The man behind the co-hosts. Tony Gustavsson, by those who know him best.
The Australia head coach has gone under the radar, but the double-World Cup winner with the USA as an assistant is adored by those who have worked with him. This is his story.
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The one really striking about Tony Gustavsson is nobody appears to have a bad word to say about him. Coaches who worked with him in his early days back home in Sweden, coaches in the last few years, and even his former players.
The man tasked with taking co-hosts Australia to glory when the World Cup kicks off on Thursday is deep into his first senior head coach role in international football, having spent many successful years as an assistant coach for the USA, where he won two World Cups working with Jill Ellis.
But his beginnings are far humbler. His playing career from the very end of the late 1980s to the mid-2000s was a modest one, and the last few years of his career on the pitch intertwined with his future career away from it.
After managing lower division club Ytterhogdals IK for three years while also playing for the club, Gustavsson signed for a bigger club, Degerfors IF, in 2004 and this time took on the role of player-assistant manager as he prepared for the next stage of his career, now at the age of 31.
Degerfors was a third division side at the time, but were promoted during Gustavsson’s year at the club, and he would become the manager outright in 2005 after hanging up his boots.
“I was playing in a local club and moved to Degerfors to play,” recalls Jonas Lindskog. “It was the same year Tony was studying to be a coach, he was doing a coaching education course at the University.
“He was an assistant, but playing too, though after six months he didn’t really play and just became a coach for the second half of the season. We won the league and got promoted to the Suppretan, then the manager moved on.”
Lindskog admits the players “expected a big name” and points to the fact the club was once managed by Sven-Goran Eriksson, as well as his England assistant Tord Grip, but it was Gustavsson who was given the nod to guide the team into the second division in his first senior role as a sole head coach.
“One day they said ‘Tony Gustavsson will be the new head coach’,” he recalls. “But you know what? It was a smart choice, we all knew how good he was, how tactical he was. He was before his time when it came to tactics. He was the first one to teach us so many things. He stabilised us in 2005 and 2006 and then he went to Hammarby, one of the biggest clubs in Sweden.”
During his second year in charge of Degefors, Gustavsson found himself needing a new assistant, and found one in the form of a man he’d come across a few years earlier, Andreas Pettersson, who is now a Sweden Under 21 coach, but at the time was a young up and comer.
“In the early 2000s, Tony started a talent camp with Tord Grip in the northern part of Sweden,” he recalls. “I lived there at the time and was sent there by my local FA and that’s where we met. From the beginning, we realised we had similar ways of seeing things, similar ways in our big interest in football.
“I think Tony was the guy who got me into that place, made me interested in being a coach…”
“I ended up going to Degerfors to work with him in 2006. He was fresh, he’d been there one year, so I moved down there and we started to work together for a year, then he moved to Hammarby and he took me with him, so I worked with him through to 2009 when he left.”
Pettersson echoes Lindskog’s remarks about a man who was potentially ahead of his time. His departure from Hammarby came unceremoniously when the club was relegated from the top division at the end of 2009, but Pettersson recalls his coaching methods in detail, even over a decade on.
“Now it’s the way everyone does it, but we trained with a ball a lot and that wasn’t that common. Not as much about the physical side and hope we could run, every training session was about the ball.
“It was very specific, the way we trained. We tried other systems, not just 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1, we tried to do things a different way. Now, this is not new at all, but 15 years ago it was a little bit new for everyone. Even when we did do running, it involved the ball.”
Gustavsson’s influence remained engrained on Lindskog, who after retiring in 2007 became a first team coach at Degerfors for seven years between 2009 and 2016, admitting his passion for coaching came from the man he’d previously played under, and someone he kept in contact with.
“We had a good relationship after he left and we talked a lot,” he says. “I think Tony was the guy who got me into that place, made me interested in being a coach. He opened up lots of new tactics and new information for us when he coached us.
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“Even as an assistant, he wasn’t the guy who would say ‘no, that’s not right’, but he would just say smart things, that the head coach didn’t really do. He was the brain behind the tactics. Every Swedish team played 4-4-2 at the time, he played 4-2-3-1 and that wasn’t really the big thing, the big thing was he knew what every single person should do, attack, midfield and defence.”
He adds, “There was a lot of training. We would do 4v4, 8v8, 11v11, it was very detailed, very specific. He knew what he wanted and players felt ‘ok, we do what he wants’ and we won, so we knew he was smart. Any player I speak to today says the same, he was the first one who was so good at the tactics.”
Pettersson admits “went against tradition a bit” as they looked to gain an edge, one which sadly at Hammarby never came, but it did for Gustavsson, and for Pettersson in fact, further down the road, with both forging out successful coaching careers for themselves.
“He was really keen to look for new things and he was keen to be modern,” says Pettersson. “He was curious, he looked for new things, he wanted to try and new things and stand for something different. It’s 15 years ago now, but that was my first impression.
“Something else I can say is he was really determined to be successful, it was in his mind. ‘This is the way to do it’. He was very professional, the way we played, the way we trained, I think it is a personal trait for him. Also, the way he tried to develop a club and progress every part of the game, no matter what it was. He worked with the little details and looks at the whole picture around a club or the national team.”
