300 thousand people, a cameraman goalkeeper and a dentist coach, and yet, they succeeded where teams of "professionals" like Italy or Holland didn't make it.

In a world where football players earn millions, and they still complain about their work, there is a little country where football is still a passion and not an economy. A country with only 300 thousand people that is constantly growing and is envied by many countries where 1 single player earns in one year enough more than all players from  Iceland together, but as they say, size doesn't matter.

There are 33 thousand people playing football in the country but only 100 of them are full-time professional players, all the others have a second job and they say that it is nice to work as a football player, because they love playing football, but it doesn't seem ok to them to "just sit on their ass all day".

Some lessons to learn from Iceland and from the players of their National Team

Birkir Saevarsson, a defender of Iceland, works as a salt-packer at a warehouse in an industrial zone of Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital.

He doesn't do that for the money, but because the monotony of factory work, the graft, the need to cover his neat hair with an unsightly net, all helped to keep him real.

“This is normal for an Icelander, you know? More normal than going to the World Cup,” Saevarsson said during a recent shift before he flew to Russia with the Iceland squad, talking to The Associated Press as he fed jars into a machine that slapped them with labels marked: “Hand Harvested Lava Salt.”

Playing football professionally is “the best job you can have, but it’s not the real life,” Saevarsson added. So he works because “I can’t really sit on my ass the whole day and do nothing. It’s boring and you just become lazy. I didn’t want to become lazy before the World Cup.”

Players like him show us how infected is our football. Why would a player like Cristiano Ronaldo deserve to earn 21 million euros while in Iceland the best players earn just around 30 thousand euros per year? Why top players are tired if they play 2 times in the same week, while others are not tired even if they work every day?

 I have no answer to those questions, but you think there is an answer, let me know!

Iceland is a very small country and it wasn't really famous for football but in the last years, there was a big growth for their national team and for football in general in the whole country. This happened mostly thanks to the government that promoted football and sports in order to fight alcohol, drugs,  and boredom that were conquering more and more young people, especially during the long Nordic winter. The government invested many resources in the creation of covered football fields, usable throughout the year, making strong "pressure" for the youngest to start playing sports, for both social and health reasons. And here come's my second question:

How come that a small country like Iceland is investing in the youths while in our countries everything is made only for money? 

I live in Italy and in here football is really popular, but it is not a sport anymore, it is more of a way to make money, and there are scandals every day starting from the division D to the national team. 

I love football, but not the Italian football, I love the Icelandic football because that's truly a sport, a real team with no big stars but with people that really play as a team, that understand each other and are truly friendly to each other!

And You? What do you think of Iceland? What do you think of what football has become?