PHOTO: Bildbyrån + TT Nyhetsbyrån
Few Swedish footballers can measure up to Gunnar Nordahl’s greatness.
As part of the highly successful Gre-No-Li, he remains one of our biggest icons.
And we will never forget when Nordahl showed his big heart and wrote Swedish sports history in Italy.
He wrote Swedish sports history when Gunnar Nordahl chose to leave Sweden and move to the Italian big club AC Milan. After scoring goals for IFK Norrköping and bringing an Olympic gold to Sweden, the goals would continue to pour in in Serie A as well.
Nordahl’s greatness
The Swedish legend is today considered one of Italy’s top goalscorers of all time and he won the shooting league a total of five times. Together with the compatriots Gunnar Gren and Nils Liedholm formed the dreaded attacking trio Gre-No-Li which would become so incredibly legendary in football history.
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Nordahl was nicknamed “Il Bisonte” and was praised both for his fantastic efforts on the field but also for his fine personality and his big heart. Especially when the Milan legend was highly involved in when Swedish sports history was created.
READ MORE: Gunnar Nordahl’s incredibly beautiful gesture to the little sick boy – makes everyone’s hearts melt: “What a hero!”
“What a hero”
In connection with Gre-No-Li’s great progress in Italy, a great interest in Italian football grew at home in Sweden. Which led to the very first Swedish football trip of all time being created when a newspaper and a travel agency joined forces and arranged a trip down to Milan to see world-class football.
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200 Swedes showed interest and were flown down to Italy, where Gunnar Nordahl and the Milan Swedes would open up their big hearts and welcome the blue and yellow fans.
– The Swedes and above all Gunnar Nordahl were extremely committed to ensuring that the visiting football tourists would have a good experience. Nordahl stepped in and set up the entire grandstand arrangement for this group trip. The Swedes got a whole section so they could be together, Nordahl fixed that, says the football journalist Erik Niva in his podcast “When we were Kings”.
– Then he met the travelers on the morning of the match day and made sure that the transport, with motorcycle police that he arranged, rolled off as it should. He made an extra effort to make this match one to remember. Milan won 1-0 and Nordahl scored the winning goal.
– What a damn hero, replies the podcast colleague Håkan Andreasson.
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After the match, the Swedish tourists were then invited to a dinner in the evening, where both Nordahl and Gren attended to complete the great experience in Milan.
– I understand that if you had that experience as a football tourist then you were hungry for more. It would turn out that there were quite a few in Sweden who began to thirst for international football over time. It was Italian football that made Swedes wince. This was our first big love abroad, Niva asserts.
– What an experience to come down and watch this match and then have dinner with Nordahl and Gren, replies colleague Andreasson.
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