No different nation has impacted the 2023 FIFA Girls’s World Cup as a lot as Sweden. At the very least, not from a training perspective.

Within the match’s historical past as much as and together with this yr’s version, a complete of 5 Swedish coaches have led non-Swedish nationwide groups. The one nation with better illustration on this sense is England, with seven coaches. That English affect has been restricted largely to Canada (John Herdman and Bev Priestman) and New Zealand (Herdman, Dave Boardman and Tony Readings). Sweden’s affect, however, has unfold everywhere in the globe, taking in nearly each FIFA confederation.

Sweden is a rustic of round 10.5 million folks. Its soccer groups, women and men, have by no means gained a World Cup. Simply how did it come to have such a robust teaching custom? What’s their legacy? To start answering these questions, we should rewind to the Eighties, to a time when girls’s soccer was on the cusp of a brand new period of competitors.

UEFA launched its first match for ladies’s nationwide groups in 1980. Qualification finally started in 1982 for an occasion—identified initially because the European Competitors for Girls’s Soccer—to be held in 1984. Sweden went on to win what’s now acknowledged because the inaugural European Girls’s Soccer Championship, beating England on penalties after a two-legged ultimate.