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What Is Tromsø IL? The History of Norway’s Arctic Club

What is Tromsø IL and what is its history? Follow Norway’s Arctic club from its northern cup years to national titles, European wins, and a Sami stadium name.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · September 25, 2026

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Snow blew across the pitch as Chelsea played in Tromsø on October 23, 1997. Ground staff kept clearing the touchlines. The visitors wanted the match called off. Instead, they played on, and the home team won 3–2.

What is Tromsø IL and what is its history? It is a football club founded in northern Norway in 1920. Shut out of national competition for decades, it won its own region’s cup before reaching the top division. It has since won two Norwegian Cups and beaten major European clubs at home.

Chris Horwedel opens the Why We Love This Club episode “Tromsø IL — The Club at the Edge of the Football Map” with that Chelsea match. It is a fair place to start. The snow was memorable, though Tromsø’s long fight to play on equal terms began well before Chelsea arrived.

What is Tromsø IL, and when was it founded?

About 20 boys and young men gathered in a gymnastics hall on September 15, 1920. That was the start. They founded Tromsø Turnforenings Fotballag, the club that became Tromsø IL, and played their first official district match the next June against Skarp, another local side.

The club wore white shirts and dark blue shorts at first. Red and white arrived in 1926. A dispute over its name took longer to settle: Tor and Flint were among the ideas considered before Tromsø Idrettslag became the choice in 1932. Idrettslag means sports club.

Tromsø sits on an island close to 70 degrees north. Summer brings weeks when the sun does not set; winter brings weeks when it does not rise. Those are fine facts for a visitor to take home. For a football club, the distances to opponents and the length of the season matter more.

The team is known as Gutan, “the boys” in local speech. Its home ground is near the city center. Supporters can walk there, though that is where any ordinary account of going to a football match begins to run into the weather.

Why were northern Norwegian clubs kept out of national football?

For years, northern clubs were shut out. They could not enter the national cup, and they had no route to the top division like clubs farther south, a situation shaped by distance, climate and poor assumptions about the standard of football in the north.

So northern clubs played for a title of their own. Tromsø won the Northern Norwegian Cup in 1931, then again in 1949 and 1956. Those wins gave supporters something real to celebrate. They also marked the boundary of what their team was allowed to contest.

The gap shows up clearly in the dates. The Norwegian Cup became a competition for the whole country in 1963. Northern clubs gained access to the national top division in 1972. Tromsø would have to wait until 1985 to earn its first promotion there.

Horwedel describes that wait as part of the club’s story, and he is right to give it space. The easy version makes northern football sound like a test of hard people against hard weather. The less romantic version has administrators deciding who could enter. Snow did not write the cup rules.

Bodø/Glimt’s national cup win in 1975 showed what a northern club could do once it got a place in the draw. Tromsø’s turn came eleven years later, almost as soon as it reached the top flight.

How did Tromsø IL win the 1986 Norwegian Cup?

Tromsø earned promotion in 1985. By October 1986, it had reached the cup final against Lillestrøm, that season’s league champion. The club’s own account calls the Tromsø side a group of friends who knew one another well. They had already beaten Lillestrøm in a snow-covered league match earlier that month.

The final was at Ullevaal Stadium in Oslo on October 26. Nils Solstad scored after two minutes. Captain Lars Espejord made it 2–0 after eight minutes. Lillestrøm got one back, but Truls Jenssen and Tore Rismo scored in the second half. Tromsø won 4–1.

The opening goal came so early that the final scarcely had time to feel like a final. Yet Tromsø’s season was hardly effortless. The team finished tenth in the league and still had to play matches to secure its place in the top division after the cup win.

That detail makes the result better, if anything. This was a newly promoted side facing the league’s best team in the capital, then getting back to the work of staying up. One of Tromsø’s players later recalled going into central Oslo the night before the final with a club scarf over his mouth so nobody would recognize him. The disguise did its job. The score the next day did not.

“Ground staff repeatedly ran onto the field to uncover the touchlines.”
— Chris Horwedel, on Why We Love This Club

Tromsø went on to finish second in the league in 1990. It has never won the league title. The next cup final it won would carry a different kind of weight, because the opponent came from the north too.

What happened in Tromsø’s 1996 final against Bodø/Glimt?

Tromsø and Bodø/Glimt are rivals in the match known as Slaget om Nord-Norge: the Battle of Northern Norway. They first played together in the top division in 1993. Three years later, they met in the Norwegian Cup final, the first between two northern teams.

Bodø/Glimt led through Runar Berg. With eleven minutes left, Ole Martin Årst equalized for Tromsø. In stoppage time, Sigurd Rushfeldt scored the winner. Tromsø took its second national cup with a 2–1 win.

There was plenty for each city to argue about afterward. Berg’s goal was disputed, and the finish was late enough to haunt Bodø. The larger shift was plain: a final once closed to both clubs now had room for nobody else.

It was never just about which team had the better afternoon. Both clubs carry northern pride. Each has had its turn out front. Bodø/Glimt later became the first northern club to win Norway’s league title. Tromsø has the 1996 final, settled by a Rushfeldt goal with the clock already past 90 minutes.

Rushfeldt left after that season and later returned to Tromsø. He finished with 172 goals in Norway’s top division, a league record. For this club, his first great exit came with a cup medal; his later years gave supporters a long second look at him.

Did Tromsø IL really beat Chelsea in the snow?

Yes. Chelsea came to Tromsø for a European Cup Winners’ Cup match on October 23, 1997. Chelsea asked for a postponement as heavy snow made the pitch difficult to see. The request was turned down.

Horwedel’s account lingers on the workers uncovering the lines while play went on. He has good reason. A match normally lasts 90 minutes without anyone needing to locate the edge of the field again.

Tromsø went two goals ahead. Chelsea’s Gianluca Vialli scored. Ole Martin Årst put Tromsø up 3–1, and Vialli scored again near the end. The home side won 3–2. London was less kind. Chelsea won the return match 7–1 and went through 9–4 on aggregate. Chelsea later won the trophy.

So Tromsø did not knock Chelsea out. That correction takes nothing away from the home win. The conditions were there for both teams, and Tromsø took its chances against a club that would go on to lift the cup.

It produced a European result with a happier second leg in 2005. Tromsø beat Galatasaray 1–0 at home. A 1–1 draw in Istanbul sent them through in the UEFA Cup. The return match mattered. This time, the small northern club got to keep the result it had started at home.

Why is Tromsø’s stadium called Romssa Arena?

Tromsø’s ground opened as Alfheim Stadion in 1987. In 2023, the club and its energy-company partner introduced the name Romssa Arena. The club says Romssa Arena means “Tromsø’s arena” in Northern Sami.

That change gives the club’s northern identity more than a snow-covered picture. Sami language belongs to the place too. The stadium project was designed to make it visible through football, with a Sami announcer and a Sami captain’s armband among the measures the club described.

There is room to ask what a stadium name can achieve. A sign cannot settle questions about whose culture gets heard in a city. Still, the name appears wherever the ground does: on match notices and in broadcasts. A visiting team has to learn to say it.

The club says Romssa Arena was the first professional sports stadium in Europe to use an Indigenous language in its name. Its old name, Alfheim, remains part of supporters’ memories; the proposal to restore it has appeared in club business. That disagreement is more useful to acknowledge than to smooth away. People care what their ground is called.

Horwedel’s Chelsea scene took place at Alfheim. A supporter heading to Romssa Arena now may still get snow, and someone may still need to clear a line. At least the name on the fixture tells a visitor a little more about where they have arrived.

The full episode of Why We Love This Club is on Underdog Podcasts, with the rest of the network's shows.