ’for a song’.