Swedish Soccer Prioritized Fans Over Finances. Now, Business Is Booming.

Swedish Soccer Prioritized Fans Over Finances. Now, Business Is Booming.

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The warning sounded over and over, first in Swedish and then in English. A fire had been detected. Please evacuate the stadium. The players left the field. Outside, fire crews were arriving. But in the stands, as a thick cloud of smoke wreathed and coiled in the floodlights, nobody moved. The fans were going to make the game happen by sheer force of will.
It was a game they had been anticipating for some time. The top two teams in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s elite league, had gone into the final day of the season separated by just three points. A quirk of scheduling fate meant that their last game was with each other. Malmo, the host, had to win to claim the championship. Elfsborg, the visitor, needed only to avoid defeat. It had been billed as a
guldfinal
: a gold-medal match.
The idea of a single game that decides the destiny of a league title is vanishingly rare in modern soccer, where championships are won over the course of a season rather than in a winner-take-all final. It has not happened in England since 1989, and Italy has not produced such a denouement in more than half a century.
Image
Fans of Malmo, left, and Elfsborg. The teams met to decide the Swedish league title on the final day of the season.
Credit…
Betina Garcia for The New York Times
Image
“It might not be the best league in Europe,” the league’s chief executive said, “but the atmosphere in the stands is.”
Credit…
Betina Garcia for The New York Times
It is also increasingly unusual for a title even to be in play as the season draws to a close. Over the last 30 years, soccer has become so financially stratified that many domestic tournaments are little more than
monthslong processions
for the wealthiest teams. Sweden, though, is different, a solitary beacon of competitive balance. In four of the last six editions of the Allsvenskan, the championship has gone to the wire.
How it has produced that is a story of rejecting orthodoxy, of asking why sports exist and whom they exist for. But it is also a story of how hard it is to stand alone, and how fragile even the most heartening success can be.
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