Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey. In 1981, a match between two Izmir teams, Kar_iyaka and Göztepe, drew eighty thousand spectators. At a practice game between the same rivals in 2003, a fan was stabbed to death. Even by the high European standard of soccer fanaticism, it’s rare to find such large-scale, life-and-death investment surrounding a match by two second-tier competitors from the same city.Elif Batuman, "Life Among Turkey's Soccer Fanatics", New Yorker 7 mars 2011
onsdag 13 mars 2013
Fotbollsromantik och huliganromantik
Romantik är en viktig och positiv del av fotbollen. Men ibland går den för långt. I hyllningarna av det passionerade och exotiska sker en glidning till hyllningar av huliganism och liknande. Så läste jag en artikel i New Yorker om Besiktas fotbollsfans, som hyllar fansens passion -- det är fint -- och lyfter fram huliganism och våld som indikatorer på just passionen. Är inte det en "problematisk" (jag är akademiker!) glidning?
tisdag 12 mars 2013
The Allsvenskan clubs: a cod sociology introduction
an unfinished introduction to the Swedish top flight clubs
---
This is an attempt to describe the social character/identity top flight clubs in Sweden (the league is called Allsvenskan) for English-speaking friends. It's a bit of a challenge as, as any football interested Swede can tell you, Swedish clubs just aren't that colourful. There's no Swedish Livorno or St Pauli (even though some GAIS or Hammarby supporters would like that) and no Ruhrgebiet with a great Dortmund - Schalke rivalry. But anyway, this is an attempt.
Except for my own prejudices and discussions with football fans I've met, I also use a couple of previous articles: feuillleton journalist Isobel Hadley-Kamptz tongue in cheek blog post on which Allsvenskan team is which political party; an article from quality Swedish football magazine Offside on fans in Stockholm; a map over fan club members in Gothenburg; a tabloid poll among parliamentarians on their sport preferences. And, to be honest, discussions on internet forums, like this and this.
I focus on the clubs from Stockholm and Gothenburg, as those cities are large enough to have several popular teams, which means that there is more of a difference between them.
Generally
Football is the most popular sport in Sweden: it's rival amont team sports is ice hockey, but hockey can only really compete with football in the north of the country. The clubs affiliated with the Swedish Football Association has a million members so the sport is extremly popular, and has no social character of its own; it is neither middle class nor working class, and even if the poll linked above with 1000 participants shows that left party voters prefer football while christian democrats prefer hockey, I am not sure that this is generally true.
The current Allsvenskan clubs tend to be around a hundred years old: Örgryte IS from Gothenburg was formed in 1887 and are Sweden's first football club, and Stockholm's Djurgården and AIK were both formed in 1892, but many teams were formed in the early 20th century. A latecomer exception is BK Häcken from Gothenburg, formed in 1940. Another current exception is Syrianska, a team formed in the Assyrian community in Södertälje in the 1970s.
Stockholm
English football journalist David Goldblatt writes in his global football tome The Ball Is Round:
Offside nr 6 2008 explored the geographical distribution of support for the big teams in Stockholm, proxied by members of the clubs. With yellow standing for AIK, blue for DIF and green for Hammarby, the map looks like this:
Generally the picture seems to be that most of the inner city - except for gentrified, once proletarian Sodermalm which is green - is dominated by DIF, while AIK has the western suburbs and Hammarby the suburbs directly south of the city. Other areas, like northern, southwestern and southeastern suburbs, are divided.
https://www.flashback.org/t708882
AIK
The most popular team, "the people's team" in Stockholm, and probably also the most controversial team in the country outside of the capital, because of their association with arrogance and hooliganism. According to older blue-collar unionists from Stockholm I've spoken to a popular team in that kind of social strata, even if of course Hammarby like to portray themselves as a "workers' team".
Djurgårdens IF (DIF)
The upper class team of Stockholm, named after one of the posher areas in the city and with their ground (Stockholm stadion, built for the 1912 olympics) in a similarly nice part, Östermalm. Contradictorily enough also known as "Järnkaminerna" (the iron stoves) for their physical style of play.
