PHOTO: Bildbyrån
The Swedish national team is entering a new era.
With his very first foreign national team captain on the coaching bench.
But now Jon Dahl Tomasson receives harsh criticism from the Swedish side.
The men’s national team is in place in Portugal to begin a completely new chapter in Swedish football history. The Dane Jon Dahl Tomasson has been appointed as the new national team captain and will be the first foreign coach in that role in a Swedish national football team.
The crisis in Sweden
Blågult enters a new era in connection with Thursday’s international match against Portugal and, as so many other countries have done in the past, a foreign coach will revolutionize the Swedish national team. After missing out on two straight championships, there has been a crisis in the national team.
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New national team managers and senior hens at the Swedish Football Association, SvFF, have been brought in to steer the men’s national team in the right direction again. They now put their trust in the former gold coach in Malmö FF.
Tomasson criticism
But ahead of the first match as national team captain for Sweden, harsh criticism is now being directed at Jon Dahl Tomasson.
“There is a Dane standing on a soccer field and leading a training session with a Swedish national team. He shouldn’t be allowed to do that,” writes Johan Esk in a column on Dagens Nyheter.
“He wouldn’t be allowed to do that if this sport had uniform national team rules, so this has nothing to do with Jon Dahl Tomasson as a person. It is not about Danes as a people. It is football’s regulations that logically mean that a national team should be led by someone from their own country.”
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It is actually the system that upsets the columnist and unfortunately Tomasson becomes part of the problem with foreign coaches who can choose the national team completely freely. In contrast to the players who are fixed forever with their national team choice.
“The moment a player steps onto the pitch in a competitive match for a national team, the borders are closed forever. Now, new rules appear to also make it more difficult for players to switch back already after a practice match. For leaders, it is an eternally open landscape,” writes Esk in the daily newspaper.
“A left-back who ended up in a national team’s freezer must not follow his mother’s roots to another country. A confederation captain can go from one nation to another without even passing a quarantine.”
READ MORE: Torbjörn Nilsson’s huge criticism of Swedish football – now points out the biggest problem: “It’s so easy”
Johan Esk is very clear about how crooked it is with the current rules for players and coaches in the international national team soccer.
“A confederation captain has often received his leadership style from his own home country. With that style, the leader can make any nation emulate and instantly become the country’s football ambassador. This is how global national team football limps along. The limping gait originates from the time when playing football was not seen as a profession but coaching the players was a job. It is often said that it is an honor to play for a national team. It is a job to lead it,” he writes in his DN column.
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