After leaving Hammarby in 2009, Gustavsson remained in Scandinavia until he was given the chance by another Swedish coach, the legendary Pia Sundhage, to step into the women’s game and be part of her coaching staff with the US women’s national team, one of the most successful women’s national teams in the world.
Over several periods, it sparked a successful seven-year association with US Soccer, first under Sundhage and then under Ellis, and the latter fondly remembers her time with Gustavsson and the role he played in them winning unprecedented back-to-back World Cups before both departed after the 2019 tournament in France.
“I was actually coaching UCLA when I first came across him,” recalls Ellis. “I was Pia’s assistant in Beijing for the Olympics and when she asked me to join her again for London in 2012, we’d hired Tony at that time, so we were assistant coaches together. Pia knew him, but I didn’t. We spent a lot of evenings over a lot of coffees talking about the games and just got to know each other that way initially. He’s a great guy.”
Ellis and Gustavsson would go on to make a formidable partnership together, but the women’s game in Europe was awaiting him first.
Swedish side Tyreso FF, home to some of the biggest names in the sport at the time, wanted Gustavsson to be their coach, so he headed home. At the time, Tyreso played host to legend of the game Marta, as well as Sweden’s talismanic Caroline Seger, and Spain’s own legend Veronica Boquete, to name just a few.
Boquete, still playing now for Fiorentina in Italy, is another who only recalls fondly her memories of working with Gustavsson, who guided them to a dramatic last-minute title success in 2012, and despite fighting financial meltdown behind the scenes two years later, the 2014 UEFA Champions League final.
“I remember it was a little unexpected, the change in coach,” recalls Boquete. “The other coach needed to leave and we needed a new coach and I remember some of the Swedish girls had met him before, they knew him and of course I asked them ‘how was it?’ They were like ‘yeah, he has great ideas – and he smiles a lot!’ I always remember that.
“When he came over, he definitely smiled a lot! He’s such a positive person, he showed all his positivity the whole time he was with us. We had tough moments, but he was always able to find a way to make it better and I really appreciate him as a coach and a leader.
“We had a really good connection because we see the game in the same way, he had quite a Spanish style. He loved to have the ball, pressure the team after losing the ball. We would train things I hadn’t seen before, not in Sweden anyway, so it was a surprise but a relief, because I loved it. Every session, every game plan.”
Boquete laughs that it’s “not possible” when I ask if anyone could possibly have disliked him, and says he was able to strike a “balance” between on the field and off the field, which is why he has been so successful wherever he’s been in the last decade.
“But he had the other side too, he had the human side which sometimes coaches don’t…”
The former Spain midfielder can’t enthuse enough her love for Gustavsson as a coach and what he achieved with Tyreso, with the back drop of the team going bust and dissolving after the Champions League final in 2014.
“He’s definitely a good leader, he could manage all the good players we had and that isn’t always easy,” says the midfielder. “He was able to get the best out of each of us. He demanded a lot, knew we were good, so since the first moment he wanted the best from us. He would let us know if at training it wasn’t good enough. He spoke a lot individually and as a group, we did a lot of analysis, watched a lot of videos, that’s something great players particularly appreciate.
“It is not easy to coach at the highest level because players demand a lot of you, but Tony was great in everything. We had a goal in every session, short-term, long-term, he would always demand the best individually and player better as a team every time. That combined with his personality and his human side, it worked well with us.”
On his infectious personality, Boquete adds, “What I experienced was definitely a good person. He never did anything to make us think a different way. He was close to us, always happy. He was always with his family, his kids would always be there, you felt he brought a good atmosphere and had good people around him. He always tried to help us, but as a manager he was great too.
“We demanded a lot on the football side, but we had a coach who had knowledge, so we respected him for that. But he had the other side too, he had the human side which sometimes coaches don’t. In this case with Tony, he was fantastic on both sides and during my career I didn’t always experience that too much. That’s hard to find at the highest level.”
When Tyreso ceased to exist in 2014, Gustavsson reunited with Ellis who had just taken on the role of USA head coach permanently a year out from the World Cup in Canada.
It was perfect timing for both as one was taking a job and one was leaving another, and it was clear even in a short time working together Ellis had seen and witnessed enough to want Gustavsson as part of her staff for an assault on the World Cup, with USA looking to end a 16-year drought.
“One thing that was interesting was when US Soccer approached me to be the head coach, I said I’d go through the process, but I said ‘you should also speak to Tony’,” Ellis recalls.
“I had a tremendous respect for him, knew he’d been a head coach, so we both interviewed and funnily enough I said ‘if I got it would you come and work for me?’ He said he’d love to and that we complemented each other.”
The pair went on to be formidable over their five years together, winning the World Cup in style a year later with a five-goal in the final against Japan, and repeating the feat after seeing off all of Sweden, Spain, France, England and the Netherlands four years later in 2019.
Many USA players credit Gustavsson’s influence as a key reason they won the tournaments, and Ellis goes into detail about just what it was he brought to the table during their time working together.