Also interesting is that among current Swedish party leaders, not only the conservative party leader prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is a DIF fan, but also the Left Party's Lars Ohly. Naturally, Ohly has had to defend this unorthodox supportership, and has, like so many leftists supporting DIF or ÖIS, referenced some part of club history to prove that the team is not purely upper class.
Hammarby IF
The team from the southern part of the inner city, historically a proletarian area which gives Hammarby their distinctive character as a vaguely prole/bohemian middle class team. They have the best before the game-song in "Just idag är jag stark" ("Today I'm strong") by famous mod/junkie/Hammarby supporter Kenta, known from the documentary Dom kallar oss mods ("They call us mods").'
Söder, the area that Hammarby comes from, is the finest example of gentrification in Sweden, and the club at least partly is gentrified. A typical criticism of Hammarby from a fan of another Stockholm club is this, taken from an internet forum:
Gothenburg
Gothenburg is the second biggest city in Sweden with about half a million inhabitants. It is traditionally a manufacturing and harbor city and in comparison with political and cultural Stockholm, an economic and more working-class city. Its main football clubs all have distinct social identities, described in expressions such as (GAIS-friendly!) "Blåvitt are dansband [Swedish country music], ÖIS are classical music, and GAIS are rock'n roll".
Political scientists Anders Widfelt and Lennart Nilsson in 2008 conducted a survey of football opinions in Western Sweden (pdf). Partially this confirms what we already thought we knew: yes, supporters of the (academic, 'good taste') Liberal Party are most likely fans of ÖIS. While Aftonbladet's poll tell us that IFK Göteborg, together with similarly working class/people's team Malmö FF is by far the most popular among Social Democratic parliamentarians. In a Widfeldt-Nilsson poll in 2007, 61 percent of football supporters supported IFK, 11 percent GAIS and 8 percent ÖIS. Häcken and Västra Frölunda together got 1 percent.
Similar to City - United in Manchester, or HSV - St Pauli in Hamburg, also in Gothenburg supporters argue over which team is the more "inner city" (and thus more "authentic"), as opposed to suburban. This of course is a hard question to give a definitive answer to. However an IFK supporter magazine got access to data over the zip codes of all members of IFK, GAIS and ÖIS, and could thus construct a map over the distribution in and around the city of members of the three clubs. It looks like this:
Blue stands for a majority of IFK members, green for GAIS and red for ÖIS. The darker the hue, the bigger the majority. We see that IFK have much more members than the two other clubs, and dominate most of the areas. Therefore it's most interesting to look at which areas have another majority. ÖIS dominate in Örgryte itself and adjacent areas Överås and Kallebäck, as well as inner-city area Vasastaden and two southern suburbs. All of these areas, except maybe for Kallebäck, are well-off, which rhymes well with ÖIS' reputation. GAIS' areas are more surprising: wealthy Fiskebäck in the west, the southern archipelago, and a neighbouring municipality.
"När det gäller yrkesgrupp, eller klass, är IFK Göteborg genomgående starka. Allra starkast är dock Blåvitt bland lägre tjänstemän och arbetare. GAIS har en viss arbetarklassprofil, medan Örgryte har sitt klart starkaste stöd bland högre tjänstemän och företagare. När det gäller partisympati har IFK brett stöd från vänster till höger. GAIS:arna har sitt största stöd bland v- och mp-sympatisörer medan ÖIS, å andra Svenska fotbollssupportrar sidan, har sin starkaste ställning bland moderaterna. I en jämförelse mellan IFK:s och Frölunda Indians supportrar konstaterar Mattias A Färdigh att Frölundasupportrarna liksom ishockeylagens anhängare i allmänhet befinner sig ideologiskt längre till höger och i större utsträckning är män. (Färdigh 2007)"
http://www.ips.gu.se/digitalAssets/1294/1294426_155-164.pdf
IFK Göteborg
"Blåvitt" (blue and white) is by far the most popular team in the city, and probably the most popular in the country. Traditionally associated with working class supporters and social democrats, also because Gothenburg in general has this image compared to much richer capital Stockholm. Widfeldt and Nilsson's poll in Gothenburg gives some support for this image. Among blue-collar workers, 64 percent supported IFK, whereas only 50 percent of company owners supported Blåvitt. Politically, IFK were weakest among supporters of heavily middle class Green Party voters - 41 per cent of the Greens supported IFK, and 16 per cent GAIS.
IFK stands for "Idrottsföreningen kamraterna", "Sports society the comrades" and in the early 20th century a bunch of IFK clubs were formed around the country, among them IFK Stockholm, IFK Malmö and IFK Norrköping. They all played in white and blue and had a central organisation with among other things a "Comrades' cup". "Blåvitt's" first chairman was an engineer, but already in the beginning the club had its main base in the working class, especially in contrast to the twelve years older, in the city dominant club ÖIS which was the middle class team (see Andersson, Kung fotboll). Some of the club's early legends were decisively working class: for example the sharpshooter and factory worker Erik Börjesson, and ship yard worker "Svarte" Filip Johansson. A much more recent connection between class and IFK is the documentary Football's last proletarians from 2011, about IFK's very successful team in the 1980s that won the UEFA cup in 1982 and were runners up in 1987, while consisting of amateurs who had day jobs as - to quote the tag line of the movie - chefs, plumbers and kindergarten teachers.
The film is heavily sentimental for a Social Democratic "paradise lost" of increasing equality, visionary Social Democratic governments and a workers' team that could beat arrogant professionals from Hamburg and Barcelona. The film is hardly historically correct in its implication that the IFK team of the 1980s were so to say the "superstructure" of the Social Democratic political economy as the "base", but it makes for good viewing.
The poster boy for the movie is right back "Red" Ruben Svensson, one of the most famous leftists of Swedish football. From an interview with Svensson in a Social Democratic journal:
Örgryte IS
ÖIS was the first football club formed in Sweden, in 1892, and in central Gothenburg, by a bunch of football fields, you can find a stone that celebrates the place where the first organized football game in Sweden was played, with ÖIS as one of the teams. Örgryte is a wealthy area and the club always had a reputation as that kind of club; Goldblatt in The Ball is Round describes it as "a bourgeois multi-sports club". Fittingly, ÖIS has a reputation as a team playing technical, entertaining football ("lirarnas lag"), in contrast to IFK's reputation for "workers' football", meaning functionalist, straight-forward no frills football.
Isobel Hadley-Kamptz in her overview over Swedish clubs' political equivalents is spot on about ÖIS: "The old liberal party. Warren Buffett style. Capitalists who are too posh to vote Conservative."
ÖIS has won the Swedish league twelve times (eleven times before 1914), but has had a weak economy for a rather long time and today they play in the third league, after being degraded from the second league because of bankruptcy in 2011. This is brutal considering how popular the team once was - ÖIS still holds the record in Swedish football for average attendance during a season, with an average of 25 490 persons in 1959.
Scania (southern Sweden)
Malmö FF
Eric Persson, legendary chairman of blue-shirted Malmö FF, called the "chief", a "strong man" (stark man) of the patriarchal 20th century, once said: "In MFF we play in blue but we vote red."
In the old days, there were two big clubs in Malmö, a harbor and industrial city in southern Sweden: IFK Malmö was the white-collar team and Malmö FF the blue-collar one (cf. Andersson, Kung fotboll). Since then, IFK have lost ground and are now playing in the third division, a shadow of their old self, and MFF is the undisputed "people's team" in Malmö, their worst rivalry today being not with IFK Malmö but with Scania rival Helsingborgs IF, from thirty minutes up the coast.
In Widfeldt and Nilsson's poll from 2004, 51 percent of Malmö citizens stated that they had a favourite football team, which is much higher than the figures for eastern Scania (ca 35 percent), where there are no Allsvenskan clubs. Three quarters of football supporters in Malmö supported MFF and MFF was by far the most popular team in any social class and among any party's votes. Widfeldt and Nilsson compare with the two other Scania (sometimes) Allsvenskan clubs, and note that Helsingborgs IF also have a broad social spectrum among their supporters, but with more centre-right voters, while the fans of Landskrona BOIS, a from blue-collar Landskrona, are more blue-collar and social democratic than the fans of MFF or HIF.
For those who speak Swedish (and understand Scanian dialect!) this is a very entertaining discussion on the topic "is MFF a workers' club?", from the documentary Blådårar about MFF fans.
Landskrona being more undisputedly blue-collar, this picture is a classic example of a connection between politics and football in Sweden:
Gefle IF
Gefle is the northern-most team in Allsvenskan. Historian Torbjörn Andersson discusses football's social history in Gävle thoroughly in his book Kung fotboll, and shows that in the early 20th century Gefle IF was the team of the establishment in the city.
---
I like football cultures. Clubs with histories and styles of their own, with their own identities, whether blue-collar or white-collar, a kick and rush legacy or a tradition of playing technical short passing football. I'd say it's all good except it's not - right wing politics is not good at all. Except for that though, I respect any club with their own identity.
This is an attempt to describe the social character/identity top flight clubs in Sweden (the league is called Allsvenskan) for English-speaking friends. It's a bit of a challenge as, as any football interested Swede can tell you, Swedish clubs just aren't that colourful. There's no Swedish Livorno or St Pauli (even though some GAIS or Hammarby supporters would like that) and no Ruhrgebiet with a great Dortmund - Schalke rivalry. But anyway, this is an attempt.
Except for my own prejudices and discussions with football fans I've met, I also use a couple of previous articles: feuillleton journalist Isobel Hadley-Kamptz tongue in cheek blog post on which Allsvenskan team is which political party; an article from quality Swedish football magazine Offside on fans in Stockholm; a map over fan club members in Gothenburg; a tabloid poll among parliamentarians on their sport preferences. And, to be honest, discussions on internet forums, like this and this.
I focus on the clubs from Stockholm and Gothenburg, as those cities are large enough to have several popular teams, which means that there is more of a difference between them.
Generally
Football is the most popular sport in Sweden: it's rival amont team sports is ice hockey, but hockey can only really compete with football in the north of the country. The clubs affiliated with the Swedish Football Association has a million members so the sport is extremly popular, and has no social character of its own; it is neither middle class nor working class, and even if the poll linked above with 1000 participants shows that left party voters prefer football while christian democrats prefer hockey, I am not sure that this is generally true.
The current Allsvenskan clubs tend to be around a hundred years old: Örgryte IS from Gothenburg was formed in 1887 and are Sweden's first football club, and Stockholm's Djurgården and AIK were both formed in 1892, but many teams were formed in the early 20th century. A latecomer exception is BK Häcken from Gothenburg, formed in 1940. Another current exception is Syrianska, a team formed in the Assyrian community in Södertälje in the 1970s.
Stockholm
English football journalist David Goldblatt writes in his global football tome The Ball Is Round:
"AIK, Djurgården and Hammerby [sic], the clubs of the bourgeoisie, aristocracy and working class respectively - though both AIK and Djurgården had working-class origins before being taken over by their social superiors."This to me does not seem too true; to call AIK a bourgeoisie team and Djurgården aristocratic seems far fetched. Djurgården surely are the upper class team (bourgeoisie as well as aristocratic, if the few aristocrats in Stockholm care about football), but AIK's social character is, as I will explain below, much broader than bourgeoisie.
Offside nr 6 2008 explored the geographical distribution of support for the big teams in Stockholm, proxied by members of the clubs. With yellow standing for AIK, blue for DIF and green for Hammarby, the map looks like this:
Generally the picture seems to be that most of the inner city - except for gentrified, once proletarian Sodermalm which is green - is dominated by DIF, while AIK has the western suburbs and Hammarby the suburbs directly south of the city. Other areas, like northern, southwestern and southeastern suburbs, are divided.
https://www.flashback.org/t708882
AIK
The most popular team, "the people's team" in Stockholm, and probably also the most controversial team in the country outside of the capital, because of their association with arrogance and hooliganism. According to older blue-collar unionists from Stockholm I've spoken to a popular team in that kind of social strata, even if of course Hammarby like to portray themselves as a "workers' team".
Djurgårdens IF (DIF)
The upper class team of Stockholm, named after one of the posher areas in the city and with their ground (Stockholm stadion, built for the 1912 olympics) in a similarly nice part, Östermalm. Contradictorily enough also known as "Järnkaminerna" (the iron stoves) for their physical style of play.
