They call it fotboll pa riktigt, or “football for real” in Sweden, the country that has become the last bastion of resistance to the market forces of modern football and the march of VAR.
As Premier League clubs prepare to vote on whether to keep VAR on June 6, they might do well to consider the alternative, in Europe’s only elite league where football is still played without replays and refereed in real time. “We won the battle,” Isak Edén, chairman of the Swedish Football Supporter Union, says. “The more we see European football, the stronger our resistance becomes.”
Sweden’s Allsvenskan, its top tier, is the only one of Europe’s 30 leading divisions to have rejected VAR and there is no sign, or appetite even, for its introduction. In Sweden, at least 51 per cent of a club must be owned by its fans, a model that means supporters’ opposition is final. Of Sweden’s 32 elite clubs, 18 said they would vote against the technology, a majority that is now believed to be much bigger, although nobody knows for sure. There is no proposal for VAR and very little debate. “They know if we vote, it will be a no,” Edén says. “So we don’t vote.”
Which is not to say fans are complacent. At Malmo, who are six points clear at the top of the division, the same banner is draped above the Norra Laktaren stand during every match, with the word ‘VAR’ written in the middle of a television screen but obscured by a large red cross. When the Swedish season began in April, supporters of the Stockholm club, AIK, held up a gigantic Asterix-style tifo, showing the walls of Sweden defending its shores from an armada of ships arriving from western Europe, with sails carrying the signs of VAR, Fifa and the euro. “In a small country in northern Europe, where the battle was not over,” read the caption alongside, “where they successfully defied the invaders surrounded by the smouldering ruins of modern football.”
Sweden’s suspicion of VAR was initially about perception, a reaction to its rollout between 2016 and 2020 in the Champions League, the World Cup in Russia and then Europe’s domestic competitions, including in England, and Sweden’s neighbours, Denmark and Norway. At that early stage, it seemed sensible at least to wait while the kinks were ironed out. “When VAR was first introduced around 2018, people here didn’t like the feel of it, the celebration being taken away,” Mattias Larsson, head of public relations at Malmo, says. “And then they saw all the complications. The argument that there would be no debate about referees? Well, that was clearly not the case.”
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There was also particular attention paid to the Premier League, which has long been the most popular foreign competition in Sweden. In the 1980s, a television programme called Tipsextra broadcast English fixtures every Saturday, as part of a betting game called Stryktipset, where fans would predict the results of matches. Even before the arrival of Sven-Goran Eriksson as England manager, Tipsextra helped form a generation of passionate Premier League fans in Sweden, whose views on VAR became more entrenched after seeing the chaos it created. “People here follow the Premier League all the time, it’s very influential,” Larsson says. “And they saw that VAR there was in fact not very helpful at all.”
There was a second stage, though, as Sweden’s rejection of VAR became less reactive and more proactive, an assertion of their own history and values, more than a criticism of others elsewhere. Clubs doubled down on their disapproval of technology and threw their arms around the purest elements of the game, which Sweden had long embraced.
In 1967, Sweden was one of the last European leagues to turn professional and 30 years later, when the Premier League was opening up to foreign investors and swelling television contracts, the Swedish government legislated to ensure its clubs would be majority-owned by their fans.
“There is now an ideological resistance here to VAR,” Noa Bachner, journalist for the Swedish newspaper Expressen, says. “Nobody is sorry the Swedish Super Cup isn’t in Saudi Arabia or that Swedish clubs aren’t owned by Abu Dhabi or part of a multi-group with seven other clubs in Europe. In Sweden, VAR equates to everything that’s bad about modern football.”
Yet there are trade-offs to be made. After coming third in 1994 and reaching the last 16 in both 2002 and 2006, Sweden have now qualified for only one of the last four World Cups and they failed to reach the finals even of the expanded European Championships this summer. At club level, while the likes of Malmo and IFK Goteborg regularly reached the latter stages of European competitions in the 1970s and 1980s, it is now rare to see a Swedish side even in the group stage of the Champions League.
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So has a refusal to modernise caused Swedish football to stagnate? “Sweden was good enough to qualify for the Euros but it’s true, the domestic league has fallen and it wouldn’t be right to say it has nothing to do with the 50+1 rule,” Bachner says. “We knew what was going to happen when we said no to easy money from private investors but we have a sense of soul and authenticity. We can live with being the 25th best league in the world. Nobody regrets that trade.”
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The “football for real” motto adopted by the Allsvenskan is certainly more than just a catchy slogan in Sweden, where supporters are put at the heart of the domestic game in ways that would make fans in Europe’s major leagues do a double-take. Swedish fixture times have to be confirmed at least eight weeks in advance to help supporters plan ahead while midweek matches cannot be played between sides based more than 300 kilometres apart. Standing sections have been retained, tickets rarely cost more than £20 and attendances are booming, with a record total in the top flight last season of more than three million.
There is also less noise around referees, especially among match-going fans. When Elfsborg faced Malmo in the final game of last season, it was a duel of first against second to decide who won the title. Malmo prevailed 1-0 thanks to a soft penalty from a point-blank handball while Elfsborg were also unfortunate not to be given a penalty of their own. “We were robbed,” Edén, an Elfsborg fan, says. “But I didn’t hear anyone shout for VAR, it just wasn’t a topic afterwards.”
Perhaps VAR has been of most assistance to the referees that go without it. “I think there’s a broader acceptance now here of human error,” Bachner says. “We know VAR doesn’t make it better so people don’t bring it up. You accept the mistakes.”
