Sweden’s unusual experiment
The inspiring story of the football club in Ostersund shows how the country could make a success of its refugee crisis
ext week, a group of football fans from a subarctic town will arrive in Spain for a match that would have been considered unthinkable just a few years ago. Ostersund, a seven-hour drive north of Stockholm, has no football tradition. Its new team was languishing in the fourth division when an English university coach was hired to try to save it. Not many Swedish players were interested, so he scouted out immigrants — especially players discarded by other teams, hungry for a second chance. What happened next could turn out to be one of the most extraordinary and inspiring stories in the history of the game.
After winning the Swedish Cup earlier this year, Ostersund FC is now in the Europa League where it has defeated Galatasaray of Turkey and PAOK of Greece. Next week, it’s Bilbao. A friend of mine, from Ostersund, describes his hometown as a small, depressing place that anyone with ambition seeks to leave. Its winter ends in May and starts in October and the streets are empty after 6pm. But now, a football team with no locals is bringing community spirit to a town that had been notorious for the lack of it, as their team takes on Europe’s giants. It’s amazing what immigration can do.
We’re used to hearing about mass immigration overwhelming Europe in general, and Sweden especially. When the recent influx started, it took in twice as many per capita as any other country and ended up struggling to accommodate tens of thousands of unaccompanied child migrants. When panicked politicians ignored public concern, voters turned to the populist Sweden Democrats whose electoral success has stopped any party from forming a majority government.
But things are stabilising. The improvement is visible in Stockholm, which is now free of the Romanian beggars who used to sit on almost every street corner. The gangs that used to menace train stations have been dealt with, and fear of crime is subsiding. Passports are now checked on the bridge with Denmark, and migrant arrivals stand at a fraction of their earlier level. As a sense of political control returns, and the main parties learn how to talk frankly about the problems of immigration, support for the populists is tailing off.
Casualties of the globalised world
Each major town still has a sub-class of unemployed newcomers, locked out of the economy by a high (although unofficial) minimum wage. The problems of such neighbourhoods, and the fate of the unaccompanied children, remain serious. How, it’s asked, will these young men with such low literacy and numeracy manage to contribute to a society in which they lack the skills to participate? Is welfare the answer? Are they the unfortunate casualties of the globalised world, for whom nothing can realistically be done? The Ostersund players could easily have been written off as a bunch of has-beens, or never-going-to-bes. Ronald Mukiibi didn’t get a single match for his old team before deciding to try his luck up north. Patrick Kpozo was let go by his Stockholm club on the grounds that he had “not developed”. Brwa Nouri was kicked out for drug abuse from a former club. On paper, they were the rejected and downwardly-mobile — but they were willing to go north and train 25 degrees below freezing, for an average salary of about £600 (Dh2,884) a week. And to Graham Potter, the manager, that was enough.
Potter, a former Stoke City player, had taken a degree in emotional intelligence and his team-building techniques — asking the squad to perform plays and poetry — are the stuff of legend locally. It makes a wider point about what people can be capable of, given the right support. Sweden certainly wasn’t a model when refugee centres were being set on fire by protesters, about this time last year. But things are better now, pretty much everywhere. A deal with Turkey has halted the flow of refugees over the Aegean Sea. Even Italy is starting to get things under control.
If you have dealt with people traffickers, crossed theMediterraneanandriskeddeathtostartatthevery bottom, then you’re probably quite resourceful. On paper, their skills might make them look useless. But the trick is to work out how to play to their strengths.
Almost exactly 50 years ago, my mother-in-law arrived in Stockholm with about £10 to her name. She made the journey from a refugee camp to a pharmaceuticals firm: Her legacy is Losec, the highestgrossing drug ever developed in Sweden. The family gathered for her funeral in Stockholm last week and did the usual thing of sending money to charity rather than buying flowers. The most obvious cause being that the many charities helping refugees who might, in a few years’ time, invent the next Losec. Or Tesla. Or help take a remote town with not much to cheer for into the European Football Championships. When Fredrik Reinfeldt was prime minister, he lost an election after asking Swedes to “open your hearts” to the new arrivals. His emotional pitch was a poor substitute for explaining how all this would be managed. Sweden always has handled influxes well, he said, and will do so again. It has taken some time, but it’s beginning to look as if he might be right. Fraser Nelson is the editor of the Spectator and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph.