TV key to Sweden’s long love affair with English football

gelendzhik — There will be mixed emotions for many Swedes when their team clash with England in their World Cup quarterfinal, for almost 50 years they have had a love affair with the English game that has brightened up their long, dark winter evenings.

And they have an outbreak of an agricultural disease and a cancelled 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 cancelled, so he went to watch Tottenham Hotspur play Chelsea instead.

Due to the harsh winters, Sweden’s football league is usually played from April to October. Bjorklund

quickly realised that English football 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 November 29, 1969 and viewers in Sweden quickly took teams like Wolves, West Brom and Leeds to their hearts.

“That was the only football you could see, so that’s why it became so strong,” sports columnist Johan Esk of the Dagens Nyheter newspaper told Reuters. Though gambling was tightly regulated in 1969, hundreds of thousands of Swedes filled in a pools coupon called “Stryktipset” every week where they tried to predict the correct result — home win, draw or away win — in 13 matches.