Pontus Jansson: Malmo ultra The Swedish defender is loved by Leeds fans, but his heart is still with his boyhood club
Few footballers share a connection with a club’s fanbase as strong as Pontus Jansson’s with Malmo. The Leeds defender talks to FFT about being a fan first, a pro second, leading the chanting at Chelsea, looking up to Zlatan, and his dream of lifting one m
Illuminated by blue police lights, pumped up and packing flares, Malmo fans looked to their leader, their capo, to orchestrate their chants and leave their mark on Stamford Bridge during a Europa League encounter with Chelsea in February. Tall and blond-bearded, wearing a black three-striped sweater and a baseball cap, the capo starts the call, spreading his arms as if to catch the response. He’s being filmed, and when he turns towards the camera he’s grinning from cheekbone to cheekbone, the way he did on the terraces in Malmo when he was a boy. But this isn’t just another fan. This is Pontus Jansson, Leeds United’s Swedish international centre-back. “I came up from the Tube station,” Jansson tells FFT a few weeks later when we meet to discuss some of his favourite memories of following Malmo FF. “And it was all sky blue, with people talking Swedish, all Malmo fans. It was unbelievable, and it felt like being back in Malmo again. The march to the stadium, and then being inside the stadium, was also incredible. That’s the most recent memory I have, and I think it’s one of the biggest.” When Jansson started going to Malmo games with his dad, he wouldn’t ask who was in the team – there were more pressing concerns. “My first question was always, ‘Is the capo coming to the match?’ Without the capo we couldn’t sing as well. My thing was to be in the stands singing – the atmosphere more than the football.” Malmo’s capo, that all-important guy with the megaphone and his back to the pitch, is now “one of my best friends,” says Jansson, with just as much pleasure as when he calls Zlatan Ibrahimovic a team-mate. Jansson has played in Serie A, captained Sweden and played at a World Cup finals, but his athletic achievements are only part of what defines him. We are used to elite footballers being found in primary schools, mollycoddled in academies and taken to games on luxury coaches, and ex-players are now as likely to own a football club as they once were a pub; some of Manchester United’s former stars are building hotels and skyscrapers like new Trumps. But while Jansson was playing youth football for his local suburban club Arlovs BI, he was receiving an education on the terraces of Malmo, lessons that won’t take him far in a boardroom, but helped to give him a fan’s perspective on the pitch. “Maybe you can see it on me,” says Jansson. “I’m no different to how I was in the stand, and on the pitch I think I’m the same person. One of the things I said in my first interviews as a professional player is that I never wanted to change. I always wanted to keep the same friends since I was young, and I still have the same friends since I was young. I have always wanted to love Malmo, and I still love Malmo.
I wanted to always respect and love the teams I play for, and I respect and love Leeds United that I play for now. I never want to change how I am as a person.” Jansson announced himself in Yorkshire by thundering into a tackle in front of Elland Road’s Kop, then thundering out of it again, celebrating as if he’d scored a goal. So much emotion was a shock, but Whites fans were enthralled and have become used to seeing Jansson’s heart showing among the tattoos on his sleeves. He can’t hide how he feels, and he felt the pain and the joy of football as a fan before he was a player. “I think my first match was around 1999, one of the worst years in Malmo’s history,” he explains. “They went down to the Superettan [Swedish second division] for the first time. “I still remember that year in the second division. I went to almost every game and the team went directly back up. Really, my first memory is when Zlatan scored a goal in the cup against our biggest rival – an extra-time winner against Helsingborg. He scored and then celebrated in front of their fans. That’s my first big memory of football, and my first memory of Zlatan.” After promotion back to the Allsvenskan, Malmo re-established themselves at the top of Swedish football, while Jansson found himself in the youth teams at Arlovs BI and among the new ultra fan culture developing on Malmo’s terraces. “I was born into football,” he says, with older brother Peter also a player, for Trelleborg. “My brother, my parents, all the people around me were in football, so everyone expected me to become a player. But at that age, 12 or 13, I liked to support my team more than to play. “I really started in 2004, the season we won the league for the first time in 16 years. I went to every game home and away. I can pick out games I remember, and the results of almost every one, who scored, things like that. That was really the season when I fell in love with the club Malmo.” The title race in 2004 went to the final two matches of the campaign – the penultimate game was away at one of Malmo’s biggest rivals, IFK Goteborg, before hosting Elfsborg on the last day. “The Goteborg game is still my biggest away memory,” reveals Jansson. Malmo’s average home attendance was around 20,000; almost half that number made the four-hour bus trip. “My friends should have gone with me, but it was too far away, so I went with my brother and his friends. “I remember being outside the stadium and realising it was much bigger than the ground we had. There were around 9,000 Malmo fans in a stadium that takes 44,000 people and it was unbelievable, one of my biggest memories as a fan.” Malmo won 2-1. A week later, more than 27,000 supporters packed inside the Malmo Stadion and went mad when Jon Inge Høiland scored in the second half before disappearing beneath a pile of sky blue team-mates. After 16 years, the league title was Malmo’s, and 13-year-old Jansson was among the first on the pitch to celebrate. “That’s true!” he admits. “My brothers were in the seated section up at the top. I always stood at the same place with my friends, on the front row of the terrace at the bottom, so we had to. I was young and didn’t realise that if you win the league, you have to invade the pitch. That’s an unwritten rule in Sweden.
“The people behind us said, ‘Come on guys, you have to go with the fans onto the pitch,’ so we said yes!” adds Pontus, laughing as he remembers the euphoria. “We all had to do it! So, because I was in the first line I just ran on the pitch. Then I saw about 4,000 fans coming behind me, and that was sick.”
He was on the pitch again when Malmo next topped the Allsvenskan, in 2010. After another final-day victory, this time over Mjallby AIF, there was another invasion, with fans stood on all four touchlines throughout the closing minutes of the game, holding flags and flares, ready to get the party started.
Jansson was now 19 years old and had played 18 games for Malmo that season, but he was still close to the supporters. In a cup match after the title success, the centre-back was criticised in the press for swapping shirts and taking pictures with the travelling ultras. The following season, when Malmo knocked Rangers out in the Champions League third qualifying round, Jansson leapt over the fence to join the fans, grabbing the megaphone and leading the singing.
“When I first signed for Malmo in 2006 and got into the first team two years later, I began to forget all of those things,” he says. “I saw myself more as a footballer, had to take more responsibility and train harder. I couldn’t go into the stand with the fans any more – I had to go with my team-mates and see the game with them. Then I was on the bench, and then I had to play.
“When we won the league title that was just unbelievable for me, and I didn’t know how to celebrate, as a player or as a supporter. When we won again in 2013, I played every minute of all 30 games and saw myself as more of a leader. I knew that was one of the reasons why we won the league, so that was a little bit different – but at the same time, I still didn’t know how to celebrate.
“After I left, and they won it again in 2016 and 2017, I was a friend of the players and still a supporter of the team, so it was the same. I didn’t know how to celebrate. I’ve now been through a lot of those moments when I don’t really know how to get through things.”
Being a Malmo player after standing on the terraces brought pressure. When it became clear that Jansson would go and play abroad, he promised that the club would get a big fee, as they had with Ibrahimovic and others, so they could build a better team. However, after his contract ran down, Jansson joined Torino in Serie A for nothing.
“People started to talk, like, this guy doesn’t give a fuck about us, he just left for money,” says Jansson. But he’d been true to his word, silently arranging for his £500,000 signing-on fee to go to Malmo, then enduring two years of criticism until the story reached the press.
“It was a lot of money for the club at the time,” he admits. “Those two years were very tough for me. I knew, and people around me knew, what happened, and I still loved the club. When it came out people realised, OK, this guy really loves Malmo, and I guess my status became almost bigger than before.”
