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He worked for 23 years at TV4 but was forced out.
Now Patrick Ekwall opens up about his new life after the sport.
– You can become bitter, whiny and think that everything is fucked up, he says in an interview with Sportbibeln.
All sports-interested Swedes know very well who Patrick Ekwall is. He devoted his life to the service of sport and did it all – from evening newspaper reporter, columnist, television reporter, presenter, blogger, commentator to podcaster.
Ekwall’s new life
Ekwall became strongly associated with the television channel TV4 where he worked for a whole 23 years with many different sports and was always there for the big championships. But in 2016 he was forced to leave the TV channel suddenly and since then he has left the world of sports altogether.
– I hardly do any sports journalism now. I do drop in on some stuff sometimes. And then I do “Muren” (SVT programme), which is a quiz where I am the “sport person”. But otherwise not so much, says Ekwall in an interview with Sportbibeln.
– No, I don’t miss it at all, even if it happens when there are big championships and big interviews are done that you could have thought of doing. But to sort of go around to Leipzig for a day or two, and stay in a hotel to do an interview and cut it together… I don’t miss that. Not that it’s worse in any way, but I’ve been doing it for so many years. I’m also in a life situation where that wouldn’t work. And above all, I don’t miss people on social media writing: “Didn’t you see it was offside, you fucking h*ra?”. So people who are involved in football are happy to get in touch, and that can drain you in the end. I miss some things, but it’s rare.
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Instead, Patrick Ekwall has saddled up and become a writer of suspense novels. He made his novel debut with “Kattfisken” in 2023 and has recently released the sequel “Skrattfesten”.
Patrick admits
He is also an ambassador for the Breast Cancer Association, a lecturer and conference speaker, has his own shoe brand and runs the podcast “Pådden med Olsson & Ekwall” together with a former colleague Mats Olsson. But mostly he calls himself a writer these days.
– It sounds incredibly pretentious, but that’s mostly me. I find it very difficult to say that I am a writer. I have to get used to it. On the other hand, I find it surprisingly fun to write books, especially the second book when I had a little better control of what I was doing. So I hope the third one will be even more fun. But it’s an exciting job, he says and tells us that a third book is in the works.
– It will be a sequel to Kattfisken and Skrattfesten, the third in the same series. I haven’t even started research work yet, but Skrattfesten turned out really well, I got super reviews and I’m extremely happy. It’s fun in every way. Then we can hope that the third will also be a success.
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Have you received any sports offers that you turned down?
– No, I can’t say that I got that. Small things yes, but no big ones. It’s actually been eight years since I left TV4, yet people still get in touch and wonder. You can meet people in town: “Damn, I haven’t seen you at Fyran in a while?” No, it was eight years ago, haha… I am so connected to the channel. But I did a part in the Olympics for Discovery, and I thought that was cool! And I probably would have continued to do it, if Discovery hadn’t sold the evening magazine rights to SVT, then I probably would have done it too. I would have thought that would have been great fun, says Patrick in the interview.
– But no, it’s not like the media companies call me and ask either. We must honestly say that it’s not like they stand in line and say: “Do you want to work on this?” And I can fully understand that somewhere, because you want to renew yourself and then you might not think: “This 59-year-old old man in Bromma, should we call him?! I understand that it might not be the first thing you do. Then it is clear that you can make use of experience and such. But there aren’t that many jobs in the industry at all anymore. There isn’t much money anymore, and I’m expensive. Then I don’t think it’s particularly strange. You can either become bitter and whiny and think that everything sucks, or you make sure to do other things that you think are fun and good, and accept that the situation is what it is.
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