There will be mixed emotions for many Swedes when their team clash with England in their World Cup quarter-final, because for almost 50 years they have had a love affair with the English game that has brightened up their long, dark winter evenings.
They have an outbreak of an agricultural disease and a canceled fox hunt to thank for it.
In 1967, reporter Lars-Gunnar Bjorklund from state broadcaster SVT was in England to do a story about fox hunting, but an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease saw all hunting canceled, so he went to watch Tottenham Hotspur play Chelsea instead.
Due to the harsh winters, Sweden’s soccer league is usually played from April to October. Bjorklund quickly realized that English soccer would be the perfect entertainment for long winter evenings, and the Tipsextra show was born.
The first game, a 1-0 victory for Wolverhampton Wanderers over Sunderland, was shown on Nov. 29, 1969, and viewers in Sweden quickly took teams like Wolves, West Bromwich Albion and Leeds United to heart.
“That was the only football you could see, so that’s why it became so strong,” Dagens Nyheter sports columnist Johan Esk said.
Although gambling was tightly regulated in 1969, hundreds of thousands of Swedes every week filled in a pool coupon called Stryktipset, where they tried to predict the correct result in 13 matches.
These matches became the cornerstone of Tipsextra, with viewers transfixed by one live match every Saturday and goal flashes from around England’s top division.
“Tipsextra created a huge interest in English football and everyone soon had a favorite team. I had Arsenal, because I thought their shirts were so beautiful,” Esk said.
At a time when there were only two channels to choose from, there was little competition.
“The broadcasts started at 3pm, they showed some trotting horse races, then the match, and when that was over you had your dinner. That was it, every Saturday,” said Esk, who is to cover Sweden’s quarter-final against England from the press box.
“Following that on the TV there was a program called Weekend Prayer, where the weekend was marked in the Swedish Church — but the real religion was Tipsextra and English football,” he added.
The arrival of Bob Houghton and former England manager Roy Hodgson as coaches in Sweden in the mid-1970s only served to strengthen the bonds with English soccer, which are still as strong today.
With the global popularity of the English Premier League, fans with cable TV and a broadband connection can see virtually any game they want, so it is unlikely that any nation will ever fall in love the same way again.
“Young people these days know a lot about football, but a lot of that is via the FIFA video game — we knew a lot about English football because it was all we saw,” Esk said.
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