SWEDEN: Mixed messages for sports fans

As reported on our Polish site on Wednesday, the Swedish sports world is breathing a sigh of relief as the country’s Culture Minister, Amanda Lind, announced that fans should be able to come to sporting events from the 10 April, the start of the Swedish football season.

However, the national papers reveal a war of words between Lind and the country’s pandemic expert, Anders Tegnell, who sees no chance of supporters gathering at the stadiums.

It was Göteborg Posten, the Gothenburg Post, the city who speedway team was Kaparna, that broke the news that the Health Department and the Culture Department has agreed than fans could attend sports match from the start of the football season, Sweden’s most watched sport. This was then reported on the Elitserien website, Elit Speedway Sverige (ESS), with a positive comment from Mikael Holmstrand, the league’s press officer.

But barely a few hours later at a public briefing about the Corona situation in the country, Anders Tegnell denied that any such agreement has been made.

„I think there has been a false interpretation,” he said, „there are still a high number of cases… and this kind of event has too many risks,” he said to national news site, SVT.

The article says that that Tegnell believes the newspapers have taken the fact that the health department is discussing how fans might be able to come to matches to mean that they definitely will come to matches. But that is not what he says is likely.

The Swedish Elite Football Union, which represents the top two divisions of Swedish fotoball have put forward a plan which would allow for increased amounts of fans as the situation improves – much like what was implemented in the Ekstraliga in 2020.

It means that arenas with a capacity of less than 15,000 could have 15% of the seats filled at the start of the season.

If this rule was applied to speedway it could make a huge difference to the sport. Ca 2000 people attend matches in the Elitserien but many of the stadiums have a much larger capacity that this from the days when the sport attracted 10,000s of fans. The capacity at Dackarna’s venue, Målilla, when they host the Scandinavian SGP can be as high as 12,000, for example.

But none of this has been approved by the Health Department, so no one knows what will happen when the football season starts, just one month before the Elitserien speedway season begins on 5 May.

In 2020, the clubs exploited a loophole in the Pandemic regulations that had no restrictions on how many could eat at a restaurant as long as they were well spaced out. So, several speedway clubs had hundreds of people dining outside and watching the matches live, even though the rules said only 50 people could gather for public events.

However, the government has made changes in the law to allow them to take stricter action, which have been in-force since December 2020. Currently, only 8 people can meet together and all shops and restaurants have a maximum amount of people who can come based on the venue’s size.