The Swedish Leagues: Rejecting Modern Football and Winning Over Fans

On a recent Footballco Business Podcast, our guest was Robert Johansson , Chief Communications Officer for Svensk Elitfotboll (Swedish Leagues). Robert joined us to discuss how the Swedish Leagues, representing the top two tiers of Swedish football, made Swedes fall in love with the domestic game after years of being behind the Premier League and Champions League.

To do so, the leagues rejected much of what is considered the norm in modern football, such as VAR and foreign ownership. Some of these changes mean that it's now harder for Swedish teams to compete in European competitions, but they also resulted in record match attendances, a tripling of league revenues and 40 per cent of fans naming the Allsvenskan as their favourite league.

The NBL Strategy

The NBL (Nordic Best Leagues) Strategy was an initiative started in 2008 by the member clubs of the Swedish Professional Football Leagues when the clubs highlighted their concern that Sweden would fall behind the other European competitors and leagues. This kickstarted the changes that saw the rise of domestic football fandom and attendance at games.

There were five core areas I would describe. The first one was the stadium experience. We had to find a way to make the matchday as attractive as possible to attract people and to enjoy the game. And since we were not the best on the pitch, we had to be the best off the pitch.

Also, there was a sporting development. This is important. Of course, we still need to get better on the pitch. We have to be able to work with young talents in a better way to make them maybe play one or two years domestically at a top level before leaving, for example, to England or Belgium or the French League.

The third core area will be economic growth or revenue streams. More money, more commercial. We had to not play only 15 home games a year. We had to have a product that lasted 365 days a year.

The fourth area was image. It's all about branding and marketing. To do that, we need to use the last core area called 'new media' and digital investments. Like at that time, social media, for example, was not the same as today. Back then, not even every club had its own webpage.

The best way of achieving this was acknowledging our fans by making them a stakeholder in the development. We brought them to the table with different questions. We listened to them what they wanted in the stands to make a good product. We brought them to the table when we were planning their schedule. We were listening to them while we were doing campaigns or communication.

Involving the fans meant the Swedish Leagues followed the German 50+1 model, with clubs becoming member-owned.

VAR

These changes and placing more power in the hands of members resulted in the Allsvenskan being the only league in Europe's top 30 divisions to reject VAR.

With the use of VAR not looking to go away anytime soon and few fans supporting it, we had to ask Robert how the Swedish leagues have been able to remain VAR-free for this long.

This is all about democracy. Since the clubs are membership-owned, the members are often are supporters as well. So, if enough people get together and then vote within the club, the club needs to work on this. At the moment, we have 32 clubs in the two top tiers and 16, half of which are actually working actively against VAR.

So this is what we have to work with. We are the league organization where half our clubs don't want to use VAR and half haven't said anything at all at the moment. And so we are handing those digits to the Swedish FA and they need to make the decision. And of course, if half the clubs don't want to use it, it's going to be a difficult task for them to make a positive decision....

The fans [members] are in the majority. And they say all this spontaneous joy of football is taken away from them. Because if you score a goal, you still need to wait if it's valid, you know, or if it's not.

Challenging in Europe

With members being majority shareholders in the clubs and clubs rejecting foreign ownership, Swedish clubs have found it harder to compete in European competitions against teams with larger revenues. However, with a greater focus on the domestic game, this is less of an issue for fans than might be expected.

Since we were more successful with our club teams in the eighties and nineties, this was a really huge thing. During recent years, I think it has gone hand in hand with us growing domestically, becoming, we call it 'football for real', our football.

And so most of the fans, they will actually prefer to go on an away game to Stockholm to lose than to go to Madrid on a Saturday on Tuesday night to lose with six-zero. We have built this story about our football and then we are like a family sticking together, but also, The Champions League is really difficult to achieve, but if you can reach the group stage in any other [European] league, you can actually also win games. So I think the interest is getting bigger for competing in Europe.

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