The warning sounded again and again, first in Swedish and then in English. A fire had been detected. Please clear the field. The players left the field. The fire brigade was arriving outside. But in the stands, as a thick cloud of smoke wreathed and curled in the headlights, no one moved. The fans were going to make the game happen by sheer force of will.
It was a game they had been waiting for a long time. The top two teams in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s elite league, had gone into the final day of the season with a difference of just three points. A quirk of fate’s programming meant that their final game was between them. Malmö, the home team, had to win to claim the championship. Elfsborg, the visitors, only needed to avoid defeat. It was billed as a trick final: gold medal match.
The idea of a single game deciding the fate of a league title is extremely rare in modern football, where championships are won over the course of a season rather than a winner-takes-all final. It hasn’t happened in England since 1989, and Italy hasn’t created such compensation for more than half a century.
It’s also increasingly unusual for a title to even play as the season draws to a close. Over the past 30 years, soccer has become so financially stratified that many domestic tournaments are little more than month-long pageants for the wealthiest teams. Sweden, however, is different, a lone beacon of competitive balance. In four of the last six editions of the Allsvenskan, the league has gone even.
How this came to be is a story of rejection of orthodoxy, with the question of why sports exist and who they are for. But it’s also a story about how hard it is to be alone, and how fragile even the most encouraging success can be.
A different path
The walls of Malmö’s Eleda Stadium are lined with memorabilia from the glory days, when Swedish teams could compete with and occasionally beat Europe’s giants.
In 1979, Malmö, taking an amateur team, reached the final of the European Cup. They are still the only Nordic team involved in the game and its successor, the Champions League final. In the 1980s, IFK Gothenburg won two (fewer) continental trophies. By 1994, IFK beat Manchester United and Barcelona in the Champions League.
These victories proved to be a last stand. The dynamics of the game changed dramatically as money invaded football in the 1990s, first from broadcasters, then private investors and finally from oligarchs, corporations and nation states. Riches created a new class of irresistible domestic forces.
“Big money fueled the biggest clubs,” allowing them to build teams full of superstars, said Mats Enquist, who served as general secretary of Svenskelitfotboll, or SEF, the body that runs Sweden’s professional leagues, from 2012 to beginning of the year. For Sweden, like many countries outside Europe’s major TV markets, he said, “it’s impossible to keep up.”
Instead of playing catch-up, Sweden’s response was — essentially — to opt out. In 1999, the country legislated a rule that 51 percent of its sports teams had to be owned by their members: the fans. In 2007, when this rule was challenged, fans fought hard to protect it.
“That was the moment the fans first realized the power they had,” said Noa Bachner, the author of a book examining Sweden’s rejection of football’s economic orthodoxy.
However, they handled it in a bleak landscape.
“People were falling, the standard of play was not good, the league had a lot of problems with hooliganism,” Mr Enquist said. A survey he commissioned as one of his first acts found that only 11 per cent of fans regarded the Allsvenskan as their favorite competition, well behind the English Premier League and the Champions League. “It wasn’t a good place to be,” he said.
Mr. Enquist was an outsider to football when he took a leading role in it: a software entrepreneur by trade and a fan of volleyball and golf by inclination. It was his job, though, to arrange.
His solution set Sweden on an almost heretical path in modern football. Unable to turn to wealthy investors, SEF took advantage of the country’s most obvious strength, the fans. In the face of much skepticism, the authorities “reached out” to supporters, Mr. Enquist said, and set about designing a league they wanted to watch and watch live.
Behavioral boundaries were negotiated, identifying pitch invasion and rocket-launching as red lines, but allowing a tacit leeway for spectacle-serving fireworks. They pushed police to take a more conciliatory approach instead of “treating all fans as potential hooligans,” as Lars-Christer Olsson, the league’s president until this year, said.
A decade later, the transformation has been staggering. Almost alone in Europe’s mid-tier league, Swedish football is a picture of health. He had 11 different champions in 20 years. Attendance has doubled in the last decade. this year brought record crowds. League revenue tripled over the same period. Now, more than 40 percent of Swedish fans identify the Allsvenskan as their priority.
The game of the year between Malmö and Elfsborg should have been the perfect distillation of all that work, an illustration of what makes Sweden a standard-bearer for a different version of football. Instead, he highlighted how fine the line is between empowering fans and losing control of them.
The start of the second half was delayed for 30 minutes as Elfsborg fans faced a barrage of riot police, and then for another half hour when the Malmö ultras, the team’s most die-hard supporters, set off so many clandestine fireworks that they set off fire alarm. When Malmö’s victory was assured, thousands of fans rushed to the stadium. A handful ran up to their Elfsborg counterparts and tossed lit flares into their packed sections.
“There is a little margin,” said Pontus Jansson, a veteran defender who returned to Malmö this year after a decade abroad to end his career. “They got over it.”
For fans, by fans
The moment Malmö’s players and staff claimed their title – two hours later, after all the smoke had cleared – it was an occasion that brought the house down. They left in small groups to collect their medals, in plush presentation boxes, from a folding table. There were no glitter cannons or smoke machines on their backs.
Instead, the photo that will one day adorn the walls alongside all the other memorabilia of past triumphs captured the two elements that make up the club: the players and, gathered on the pitch behind them, the fans.
Everything Swedish football has become has been built by and for the people who go to the stadiums to watch it. Mr. Bachner, the author, clarifies the beginning of a long list of examples: the absence of corporations, sovereign wealth funds and “multi-collegiate projects” from the ranks of club owners. Continued investment in women’s teams; an unofficial ban on holding training camps in authoritarian states; a rule stating that the league must give at least two months’ notice before televising games.
The clearest example, however, is that Sweden – alone among Europe’s major nations – resisted the introduction of video assistant referees. Clubs, at the behest of their members, have consistently voted against the technology, a source of controversy elsewhere because of its not infrequent errors and endless delays.
“I think the fans feel they’re disrupting the atmosphere in the stadium,” Mr. Olson said.
There are things Sweden’s democratic tradition cannot do away with. Malmö’s league title, for example, means another potential Champions League revenue stream that could be enough to give the club — already Sweden’s richest — an insurmountable competitive advantage.
The issue of ultras also creates a problem. “It looks like two games are being played,” Mr. Bachner said. “One on the field and one in the stands, where these teams see how they can show their power and they don’t mind having 20,000 other people waiting while they do it.”
Sweden is not the only country facing this challenge, but Mr Bachner acknowledged the concern that chaos on the season’s exhibition day would lead to calls for more aggressive policing, which could threaten the delicate alliance between authorities and followers.
For many, this would be a step backwards. “It may not be the best league in Europe,” said Johan Lindvall, the league’s chief executive, “but the atmosphere in the stands is.” Race days are both the cornerstone on which all success has been built and proof of how far he has come.
“After we scored the goal, the noise was crazy,” Mr Jansson said. His presence alone is a typical example. He had spent the last seven years as part of the furniture of English football. Just 32, he could still be playing there, among the Premier League’s superstars. Instead, in April, he chose to return home to experience what Swedish football had become.
“That atmosphere,” he said. “That brought me back.”