Also interesting is that among current Swedish party leaders, not only the conservative party leader prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is a DIF fan, but also the Left Party's Lars Ohly. Naturally, Ohly has had to defend this unorthodox supportership, and has, like so many leftists supporting DIF or ÖIS, referenced some part of club history to prove that the team is not purely upper class.
Hammarby IF
The team from the southern part of the inner city, historically a proletarian area which gives Hammarby their distinctive character as a vaguely prole/bohemian middle class team. They have the best before the game-song in "Just idag är jag stark" ("Today I'm strong") by famous mod/junkie/Hammarby supporter Kenta, known from the documentary Dom kallar oss mods ("They call us mods").'
Söder, the area that Hammarby comes from, is the finest example of gentrification in Sweden, and the club at least partly is gentrified. A typical criticism of Hammarby from a fan of another Stockholm club is this, taken from an internet forum:
"Full of people who moved in to the city and dorks who have bought the myth about the cozy workers' club."Stressing that Hammarby has many fans who don't come from Stockholm is of course a way of pointing out that their fans are less authentic than the fans of other clubs.
Gothenburg
Gothenburg is the second biggest city in Sweden with about half a million inhabitants. It is traditionally a manufacturing and harbor city and in comparison with political and cultural Stockholm, an economic and more working-class city. Its main football clubs all have distinct social identities, described in expressions such as (GAIS-friendly!) "Blåvitt are dansband [Swedish country music], ÖIS are classical music, and GAIS are rock'n roll".
Political scientists Anders Widfelt and Lennart Nilsson in 2008 conducted a survey of football opinions in Western Sweden (pdf). Partially this confirms what we already thought we knew: yes, supporters of the (academic, 'good taste') Liberal Party are most likely fans of ÖIS. While Aftonbladet's poll tell us that IFK Göteborg, together with similarly working class/people's team Malmö FF is by far the most popular among Social Democratic parliamentarians. In a Widfeldt-Nilsson poll in 2007, 61 percent of football supporters supported IFK, 11 percent GAIS and 8 percent ÖIS. Häcken and Västra Frölunda together got 1 percent.
Similar to City - United in Manchester, or HSV - St Pauli in Hamburg, also in Gothenburg supporters argue over which team is the more "inner city" (and thus more "authentic"), as opposed to suburban. This of course is a hard question to give a definitive answer to. However an IFK supporter magazine got access to data over the zip codes of all members of IFK, GAIS and ÖIS, and could thus construct a map over the distribution in and around the city of members of the three clubs. It looks like this:
Blue stands for a majority of IFK members, green for GAIS and red for ÖIS. The darker the hue, the bigger the majority. We see that IFK have much more members than the two other clubs, and dominate most of the areas. Therefore it's most interesting to look at which areas have another majority. ÖIS dominate in Örgryte itself and adjacent areas Överås and Kallebäck, as well as inner-city area Vasastaden and two southern suburbs. All of these areas, except maybe for Kallebäck, are well-off, which rhymes well with ÖIS' reputation. GAIS' areas are more surprising: wealthy Fiskebäck in the west, the southern archipelago, and a neighbouring municipality.
"När det gäller yrkesgrupp, eller klass, är IFK Göteborg genomgående starka. Allra starkast är dock Blåvitt bland lägre tjänstemän och arbetare. GAIS har en viss arbetarklassprofil, medan Örgryte har sitt klart starkaste stöd bland högre tjänstemän och företagare. När det gäller partisympati har IFK brett stöd från vänster till höger. GAIS:arna har sitt största stöd bland v- och mp-sympatisörer medan ÖIS, å andra Svenska fotbollssupportrar sidan, har sin starkaste ställning bland moderaterna. I en jämförelse mellan IFK:s och Frölunda Indians supportrar konstaterar Mattias A Färdigh att Frölundasupportrarna liksom ishockeylagens anhängare i allmänhet befinner sig ideologiskt längre till höger och i större utsträckning är män. (Färdigh 2007)"
http://www.ips.gu.se/digitalAssets/1294/1294426_155-164.pdf
IFK Göteborg
"Blåvitt" (blue and white) is by far the most popular team in the city, and probably the most popular in the country. Traditionally associated with working class supporters and social democrats, also because Gothenburg in general has this image compared to much richer capital Stockholm. Widfeldt and Nilsson's poll in Gothenburg gives some support for this image. Among blue-collar workers, 64 percent supported IFK, whereas only 50 percent of company owners supported Blåvitt. Politically, IFK were weakest among supporters of heavily middle class Green Party voters - 41 per cent of the Greens supported IFK, and 16 per cent GAIS.
