How football took off in Scandinavia

When Denmark lifted the European Championship trophy at the Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg on 26 June 1992, it marked something of a highpoint for Scandinavian football. Here was a Danish side winning a major trophy on Swedish soil. Sweden’s own record is not too shabby – Olympic gold in 1948, World Cup finalists ten years later, and third in two World Cups (1950 and 1994). So where did it all begin for Scandinavian football?

Football comes to Denmark

The Association rulebook was first drafted in the winter of 1863 in London, after a series of meetings. The resulting laws and basis for the modern games were formed from a compromise of footballing codes used within various English schools and that of Sheffield FC, the world’s oldest football club. 

When it comes to the spread of Association rules football outside Britain and Ireland, Scandinavia came first. Sure, the British community in Buenos Aires had kickabouts as early as 1867, and the English community in Le Havre had established France’s first football club in 1872, playing a combination of Association and Rugby codes, but the first locally formed club was Danish. 

In my first book, Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World, I point out that there were two ways that football typically arrived in a new country. It was either imported by the British community – as in the cases of Buenos Aires or Le Havre – or it was brought back by locals who had studied in Britain. Often, it took a little bit of both to get the sport up and running.

Many wealthy Danish families sent their sons to top schools in England in the 19^th century, where they would be introduced to English sports. Cricket was even a popular summer sport for anglophile Danes. It appears that football may have appeared in the Danish schooling system as early as 1877.

The previous year, on 26 April 1876, four men – Frederik Levison, August Nielsen, Carl Møller and E. Selmer – met to form Kjøbenhavns Boldklub (KB – Copenhagen Ball Club). It was a multi-sports society and it adopted Association rules football in 1879, the same year as Ireland’s first football club, Cliftonville, was formed. KB’s first match at Klampenborg in Copenhagen on 7 September 1879 caused some bemusement among the watching public.

Lawyer Frederick Markmman took over as KB’s chairman in 1880 and set about promoting the game within Danish schools. He even translated the rulebook into Danish in 1887. The 1880s were an important decade for the Danish game. New clubs cropped up in the capital, often based around the open ground at Fælledparken and a tournament was held in 1888, won by KB. By the end of the decade, Markmann had contacted 86 associations with 4,000 members to create the Dansk Boldspil Union (Danish Ballgame Union – DBU). Formed on 

18 May 1889, the DBU consisted of 21 Copenhagen-based clubs and five from Jutland and is the world’s oldest national football association outside Britain and Ireland. In 1904, the DBU was a founding member of FIFA.

British clubs, including the prestigious amateur sides Queen’s Park and Corinthians, came to help the Danes improve their game. By the early 20^th century, Danish clubs were beating British opposition. In 1908, Denmark’s first national team sailed to London for the Olympic Games at White City. Here, Denmark’s Sophus Nielsen became the first player to hit ten goals in an international match as the Danes hammered France 17-1, although the side would lose 2-0 to Great Britain’s amateurs in the final and had to settle for silver.

Danish players were among the first to appear in British football. Dane Nils Middelboe became Chelsea’s first overseas player in 1913 while Rangers snapped up Carl Hansen of Copenhagen club Boldklubben 1903 for £20 in 1921.

The Danish game remained amateur until 1978, and in the 1980s the ‘Danish Dynamite’ golden generation – including the Laudrup brothers, Preben Elkjaer, Jan Mølby, Allan Simonsen, Jesper Olsen and many others – captivated the footballing world. But Denmark’s football journey started way back in the upper-class sporting environment of the 1870s.

In 1992, the two historic clubs of Kjøbenhavns Boldklub and Boldklubben 1903 merged to create the new Football Club København (FCK), occupying the then-recently built national stadium, Parken. FCK enjoys a feisty derby with Brøndby, which is a relatively new club, having only been formed in 1964.

Sweden takes up the round ball

When IFK Göteborg won the UEFA Cup in 1982 and 1987, it was the culmination of a footballing cycle that had started in the Swedish city a century earlier. The main protagonist was a man called Wilhelm Friberg. He had been obsessed with sport, even building an ice rink with a friend. On 4 December 1887, Friberg and eleven friends formed the Örgryte Idrottssällskap (ÖIS) sports club. Four years later, the club adopted football, assisted by some Scots who were based in the city.

There is a plaque in the Heden district of Gothenburg that marks the spot where Sweden’s first match took place on 22 Mat 1892 between ÖIS and another now defunct club called Idrottssällskapet Lyckans Soldater. The hour-long match of 30 minutes per half featured six Scots and ended in a 1-0 win for ÖIS.

By the 1890s, the game was emerging independently in Sweden’s other main port cities of Stockholm and Malmö. New clubs were emerging, including both AIK and Djurgårdens IF in 1891. By 1896, there were enough clubs in Sweden to host the first national knock-out competition – the Svenska Mästerskapet – in the west Swedish port of Helsingborg. It became an annual event, with ÖIS dominating the early tournaments.

By 1904, the country had its own football association – the Svenska Bollspells Förbundet (SBF – Swedish Ballgame Association – later becoming SvFF) – and it was also involved in the foundation of FIFA. The Corinthians visited that year and left a trophy for local teams to compete. Four years later, Sweden entered a team for the London Olympics, suffering a 12-1 reverse to the hosts in front of a crowd of just 2,000 spectators at the quarter final stage.

Domestically, the Swedes had a league up and running in 1910. The Svenska Serien (Swedish Series) be played on and off until the creation of the Allsvenskan, the current national Swedish league system, in 1924. Interestingly, no Stockholm club ever won the Svenska Serien, with ÖIS, IFK Göteborg and GAIS keeping the title in Gothenburg.

In 1912, Stockholm hosted the Olympic Games, which featured four Nordic sides – the hosts, Sweden, alongside Denmark, Norway and Finland. Råsunda Idrottsplats, which would go on to host the 1958 World Cup final, was one of the three Olympic football venues. The Danes would again claim silver, losing the final 4-2 to Great Britain’s amateurs. The Finns had been the surprise package, reaching the semi-finals and then losing the bronze medal play-off to the Dutch. The Finns had defeated both Italy and their imperial masters of the time, Russia, en route to the semi-finals.

Norway’s football roots

The first club to be established in Norway was Odds Ballklubb of Skien, 100km south of Oslo, in 1894. The game was probably played during the 1880s but Odds – named after a giant from the Sagas of Islanders, was Norway’s pioneer club. A small national league of six teams was up and running by 1914.

Norway surprised everyone at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, beating a Great Britain side featuring three Corinthians 3-1 in the first round. Most notably in pre-World War II Norwegian football, the country eliminated Germany from its own Olympics in 1936 in front of a furious Adolf Hitler, who left before the final whistle. It is thought to be the only match he ever attended.

If you’re interested in how football got started around the world, check out my book Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World. It’s a country-by-country account of how football got established in rough chronological order.