Exclusive: Home and away life of Stale Solbakken

Stale Solbakken is surprisingly tall. It's one of the first things that strikes you about him. He's in great nick, too, barely a few ounces above his playing weight during a career brought to a premature end 11 years ago by that well-documented heart trouble.

This, it turns out, is no accident. Solbakken works out and runs every day, determined to keep his energy level at maximum for the draining task of managing Wolverhampton Wanderers FC.

He is the club's first overseas boss who stepped into what he describes as a "graveyard" when he arrived in the summer to formally succeed Mick McCarthy.

All around him there was suspicion, tension, a little hostility and a great uncertainty about what this 44-year-old Norwegian of no real English profile would bring to a club reeling from relegation, rumours of dressing room fractures and the prospect of losing star players. This was not going to be easy.

"So I think it's very important to stay in good physical condition, very important," he tells me.

"If you feel better in yourself then you will do the job better. That seems obvious to me. If you let your physique drop then you will let your mind drop too. I think the two go together.

"I run every day, work in the gym . . . You have got to face players who will feel at times have been treated unjustly by you. They will not be happy you have left them out of the team or not played them in a particular way. Y

"ou have to be honest and direct with them and you have to have energy to deal with all this."

As a result, Wolves players who were probably in the same camp as Roger Johnson but didn't like to admit – "I've never heard of him," was the central defender's blunt reaction to Solbakken's appointment – were greeted by a man of just over 6ft but seemingly taller and very much of this new slick, smart age of football. There would be no mickey-taking of a gaffer gone to seed here.

A few months on, and those tensions are dissolving. Yes, Solbakken is still feeling out Wolverhampton as much as Wolverhampton is feeling out Solbakken but it is probably fair to say each quites like what they see.

He has now finally ended the curse of football people's life – a hotel room can never be a home – and found an apartment in Tettenhall.

"People told me I wouldn't be able to live here but it has not been like that at all," he reports.

"Everyone seems to respect my space and give me time to breathe. I've found a nice restaurant/bar I can go and relax in when the chance comes. It has been very good. Certainly nothing like Cologne (his previous club in Germany). There I could not step outside my front door before people were jumping on top of me.

"I need time to switch off. I spend a lot of time available to the media and talking to you. It's all part of the job, perhaps more than you like. But it means I don't like big parties and all the attention. I'm afraid my wife has gone to a few weddings alone."

It would be stupid to deny that his is a lonely existence for the time being. Solbakken is a devoted family man, a father of three who openly, and rather charmingly, confesses to have fallen in love at first sight of his wife Anniken, then a 20-year-old seven years his junior working in fashion for Benetton and the sister of his best friend's girlfriend.

She has since re-trained as a psychologist specialising in working with abused children, although currently she is focused largely on a familiar experience – cramming their marriage and a family life into the demands of the modern-day football man.

"It was not so bad before the transfer window closed, it was a little bit crazy – I was working 12, 14-hour days. Sleeping and working, and that was about it," he says.

"I've been living in a foreign country for seven years now where you don't have so many friends and so I am quite used to it in that sense. And that can mean that it actually brings you closer together as a family when you are together.

"But I struggle more than them because they are together; I am the lonely one. There are DVDs and always lots of football. I watch lots of football. International football. Spanish football, you've got to stay up to date on all the international leagues. I think that's an important part of my job."

I wonder, amid this enforced separation, what his perfect day would be . . .

"Oh, that would be with them. A family breakfast, and then some activities, sporting activities with the children. Football with the boys or perhaps swimming with my little girl . . . a lovely lunch together and then maybe home for some games, perhaps a movie in the evening."

You can practically hear the log-fire crackling in the back ground as Solbakken's longing becomes clear.

But they remain at home in Norway leaving Solbakken to fill his spare hours here reading or watching endless hours of football, either on TV or in the flesh.

The Nordic countries are the current powerhouse for crime fiction with a dark and often political edge and Norway's leading exponent Jo Nesbo – strangely a former footballer forced to turn to other things when injury ended his career as a teenager – is Solbakken's favourite.

He finds interesting, too, political histories and ideology especially from the period around the Second World War which is not too surprising when you consider his nation's role in defiance of the Nazis.

The shudder provoked by such terrorism was back in his native land, of course, a year last July when along with the rest of his fellow-citizens he began to hear about the madness of Anders Breivik's Oslo bomb and island slaughter.

"I was preparing Cologne that day for the final pre-season match against Arsenal," he says. "It began as perhaps 10 casualties but when I woke up the next morning I was suddenly hearing about 60, 70 people having been killed.

"It was so unlike Norway. It did not seem real. And it has started a big debate in my country.

"You must realise that in Oslo you can stroll into our Houses of Parliament and sit down and listen to the politicians. That is how we are used to living. We really do not want to have a society where the police are walking around with guns, but something like that has got everybody thinking . . ."

Solbakken's own politics are unhesitating and clear and revealed when I wonder who would get his vote if he had one in the American election.

The question is barely finished before he says, firmly and with feeling: "Obama."

Why so?

"I have always believed in those things, it is the way I have been brought up. I'm a socialist I suppose in that I believe in equality for all, equality in opportunities and sport. It is very important and for me just a matter of common sense. I have leant my name to campaigns back home. I've been raised that way. I've been raised to stay humble and respect people.

"That's why I feel we have a big problem here with prices for football. We have to be careful about where this is going.

"It should not be a choice for someone as to whether they go to the game or they put a meal on the table for the family that night.

"There is a new TV deal coming in and will be bigger than ever. But you and I know where the money will go and it will not go to lowering ticket prices I think."

But he likes England. "Of course – I think you have a great sense of humour here," he says although there has been one disappointment, one that appears to have taken him by surprise.

Solbakken is currently sounding out schools for his three children, boys Sondre 15, Markus 12 and eight-year-old daughter Ida for next summer, their arrival having been delayed by the oldest's key examination year back home.

"Yes, the schools I found strange. The schools I found a little bit like going back in time."

Going back in time?

"Yes. For a start everyone is in uniform, all the same, something which we don't like in Norway.

"But what I found was that everyone in the schools were giving me the hard sell. They were telling me about how good their exam results were and how great their facilities were . . . no-one said to me 'I will look after your child' or 'I will make sure he enjoys his education. This is what we can do for him.'

"I found it all a little bit, soulless."

But this is a man who is warming to his task, you sense.

Solbakken's keen intelligence is obvious; he also has a wicked turn of phrase and sense of humour that has surprised many.

Most of all, he feels he is a man now beginning to make progress in the task he has taken on.

"I think now the players are with what we are trying to do and when you have that, then you can start making progress," he adds.

"When I came here it was like a graveyard. I knew everybody was wondering what I would do. Everybody was suspicious, they had all worked with the former manager, there were a lot of rumours. That is natural.

"But now I think we are beginning to understand each other and trust each other. In fact, I am surprised we have got to this point so quickly. I would take 100 times where we are now when I think to where we there then."