IFK stands for "Idrottsföreningen kamraterna", "Sports society the comrades" and in the early 20th century a bunch of IFK clubs were formed around the country, among them IFK Stockholm, IFK Malmö and IFK Norrköping. They all played in white and blue and had a central organisation with among other things a "Comrades' cup". "Blåvitt's" first chairman was an engineer, but already in the beginning the club had its main base in the working class, especially in contrast to the twelve years older, in the city dominant club ÖIS which was the middle class team (see Andersson, Kung fotboll). Some of the club's early legends were decisively working class: for example the sharpshooter and factory worker Erik Börjesson, and ship yard worker "Svarte" Filip Johansson. A much more recent connection between class and IFK is the documentary Football's last proletarians from 2011, about IFK's very successful team in the 1980s that won the UEFA cup in 1982 and were runners up in 1987, while consisting of amateurs who had day jobs as - to quote the tag line of the movie - chefs, plumbers and kindergarten teachers.
The film is heavily sentimental for a Social Democratic "paradise lost" of increasing equality, visionary Social Democratic governments and a workers' team that could beat arrogant professionals from Hamburg and Barcelona. The film is hardly historically correct in its implication that the IFK team of the 1980s were so to say the "superstructure" of the Social Democratic political economy as the "base", but it makes for good viewing.
The poster boy for the movie is right back "Red" Ruben Svensson, one of the most famous leftists of Swedish football. From an interview with Svensson in a Social Democratic journal:
"IFK is usually called a workers' club. Is that really true today?We see the association between workers' club and humility, and I'll say that this puts the finger on IFK's social character today: certainly not strictly a workers' club, but a club with that kind of heritage but today mainly the people's team in the city. Club legend Torbjörn Nilsson, IFK's best player in the 80s, explains the history in the same interview:
- You can't say that IFK is a workers' club anymore. But what makes IFK popular and folkligt (folksy) is precisely the humility. People like that kind of stuff in Sweden, just as with Ingemar Stenmark."
"– The borders between teams are getting blurry. IFK was more connected to [metal factory] SKF, [car and truck factories] Volvo, and [ship yard] Götaverken, while GAIS was more [gentrified working class area] Majorna. It's not like that anymore. But some of it sticks around, a little like an ideology. The basic ideas are still there, but you have to adapt to keep up."Just like Svensson, Nilsson also stresses that a lot has changed but that there still is some continuity in that some of the club's history and social character still lives on.
Örgryte IS
ÖIS was the first football club formed in Sweden, in 1892, and in central Gothenburg, by a bunch of football fields, you can find a stone that celebrates the place where the first organized football game in Sweden was played, with ÖIS as one of the teams. Örgryte is a wealthy area and the club always had a reputation as that kind of club; Goldblatt in The Ball is Round describes it as "a bourgeois multi-sports club". Fittingly, ÖIS has a reputation as a team playing technical, entertaining football ("lirarnas lag"), in contrast to IFK's reputation for "workers' football", meaning functionalist, straight-forward no frills football.
Isobel Hadley-Kamptz in her overview over Swedish clubs' political equivalents is spot on about ÖIS: "The old liberal party. Warren Buffett style. Capitalists who are too posh to vote Conservative."
ÖIS has won the Swedish league twelve times (eleven times before 1914), but has had a weak economy for a rather long time and today they play in the third league, after being degraded from the second league because of bankruptcy in 2011. This is brutal considering how popular the team once was - ÖIS still holds the record in Swedish football for average attendance during a season, with an average of 25 490 persons in 1959.