“He’s very passionate about the game, that’s our foundation in what we have in common and he’d had great experience in Sweden,” she says. “What hit it off was how we saw the game. Both of us felt we wanted to coach teams that looked to get forward and play exciting, high-energy, high-tempo football with both sides of the ball. When I started in the job I targeted head coaches to be the assistants because they understand what it takes. The challenges, the expectations, so all my assistants were head coaches and Tony became almost a partner.
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“In 2015, the way we divided it up and in 2019 we divided up in in-possession and out of possession, but the overall philosophy and how I wanted us to look was I said to Tony I wanted three in the middle and three up front, because we were front-loaded. We went through a period of experimentation in 2017 with different players, different systems and we settled on the 4-3-3.
“He focused on in possession. His set-pieces were brilliant, that was a huge strength of ours and what I miss is the robustness of those conversations. The four of us who sat in that room together. I said to the staff ‘I want to hear your most impassioned plea and why, I don’t want to hear what you think I want to hear’ and man we had some great debates until late in the night and we really challenged each other in that regard. That’s where you get the best out of each other, where it’s not just comfortable.
“I care for him like a brother. I got to know him and his family and I’m a big supporter of Tony’s always.”
The praise for Gustavsson is universal, and it all follows the same theme. Lindskog, who remains in touch with him to this day, describes him as “extraordinary”, and recalls one story of when he came back to Degerfors to host a conference, one which Lindskog was in the audience for.
“It was him and the national team coach in hockey,” he recalls. “He started talking about two players who had been important for him. One was Sebastian Eguren, from Uruguay, and the second player he said did everything for him, everything for the team and then he said ‘I’m very happy he was here today’, and it was me.
“I felt honoured, he would never have said that if he didn’t mean it and that’s Tony in a nutshell. I was totally knocked out, that was big for me. Every time we talk it feels like we talked yesterday. Whatever he does, he’s a winner. When he came here, he was a winner as a coach. If we did a quiz, he was the winner, if we played basketball, he was the winner. Not just for football, I think that’s his life philosophy, he will be successful whatever he does. He was the assistant with the USA, he was the winner, he will make a team a success.
“He’s a really, really great person. He never gave advantage to anyone, everyone liked him even if you didn’t play because he’s a warm-hearted person.”
Pettersson admits the two hit it off “from the beginning” and like everyone else, the pair remain good friends and remained in contact to this day, briefly working together again when Gustavsson was appointed GIF Sundvall manager in 2019 on a short-term deal after leaving his USA role.
“He listens to people. We sat a few months ago and talked about defence and 4-4-2 for two hours…”
Like Lindskog, Ellis and Boquete, he too only has good memories of working with Gustavsson and believes he will continue to succeed whatever he does and wherever he goes.
“He's a really good guy, in all ways. He’s very familiar, really keen on taking care of people around him. His family, his friends, people around him. He thinks about people, but he’s very dedicated too. When he starts something, he always wants to do the research to find out ‘is it worth it? Is everything right?’ When he decides to go into something he knows it’s right and from then he works until it’s 100%. He is really keen on preparation, he puts a lot of time into how he wants things to happen, how he thinks and making sure he can do the best job possible.
“He’s the same guy with his passion, his motivation, but the personal trait was always be professional. That’s him. He was so determined when we started to make it and be successful and I think he has that same personal trait now, but with more experience. He listens to people. We sat a few months ago and talked about defence and 4-4-2 for two hours. He looks for solutions, always tries to find solutions.
“He’s curious, he will always look for answers, for influences, he’s been successful with set-pieces. Influences like Marcelo Bielsa. He doesn’t think he always knows best, he listens to people. He’s the same person with the same drive to be successful, but the experience has made him better.”
All will be watching closely to see if he takes the form he was created in the Australia into what would be a historic first World Cup for the co-hosts, and a third triumph in a row for Gustavsson, but this time as a head coach.
Given how he has got them playing and with a home crowd behind them, no one would be surprised if he pulled it off.
“He makes himself successful,” says Lindskog. “If he doesn’t know something, he will find out. I spoke to him when he was taking over Australia. I’m on the board now at Degerfors, we have played 3-4-3 for a long time and he called me for a really long chat about tactics with 3-4-3, because one of his ideas was to play 3-4-3 with Australia.
“He called me and wanted every detail of how we played and called other coaches he knew who played 3-4-3 for every single detail to make his own solution with his own team. He never leaves anything, he finds out what he wants.”
Boquete meanwhile thinks anyone who is not yet familiar with Gustavsson as a head coach will “definitely” know a lot more about him after the tournament, whatever happens.
“When you are assistant, you don’t get the respect you always deserve, but from what I hear from the USA players he played a huge part in their success when they won everything. The players he has worked with really respect him, but maybe in the women’s game with the media space people don’t know as much about him.
“In his case, he is the now head coach of the co-hosts, people will know about him. If you know his story, he is one of the best coaches in the women’s game. Not many have his experience in both men’s and women’s football, the USA national team. He took Tyreso to a Champions League final, he still hasn’t got all the respect he deserves but I have no doubt he will get it after this World Cup. He can get any job he wants in a club or national teams.”