Football Season Guide

Sandefjord were one of the overachievers last season as they managed to pretty much stave off relegation pretty early despite having one of the most modest squads in the league. Coach Hans Erik Odegaard managed to create a pretty solid squad that did better than expected while playing quite open and attacking football, something that teams at the bottom end of the standings rarely do. Yet, he is facing a real challenge in replicating this sort of success this season after a pretty major exodus in the winter. Losing key attacking performer in Kristoffer Hansen is a blow in itself but, added to that, the Whales also parted ways with Vidar Jonsson, Martin Krezrigler and Brice Wembangomo. Thus, they lost probably four of their best players and it will be a hard task in trying to replace them with adequate quality, especially given the tight budget. There were some interesting additions made nevertheless, with winger Keanin Ayer Boya a potentially interesting signing, but as a whole the squad does feel a lot weaker and thinner with a week before the start of the season. Someone who could bring up a bit more quality this season is Costa Rican Deyver Vega, who never really had much impact last season after joining late in the campaign, but has quality and flair to replace the goals that Janssen provided last season. However, the outlook for the Whales is definitely rather grim and they will definitely need to extract a lot of points from difficult games to give themselves a chance in a survival battle.