A soccer team from a fishing village off the Baltic Sea is close to a fairytale league title

In a remote fishing village beside the shore of the Baltic Sea, one of the most remarkable achievements in European soccer is close to being realized.

“Make the impossible possible” is one of the mantras found on the walls and the PowerPoint slides at tiny Swedish club Mjällby. And that’s exactly what is happening.

Mjällby holds an eight-point lead with six rounds left in Sweden’s top league, Allsvenskan, and has lost just one game this season. Oh, and it is on course for the biggest points haul in the league’s 101-year history.

Not bad for a team made up of mostly locally born players who play home games in a village of around 800 inhabitants on Sweden’s south coast, whose coach is a school principal and scout is a postman. Just nine years ago the club was one game away from dropping into the country’s fourth tier.

“If we would be able to win the league, I cannot imagine anything has been close to this achievement,” Mjällby chairman Magnus Emeus told The Associated Press. “The size of the club, our conditions, our financial muscle — to one year beat all the others, I think no one has been near this.”

Mjällby’s unlikely journey to the brink of what could be compared to Leicester’s unfathomable Premier League title in 2016 is a tale of hard work, common sense and bold data-driven decisions on and off the field at a club that’s the beating heart of a small, tight-knit community.

There’s been no takeover by a sheikh from the Middle East or American venture capitalists.

Indeed, Mjällby’s turnover last year was around 85 million kronor ($9 million), according to Emeus, who estimates that his club’s budget is an eighth of that of defending champion Malmö, Sweden’s biggest club which is a 90-minute drive west.

“It’s a fairy tale,” Mjällby director Jacob Lennartsson tells the AP in a video call. “We get the question a lot now — how are you doing this? It’s important to say we haven’t just done this from this year, we’ve been working for so many years.”

About Mjällby

Emeus is biased, naturally, but he describes Mjällby’s 6,000-capacity Strandvallen home — located in the village of Hällevik — as “the nicest-situated football stadium in Sweden.”

“If you kick the ball really hard and far over the goal, it will not be far from the Baltic Sea,” Emeus said.

Such is its rural and isolated location that visiting teams might feel like they’re driving to the end of the world, Emeus said with a smile.

“They’re probably sick and tired of never ever getting to the stadium,” he said. “You drive and you drive and you drive and you drive, and then finally you either have to drive into the Baltic Sea or into the arena.”

Fishing has long been the predominant industry in this corner of the world, where there are also vast swathes of farmland and an entrepreneurial spirit helping to drive the local economy.

Turning point

Founded in 1939, Mjällby has never won a major trophy and has typically played outside the top flight, flitting around the regional leagues.

A big turning point came in 2015 with the arrival of Emeus, a locally born businessman who had moved back to the region after working with companies across Europe. He took up an offer of becoming chairman of Mjällby, which was in the second tier at the time and making year-on-year financial losses, and — in his words — “established a methodology I’d learned in business life.”

Strategic plans and ambitious targets were put in place off the field, while new coaches were hired and a commitment was made to lean on homegrown players who could be sold for a profit.

“Another mantra I talk about is, we need to be best on the things which are free,” Emeus said. “We can have a better team spirit than Real Madrid … we can prepare better for a game than Manchester United.”

Mjällby won its last match in the 2016 season to stay in the third division, then won back-to-back promotions in 2018 and ’19 to return to Allsvenskan.

Teacher and student

The unlikely rise to being title contenders has come in the last two years under coach Anders Torstensson, a former youth-team player at Mjällby who spent time in the military before returning to the area, becoming a teacher and occasionally helping out as the club’s short-term coach.

Torstensson was hired for the third time in 2023 and was soon joined by an assistant, Karl Marius Aksum, who has a PhD in Visual Perception in Elite Football but had never coached at senior level. Mjällby’s leadership noticed that Aksum, a Norwegian, posted his tactical beliefs and principles to a large following on social media and felt he was the coach to help change a team known for being defensively minded to one which played a more expansive game.

Mjällby achieved a club-record 50 points last season, had its highest average possession stats ever (moving up to 51%) and created more chances, Aksum said.

This season, Mjällby has the best defensive record (17 goals conceded), the second most goals (44) and has lost just one of its 24 games. The team’s 57 points is a record at this stage of a season and it needs 11 more from its last six games to break Malmö’s league record of 67.

“It’s no surprise that we’re playing a good style of football,” Aksum told the AP. “It’s a surprise, of course, that we’re leading the table.

“For everyone around the village, in the shops, in the countryside when I take a walk or a run, they are living a fairy tale. They can’t believe what’s happening.”

The title?

The only team which can realistically stop Mjällby winning the title is Hammarby, which is eight points back in second place. Another Stockholm-based team, AIK, is a further six points adrift in third.

“I’ve dreamed of qualification to European games at some point in my life and being able to watch Mjällby abroad,” said Mjällby fan Johan Cederblad, who travels for the team’s home games from Stockholm, 520 kilometers (320 miles) up the coast. “But winning Allsvenskan has probably never even occurred to me.”

Mjällby has never been in this position. Its squad is full of unheralded players — though Axel Noren recently got a first call-up by Sweden’s national team and fellow defender Abdullah Iqbal is Pakistan’s captain — who need to handle increasing pressure.

For Aksum, Mjällby is still “far off from winning the league.”

That’s not stopping fans believing a dream could turn into a reality.

“We’re not here because of luck,” Lennartsson said. “We have belief, we have good people — players, coaches, employees – and I think we’re humble and have our own identity. That’s a great strength.”

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer