Last night, a tiny and almost penniless Swedish football club beat Arsenal 2-1 at home. The story of Östersund Football Club is quite unlike any other in sport: I wrote about it in my Daily Telegraph column a while ago when they hadn’t really featured on a British radar. This morning, with Arsene Wenger in despair at his team’s complacency, a lot of people will be wondering what happened. The answer is an inspiring one, full of lessons for politics and life in general.
Östersund is a tiny vodka-belt town in the frozen north of Sweden with a population smaller than the capacity of the Emirates stadium. It has no football tradition, or didn’t before Daniel Kindberg, a local businessman, was crazy enough to try to start a team there. He’s one of those cheerful Swedes, who didn’t seem put off by the odds stacked against him. Not even when the team he assembled sank to the fourth division.
He then hired Graham Potter, an English coach and a kind of football hippie who had played for Stoke City and ended up as an English university coach.
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