Several other locally born players had left Malmo by then and Jansson, freed from the responsibility of playing for his boyhood team,
“YOU HAVE TO RESPECT AND KNOW YOUR CLUB, KNOW THE HISTORY, AND KNOW HOW BIG THE CLUB IS”
rediscovered his place as a supporter, spending weekends off at big Malmo games and leading the singing. “I was the only player going back there, standing with the fans,” he says. “That life came back to me when I left the club.” At Torino, Leeds and for Sweden, Jansson has continued showing the intense, emotional responses of a player who understands the game as a fan. Though nothing can replace Malmo for him – while we chat, he corrects himself for using ‘we’, then carries on anyway – Jansson knows the fans at Elland Road feel the same way about Leeds, and mirrors their feelings on the pitch. When an interviewer thrust a microphone in front of him moments after he’d scored a late equaliser against Brentford, he was still angry about the Bees being given a penalty. “I feel shit,” he said, adding a more footballer-like, “to be fair” before saying, “This was a robbery from the referee, so it feels bad. Do you think I should be happy? No chance.” Jansson was banned for one game by the FA; he was only saying what every Whites fan was thinking. He’s tried to bring some of the ultra mentality to Leeds, asking fans to arrive at the ground early to generate an atmosphere before big matches, and getting Luke Ayling and Kalvin Phillips to join him running towards the stands, whipping up the crowd to make more noise. “I think as a player you have to respect and know your club, know the history, know how big the club is,” explains Jansson. “And I really know what Leeds United means to people. For me it’s a responsibility. I have to do something good for the club. “I’ve said to my team-mates, when I go up to the stands and try to build energy in the stadium, I don’t do it for myself. I don’t do it so people watching say, ‘Look at this guy, he’s nice with the fans.’ I do it to get the energy up and help my team-mates, so that my team play better. I know that when Elland Road is pumped up with energy, it’s tougher for the opponent to play. That’s one of the reasons I want Leeds fans to be with us for 90 minutes. That’s something I want to share with them and get the atmosphere up in the stadium.” The shared perspective of fan and player has given him unique experiences. Jansson made his Sweden debut as a late substitute against England in 2012, and within five minutes he was watching his childhood hero, Ibrahimovic, score his and Sweden’s fourth goal in a 4-2 win – a glorious and belligerent overhead kick from 30 yards. Jansson was one of the first to congratulate him, once again becoming the 13-year-old boy running around the pitch in awe of his idol. “That was sick,” he smiles. “English clubs always said Zlatan never scored against them, and before the game he was saying, ‘OK, it’s time for me to keep them quiet now.’ Then he goes out, scores four – and that unbelievable goal – and after the game he’s coming into the changing room saying, ‘It’s OK guys, now they can’t say anything.’ “That’s really how Zlatan is as a person. He talks, but he always does the things he says. What he changed in Swedish football is just amazing. His attitude is quite similar to how people see things in Malmo, that you always believe in yourself and believe you are the best as a team and as individuals. He really opened that culture for us young players. “I still look up to Zlatan today. Now he has been my team-mate and we’ve got another connection to each other, but he’s one of the biggest idols of my career.” Ibrahimovic would tell you himself that he’s as elemental as magnetic north, but he does represent one of the constants of Jansson’s football life. When he first started watching games as a boy, there was Ibra, Malmo, family and friends. His relationships with them all have changed over the years as Jansson has grown older and made his own career, but they have never broken. When he was playing for Malmo, Jansson still lived in Arlov, the same working class district he had grown up in, and although he’s since bought a house a little further out of town, the kids he played with for Arlovs BI are still his friends. His wife, Asa, went to the same school as Jansson, and still has the same friends she did back then. When he was only 18, he wrote a promise to himself and his family and friends in a tattoo on his arm. “Never forget where you come from – that’s the words,” he reveals. “It was one of my first tattoos. My tattoos always have a meaning, and now I have two arms full so I can’t do more, because my mother is going to kill me! I have the stadium where I grew up as a fan and where I won the league as a player, plus the castle where I got married. I also have the face of my wife on my arm. She is everything to me; she’s been with me from day one, and that’s sick when you look back at what you go through together. She was raised exactly the same way that I was, so I think our daughter is going to be raised well.” Jansson is too grounded to say any of his career has been a dream come true. “I’ve never had, like, big dreams,” he says. Playing for Malmo, winning the league twice, playing for Sweden and everything else he’s achieved were motivations, things he wanted to make happen, and aged 28 there’s plenty of time for that determination to lead him to new heights. There is one dream, though. “You never know when,” he says, “But I do have a dream to go back to Malmo. Me and my wife know that when we move home, we’re moving home to Malmo, so hopefully I’m still good enough to play there and win the league again. That would be amazing.” And with the medal in his pocket, he could go back up to the terraces, his love for Malmo changing shape again, and his love for football, but never breaking. Not while he can hear the capo and his megaphone.
“I’M no DIFFERENT TO HOW I WAS In THE STAND, AND On THE PITCH I STILL THINK I’M THE SAME GUY”