Swedish football prioritized fans over finances. Now the business world is booming.

The warning sounded again and again, first in Swedish and then in English. A fire had been detected. Please evacuate the stadium. The players left the field. Firefighters arrived outside. But in the stands, as a thick cloud of smoke curled through the floodlights, no one moved. The fans were going to make the game happen through sheer force of will.

It was a match they had been looking forward to for a while. The top two teams in the Allsvenskan, Sweden’s elite league, entered the final day of the season with just three points difference. A quirk of fate’s planning meant that their last match was with each other. Malmö, the host, needed to win to claim the championship. Elfsborg, the visitor, only had to avoid defeat. It was announced as one golden final: a gold medal match.

The idea of ​​a single match deciding the fate of a league title is extremely rare in modern football, where championships are won over the course of a season rather than in a winner-takes-all final. This has not happened in England since 1989, and Italy has not produced such a denouement for more than half a century.

It’s also becoming increasingly unusual for there to even be a title in play as the season comes to an end. Over the past thirty years, football has become so financially stratified that many domestic tournaments for the wealthiest teams are little more than months-long parades. Sweden, however, is different, a lonely beacon of competitive balance. In four of the last six editions of the Allsvenskan, the championship has been at stake.

How that came about is a story of rejecting orthodoxy, of asking why sports exist and for whom they exist. But it is also a story about how difficult it is to be alone, and how fragile even the most encouraging success can be.

A different path

The walls of Malmö’s Eleda Stadium are filled with memories of the glory days, the era when Swedish teams could compete with and occasionally beat the European giants.

In 1979, Malmö, with a team of amateurs, reached it all the way the European Cup Final. It is still the only Scandinavian team to participate in the game and its successor, the Champions League final. In the 1980s, IFK Göteborg won two (lesser) continental trophies. As recently as 1994, IFK defeated Manchester United and Barcelona in the Champions League.

Those victories turned out to be a last stand. The dynamics of the game changed dramatically when money poured into football in the 1990s, first from broadcasters, then from private investors and finally from oligarchs, corporations and nation states. The wealth created a new class of untouchable domestic superpowers.

“The big money fed the biggest clubs,” allowing them to build rosters full of superstars, said Mats Enquist, who from 2012 until early this year was general secretary of Svenskelitfotboll, or SEF, the body that runs Sweden’s professional leagues. For Sweden, like many countries outside Europe’s main television markets, it was “impossible to keep up.”

Rather than reaching for shade, Sweden’s response was – effectively – to opt out. In 1999, the country made it law that 51 percent of its sports teams had to be owned by their members: the fans. In 2007, when that rule was challenged, fans fought fiercely to protect it.

“That was the moment when the fans first realized the power they had,” says Noa Bachner, the author of a book that examines Sweden’s rejection of football’s economic orthodoxy.

Yet they wielded it in a bleak landscape.

“The crowd decreased, the level of play was not good, the league had a lot of problems with hooliganism,” Mr Enquist said. A survey he commissioned as one of his first acts showed that only 11 percent of fans considered the Allsvenskan their favorite competition, far behind the English Premier League and the Champions League. “It wasn’t a good place to be,” he said.

Mr. Enquist was an outsider to football when he played a leading role in it: a software entrepreneur by trade, and a volleyball and golf fanatic. However, it was his job to solve it.

His solution set Sweden on an almost heretical path in modern football. Unable to turn to wealthy investors, the SEF tapped into the country’s most obvious strength: its fans. Despite considerable skepticism, the authorities “reached out” to supporters, Mr Enquist said, and began designing a competition they wanted to watch, and that they wanted to watch live.

They negotiated limits on behavior, labeling invading the field and throwing missiles as red lines, but leaving a tacit leeway for fireworks in the service of the spectacle. They convinced police to take a more conciliatory approach rather than “treating all fans as potential hooligans”, as Lars-Christer Olsson, the league’s president until this year, said.

Ten years later, the transformation is staggering. Swedish football is almost alone in the middle class in Europe and is a model of health. It has had eleven different champions in twenty years. Visitor numbers have doubled in the past ten years; this year brought a record number of visitors. The league’s revenues have tripled over the same period. Now more than 40 percent of Swedish fans consider the Allsvenskan as their priority.

The match of the year between Malmö and Elfsborg should have been the perfect distillation of all that work, an illustration of what makes Sweden the standard-bearer for a different version of football. Instead, it highlighted how thin the line is between empowering fans and losing control over them.

The start of the second half was delayed by half an hour as Elfsborg fans faced a line of riot police officers, and then by another half hour when Malmö’s ultras, the team’s most hardcore supporters, exploded so many smuggled-in fireworks that they activated the fire alarm. When Malmö’s victory was secured, thousands of fans rushed onto the pitch. A handful rushed towards their Elfsborg counterparts and threw flaming flares into their huddled sections.

“There is a small margin,” said Pontus Jansson, a veteran defender who returned to Malmö this year after a decade abroad to draw the curtain on his career. “They got over it.”

For fans, by fans

The moment Malmö’s players and staff claimed their title – two hours later, after all the smoke had cleared – was a homely occasion. They walked out in small groups to collect their medals, in velvet presentation boxes, from a folding table. There were no glitter cannons or smoke machines behind them.

Instead, the photo that will one day grace the walls alongside all other reminders of past triumphs captured the two elements that make up the club: the players and, gathered on the pitch behind them, the fans.

Everything that Swedish football has become has been built by and for the people who go to watch it in stadiums. Mr. Bachner, the author, cites the beginning of a long list of examples: the absence of corporations, sovereign wealth funds and “multi-club projects” among the ranks of club owners; sustainable investments in women’s teams; an unofficial ban on holding training camps in authoritarian states; a rule stating that the league must give at least two months’ notice before rescheduling televised games.

The clearest example, however, is that Sweden – alone among the major European countries – has resisted the introduction of video assistant referees. The clubs, at the insistence of their members, have consistently voted against the technology, which is a source of controversy elsewhere due to its not-infrequent errors and interminable delays.

“I think the fans feel that it disrupts the atmosphere in the stadium,” Mr. Olsson said.

There are things that the Swedish democratic tradition cannot vote away. Malmö’s championship, for example, means a new potential revenue stream from the Champions League that could be enough to give the club – already Sweden’s richest – an insurmountable competitive advantage.

The issue of ultras also poses a problem. “It feels like there are two games happening,” Mr. Bachner said. “One on the field and one in the stands, where these groups see how they can demonstrate their power, and they don’t mind if 20,000 other people have to wait while they do it.”

Sweden is not the only country facing this challenge, but Mr Bachner acknowledged concerns that the chaos on the season’s showcase day would lead to calls for more aggressive policing, which could threaten the delicate alliance between authorities and fans .

For many that would be a step back. “It may not be the best competition in Europe,” says Johan Lindvall, the league’s CEO, “but the atmosphere in the stands is.” Matchdays are both the cornerstone on which all success is built, and the testament to how far it has come.

“After we scored the goal, the noise was crazy,” Mr Jansson said. His presence alone is an example of this. Over the past seven years he had become part of the furniture of English football. He’s only 32 and could still be playing there, among the Premier League’s superstars. Instead, he chose to come home in April to experience what Swedish football had become.

“That atmosphere,” he said. “That’s what brought me back.”