How FC Rosengård have bounced back from their worst season
The Swedish giants finished a lowly seventh in 2023, but in 2024 have won 17 games out of 17 and look all set for a fourteenth domestic title, so how they have they turned it around so quickly?
There are few teams in Europe who have enjoyed as big a turnaround in fortunes during 2024 as Swedish side FC Rosengård.
It should be no surprise to see the 13-times Damallsvenskan champions at the top of the league, but the club who were once a regular feature in the latter stages of the Champions League endured a torrid 2023, finishing seventh in the bottom half and trailing title winners Hammarby by 14 points.
Flip forward almost 12 months and FC Rosengård sit nine points clear of last year’s champions with a game in hand and have incredibly won all 17 games so far this season, already beating their points tally from 2023 with nine games still to go.
It’s all the more remarkable given last year looked like the start of a worrying pattern for the titans of Swedish football, overtaken by clubs such as both Hammarby and BK Häcken, clubs linked with big men’s teams at the top end of the Allsvenskan, while FC Rosengård’s men’s team play in the lower divisions and is not a club with the financial might of its women’s equivalents.
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“It’s been a lot,” says sporting director Therese Sjögran, with a little chuckle, as she reflects on their incredible season so far during the mid-season break, adding, “But the football is going well, so I can’t complain!”
To say it’s going well is somewhat of an understatement. On top of their incredible run of 17 wins, they have 75 goals and conceded just five, the closest result to dropping points a 1-0 win away at nearest rivals Hammarby.
Even Sjögran, a former player for the team, over 200 caps for Sweden and over five years as the club’s sporting director, isn’t quite sure just how it’s gone from so bad to so good in such a short space of time.
“It’s crazy,” she says. “Last season…that was really, really bad. We almost have the same team, we haven’t changed a lot. We have changed how we train, otherwise? I genuinely don’t know.
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