In my Daily Telegraph column today, I write about the incredible story of Östersund football club. It hasn’t quite been picked up in Britain yet, but I suspect it will one day be made into a Moneyball-style film: about how a small-time English coach was hired to move to a small subarctic town in Sweden with a small budget, and assembled a team of misfits on £600-a-week. But his tactics, and his faith in his ability to get the best out of people, saw them not only win the Swedish Cup but they are now taking on the biggest clubs in Europe. So this town, the size of Inverness, a seven-hour drive north of Stockholm, where winter ends in May and starts in October, is now chartering aircraft to take fans to Spain where their club plays Athletic Bilbao on Thursday next week.
It’s quite a story, and one for which I gathered far more information than you can fit into a 1,000-word column.
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