Viking FK's Unique Coaching Duo Takes on Champions League
Norwegian champions Viking FK walk into Wednesday night’s Champions League tie at VfB Stuttgart carrying one of European football’s strangest, and now most successful, ideas: two men sharing one job.
Morten Jensen and Bjarte Lunde Aarsheim are not manager and assistant. They are both manager. Equal power. Equal responsibility. Equal scrutiny.
They have been doing it since January 2021, and what started as a curiosity has hardened into a philosophy.
A double act that delivers
Viking ripped up the traditional hierarchy and built a flat structure around their dugout. No single all-powerful boss, no clear No 2 waiting in the shadows. Jensen and Lunde Aarsheim prepare, select and tweak the team together, right down to key tactical calls.
The results have forced everyone to take them seriously.
Under the pair, Viking climbed from contenders to standard-setters in Norway. The breakthrough came in 2025, when the Stavanger club finally dragged the Eliteserien trophy back to the city for the first time in 34 years. A generation of frustration, gone in one season under a shared headset.
This has not been a one-off surge. Viking have stayed in the thick of the title fight, trading blows at the top with Bodo/Glimt and refusing to drift away after that long-awaited championship. The dual leadership has given them something every club craves: consistency.
The European stage has followed. Their play-off win over Dinamo Zagreb did more than secure prize money and prestige. It validated the entire project.
Jensen could barely hide what it meant, describing the achievement as “overwhelming and everything we’ve ever dreamed of.” For a club that last tasted the Champions League main stage in 1992, the emotion ran deep.
Shared power, shared burden
Matchdays for Viking are a study in controlled chaos. Two coaches pacing the technical area, two voices feeding into decisions, one message that has to reach the players without distortion.
They split the workload. Training design, analysis, substitutions, media duties – all divided, all discussed. There is no obvious frontman, no silent partner. The model only works because both men are rooted in Viking’s identity.
Few embody that link more than Lunde Aarsheim. Before he pulled on a tracksuit as coach, he pulled on the shirt often enough to sit eighth on the club’s all-time appearance list. His authority comes not just from the job title, but from years spent in Viking colours.
On the pitch, the conduit is clear.
Captain Zlatko Tripic has become the on-field extension of the duo’s thinking. He carries their ideas into the heat of the game, turning whiteboard plans into hard running and decisive moments.
He delivered exactly that against Dinamo Zagreb. Tripic scored in both legs of the play-off, the defining figure in the tie that pushed Viking back into the Champions League proper after more than three decades away. When the club needed a leader to match the coaches’ ambition, their captain stepped into the spotlight.
A 1,150km test of a philosophy
Now comes Stuttgart and the MHP Arena. A 1,150-kilometre journey from Stavanger, but in football terms it feels even longer – from domestic planners to Europe’s prime-time schedule.
This is where the experiment is truly exposed.
Viking’s co-coaches carry with them not just a gameplan for 90 minutes in Germany, but a blueprint that challenges the sport’s old assumptions. One bad night will not dismantle it. One big result could accelerate its influence.
They will need clarity in the din, unity when the pressure spikes, and Tripic once again knitting their shared vision into something concrete on the grass.
If Viking can impose their structure and nerve on a Bundesliga side in their own stadium, the question will no longer be why they do it differently.
It will be who dares to copy them.
