As Janne Andersson signed off Wednesday as Sweden coach, he assessed what his future might hold after spending the last seven years in what he described as “the best job in the world.”
“Everything,” he said, rather glumly, “can only get worse.”
Fans of men’s soccer in Sweden know the feeling.
Farewell 2023, they’d say. You won’t be missed.
It’s been one depressing episode after another for a once-proud soccer nation — a World Cup semifinalist in 1994 and a quarterfinalist as recently as 2018 — that is going through its darkest times for a generation.
How about this for a tale of woe: Sweden has just missed out on qualifying for the 24-team European Championship, following up its absence from last year’s World Cup in Qatar. It’s the first time since the 1980s that the distinctive yellow Swedish jersey will not be seen for back-to-back major men’s tournaments.
The national team was facing up to being demoted to the third tier of UEFA’s Nations League after finishing in last place in a group containing Serbia, Norway and Slovenia in late 2022.
Sweden's sole representative in the three European club competitions, Hacken, has lost all four of its group games in the Europa League. Its zero points and minus-11 goal difference is the worst record of any team in the competition. Sweden, meanwhile, has plunged to No. 23 in UEFA's rankings of each nation's clubs in European competitions, behind Cyprus.
Off the field, Sweden supporters were targeted by a gunman who fatally shot two of them before a Euro 2024 qualifier against Belgium in Brussels last month. It has sparked a debate over whether the team’s travelling fans should wear clothing in national colors.
Being a Sweden fan is tough at the moment. Even the men's under-21 team is set to miss out on that year-group's next European Championship.
For those with a more positive outlook, there are a few things to cling to.
Andersson is departing — maybe one or two years too late for many — and that might be the moment for the federation to be bold and hire a younger coach with a more modern outlook on the game who can get more out of a slew of exciting young attacking players, led by Alexander Isak and Dejan Kulusevski — regular starters for top Premier League teams Newcastle and Tottenham, respectively.
Critics saw the 61-year-old Andersson as overly pragmatic and old-fashioned in his approach, up until recently playing with a big target man up front in a nod to a coaching upbringing that was influenced by Roy Hodgson and Bob Houghton, Englishmen who coached in the Swedish league and typically used an old-school 4-4-2 formation.
Andersson did try to evolve — he had to — in his final years. But with an injury-prone and now-retired Zlatan Ibrahimovic in and out of the team and with a lack of quality and depth at fullback and central midfield, Sweden's results were alarming. None more so than the 3-0 loss in Azerbaijan last week and the 3-1 loss at home to Austria in September that combined to end any hopes of qualifying for Euro 2024.
“We need someone who can change the game, with different thoughts, a bit more offensive football with greater ball possession,” said Roony Bardghji, a highly rated player from the under-21 team who grabbed headlines at club level by scoring a winner for FC Copenhagen against Manchester United in the Champions League this month.
Sweden might even be ready to hire its first ever foreign-born coach of the men's team, with a Norwegian — Per Mathias Högmo, who is in charge of Hacken — on the federation's list of options.
Graham Potter, the former Chelsea manager who previously coached in Sweden at Ostersund, has reportedly said he is not interested. As has Peter Gerhardsson, the coach of the women's national team, which provided a glimmer of light in a dark year for Swedish soccer by reaching the semifinals of the Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
So, in Isak, Kulusevski, potentially Bardghji and 19-year-old Hugo Larsson — a midfielder who left Malmo to join Eintracht Frankfurt in the offseason for a record fee received by a Swedish team — there might be hope. There was also exciting news on Wednesday with Sweden great Ibrahimovic’s son, Vincent, called up to an enlarged training camp for the country’s under-15 squad.
That was announced around the same time as Andersson was holding his final news conference in the job of his dreams.
Goodbye Janne Andersson. Hello — even if it is way in the future — another Ibrahimovic.
Maybe there is some cause of optimism, after all.
___
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer