Rose City Renegade: Kristoffer Velde welcomes Portland Timbers spotlight | OneFootball

By Charles Boehm

Incongruous as it may seem for a Norwegian currently living in Oregon, the Portland Timbers’ Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire visit to Inter Miami CF is a homecoming of sorts for Kristoffer Velde (6 pm ET | Apple TV).

Despite spending most of his life in Europe before arriving in the Rose City as a showpiece Designated Player signing last August, Velde has roots in Vice City, and it’s a very American tale.

“My dad and my mother, they both worked for Royal Caribbean. So we were actually living in Miami when I was younger,” Velde explained in a one-on-one conversation with MLSsoccer.com this week.

“When I was 3, 4, my dad worked there; my mother moved to Norway after she met my dad … and they will attend the game on Sunday as well. So it will be nice.”

The Sunday night time slot offers one of the league’s brighter spotlights. So does just about any fixture involving that Lionel Messi-led squad that wears that cruise ship line’s logo on their chests. The defending champs serve as a measuring stick for the rest of MLS, particularly for a Portland side struggling for consistency, hovering in 12th place in the Western Conference (14 points, 4W-6L-2D) and yet to win consecutive matches this season.

“Huge game,” Velde added. “We will play against the best soccer player throughout the history of the game. So it will be an interesting game, in their home stadium, new stadium, nice atmosphere.

“The team in general, even though we had some tough results and bad moments during this season so far, I think the mood has always been good. We have a good morale in the team, and we keep fighting and we keep working on it.”

Maniacal competitor

These are the sort of occasions Velde lives for – and for which Portland paid a reported $5 million to Greek powerhouse Olympiacos, eager to acquire not only his substantial attacking skill set, but also the fiery personality that made him, upon arrival, quite possibly the biggest character in the locker room.

With a high work rate, raging intensity and an eye for the final pass and long-range bangers alike, Velde’s style is explosive, with a spirit to match. Committed, creative and cantankerous, he’s notched 6g/5a since joining the club and has matched his goal total with the same number of yellow cards, reflective of a red-line sort of approach to the sport.

“We have different types of personalities in this team. I think I'm probably the most loud one,” Velde deadpanned. “I don't know. You always need a clown. You always need a guy which does some stupid s--t sometimes.”

Whether it’s a game of head tennis at practice, ping-pong in the training facility or a round of golf with teammates Brandon Bye, Sawyer Jura and Cole Bassett, Velde goes full throttle any time there’s a score to be kept and trash to be talked.

“I always want to win, and I always use dirty tricks to win – or, I do whatever it takes to win,” he said. “I think that's the part of me which probably took me that far. Because if you're not competitive, you will need to find something else to do. Everybody needs that competitiveness in themselves to reach something and do something great.”

Valeri heir apparent?

Head coach Phil Neville clearly concurs. He’s already compared Velde to arguably the biggest icon in the Rose City club’s storied history.

“The players have to drive the intensity. It’s up to Kristof,” said the Englishman over the winter, harking back to the lessons of his own playing days in the English Premier League. “We absolutely love him. I think everybody in Portland loves this player. He has to grab hold of the club and go take us to a championship.

“He’s got the personality to do it. We haven’t had that in a while, since the Diego Valeri days. We haven’t had a DP that’s gone, ‘Right, this is my club, this is my stage and I’m going to take us to a championship and put my name in the rafters.’”

Perhaps it’s that Argentine blood that makes him so combustible, he muses, or the Viking heritage of Haugesund, the coastal region where he grew up. In sheer entertainment terms, it makes him that much more watchable. Consider his reaction to Portland’s offseason cash-for-player trade of midfielder David Ayala to this weekend’s opponents, for instance.

“We’re going to kill them in May when we play against Miami,” Velde said in Spanish.

Living on the edge

In the past he’s even described himself as “annoying,” and local columnist Bill Oram provided a memorable tagline in The Oregonian during Portland's pulsatingly chaotic Audi MLS Cup Playoffs series with San Diego FC last autumn, when he dubbed Velde a “goal-scoring, crotch-grabbing Norwegian villain” as he tiptoed the line between inspired and insane, nearly pulling off a major postseason upset in the process.

“Ask San Diego if I was annoying last year,” said Velde. “I'm always playing on the edge, and I think that I’ve played my best soccer or football when I'm on the edge. And I'm always on the edge to a yellow card, or always on the edge with the referees or the opponents and maybe sometimes my own teammates, I don't know. But I just feel like I need to bring everything to the table to be playing good.”

This has not gone unnoticed by his coaches and teammates. A member of the club’s communications staff explains that “every day they make it a mission to piss him off at training, to get him all riled up. And every day, he leaves the field cursing and throwing things. We actually say it's a bad day if he doesn't leave training like that. But then he'll be fine five minutes later.”

Velde readily concurs.

“I'm a different guy off the pitch. As soon as I step on the field, something happens with me,” he said. “It’s a little bit easy to wind me up. It doesn't take too much. But I know how to wind up others as well. So don't you worry: I can irritate them back.”

No time to waste

It shows in his celebrations, too. Like the time he scored the crucial opening tally of a dramatic 2-1 win over LAFC, the first goal the SoCal heavyweights conceded this season, and leaped onto – then immediately almost fell off – Timber Joey’s famous log in front of the Timbers Army.

That said, Velde’s most recent celly, after he rifled a shot from 20 yards out into the top corner to spark a 6-0 thrashing of Sporting KC, might be his most meaningful one yet: a ball stuffed under his jersey to convey that he and his wife Malin have a baby on the way – a daughter, due in July.

It’s another sign of how comfortably the couple has settled in their new city far from home. Within their first few months, Velde had already turned heads by stopping a shoplifter at the entrance to a downtown clothing store, and picked a local landmark for the site on which he and Malin officially tied the knot: under the St. Johns Bridge, a distinctive steel suspension bridge which spans the Willamette River in North Portland.

“I really like Portland. It's more calm compared to the city I came from, which is Athens – obviously a different lifestyle. But I really like it there, and yeah, the people are amazing. And my wife likes it there,” said Velde, who was also a target of Austin FC two years ago before electing to join Olympiacos instead.

“Hopefully it will be a safe spot for my baby girl to grow up in. We're looking forward to it.”

That comfort coexists with a distinct sense of urgency around the Timbers. Neville himself has said it’s “time to deliver” in his third year in charge, his first two marked by middling results and relatively early postseason exits.

Velde feels that too, even if Sunday’s showdown is a tough test, the final leg of a draining swing that's whisked the Timbers from Portland to Quebec for a midweek tussle with CF Montréal, down to Miami and back home again, more than 6,000 miles (10,361 km) of air travel around three matches in nine days.

“We had a tough start,” said Velde. “But there's so much huge potential in this group that I'm pretty sure we will bounce back, and probably the [6-0 SKC win] was that bounce, and we will keep going further and forward.

“Phil has a good project going on,” he added. “I believe in Phil, and I think he has a huge belief in this team as well. So if we can carry on this together, we can create good things. The season is long, you can’t judge us by a few games now. We will come back and climb the table, that's for sure.”

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