Scania (southern Sweden)
Malmö FF
Eric Persson, legendary chairman of blue-shirted Malmö FF, called the "chief", a "strong man" (stark man) of the patriarchal 20th century, once said: "In MFF we play in blue but we vote red."In the old days, there were two big clubs in Malmö, a harbor and industrial city in southern Sweden: IFK Malmö was the white-collar team and Malmö FF the blue-collar one (cf. Andersson, Kung fotboll). Since then, IFK have lost ground and are now playing in the third division, a shadow of their old self, and MFF is the undisputed "people's team" in Malmö, their worst rivalry today being not with IFK Malmö but with Scania rival Helsingborgs IF, from thirty minutes up the coast.
In Widfeldt and Nilsson's poll from 2004, 51 percent of Malmö citizens stated that they had a favourite football team, which is much higher than the figures for eastern Scania (ca 35 percent), where there are no Allsvenskan clubs. Three quarters of football supporters in Malmö supported MFF and MFF was by far the most popular team in any social class and among any party's votes. Widfeldt and Nilsson compare with the two other Scania (sometimes) Allsvenskan clubs, and note that Helsingborgs IF also have a broad social spectrum among their supporters, but with more centre-right voters, while the fans of Landskrona BOIS, a from blue-collar Landskrona, are more blue-collar and social democratic than the fans of MFF or HIF.
For those who speak Swedish (and understand Scanian dialect!) this is a very entertaining discussion on the topic "is MFF a workers' club?", from the documentary Blådårar about MFF fans.
Landskrona being more undisputedly blue-collar, this picture is a classic example of a connection between politics and football in Sweden:
The banner says "Save the ship yards" and it's held up by Landskrona BOIS players in an Allsvenskan game against IFK Göteborg in Gothenburg in 1978, when Swedish ship yards (and both Landskrona and Gothenburg were shipyard cities) were in deep crisis due to stiffening international competition from above all South Korea and Japan. One of the BOIS players says in an interview:
— All of Landskrona was suffering because of the big threat of the closing down of the ship yard. We had Kenneth 'Kecka' Elgström on our team and he worked in the ship yard. It was all near and tangible. The decision that we players had to do something to show our solidarity developed slowly but with certainty."The article continues:
"When the BOIS players entered the pitch at Nya Ullevi they were met with booing from most of the 23 199 spectators.— When we unfolded the banner and then turned around and showed it for all of Nya Ullevi a deafening roar arose. I never heard anything like that during my career. It was of course a perfect connection. Landskrona and Gothenburg were both ship yard cities and equally badly hit, says Claes Cronqvist."
Gefle IF
Gefle is the northern-most team in Allsvenskan. Historian Torbjörn Andersson discusses football's social history in Gävle thoroughly in his book Kung fotboll, and shows that in the early 20th century Gefle IF was the team of the establishment in the city.
Degerfors IF
http://www.ultrarossobianco.tk/
Jens Kellers tröja
Kanske har Schalkes dåliga form vänt -- fyra matcher i rad utan förlust i ligan, och senast en tung derbyseger mot Dortmund. Men inte desto mindre fascineras jag fortfarande av Raphael Honigsteins historia på Guardians fotbollsblogg för en månad sedan om hur Kellers auktoritet som manager för Stuttgart för tre år sedan underminerades av den tröja som han bar på presskonferensen där han presenterades som ny tränare.
"Most neutrals are convinced that Keller, 42, knows his stuff but the supporters simply do not believe in him as a leadership figure. The former Under-23 coach at S04 lacks charisma and gravitas. What's worse, he doesn't seem to get lucky. And that's where the jumper hoodoo might come in. The former VfB midfielder took over from Christian Gross as caretaker of Stuttgart in October 2010. At the presentation, he wore a chequered brown and beige number that screamed loads of things – retirement home, medieval court jester, free jazz – except football manager. Keller never recovered from that false start and was replaced by Bruno Labbadia after two months of bad results."Raphael Honigstein, "Schalke in 'mega-crisis with Jens Keller's sartorial misadventures", 4 februari
Prenumerera på:
Inlägg (Atom)