Creating an identity

I love my family, my wife and children, but I have also had a lifelong love affair with football.

As a player I was privileged to play for clubs that were used to winning things. At AC Milan and Feyenoord, we won titles and European trophies. So I learned the mentality of winning – how to win as a player and as a team.

At Milan, we had a bunch of leaders and it was a perfect environment – probably the best club in the world at that time. We had players who have since gone into management or other roles at football clubs: Paolo Maldini, Alessandro Costacurta, Clarence Seedorf, Andriy Shevchenko, Alessandro Nesta, Gennaro Gattuso, Andrea Pirlo, Filippo Inzaghi and more. They have all gone on to fill roles in the game after playing. So it was an incredible environment to experience, and a great place to develop your football mind. A lot of thinking, talking, discussing all aspects of football.

I was only 18 when I left Denmark for Holland to sign for Heerenveen. The coach there, Foppe de Haan, is a Heerenveen legend. He took me on scouting trips to connect with me and talk about the game, because each country’s football can be a little bit different. That was a very good way of making a connection, but also of giving me inspiration and a sort of extra football education.

Now, as a coach myself, I like to help players become better and fulfil their potential. As a head coach of a football club, you should know what is happening in every corner of the club, including the youth team. You should know who is the top talent and who needs a helping hand.

When I was head coach of Blackburn Rovers, I saw a kid in the youth team who had a lot of ambition and dreams. Adam Wharton wasn’t the finished article, but he had a lot of talent. So I made some extra efforts to help him take the next step.

“I was lucky to play for a lot of excellent coaches myself. Carlo Ancelotti was very inspiring”

I went to talk with him and his parents at their family home, about how he could develop into a senior player. It was about how we could help him not only then, but to become a Premier League player and to play for England.

It gives me a lot of joy to be able to help someone like that, but for a football club there is also a business case for developing young players. When Blackburn sold Adam to Crystal Palace, they received the highest transfer fee in the club’s history. But for me it was great to see a young man develop into a senior player, taking responsibility for his own development and going on to play for England.

I was lucky to play for a lot of excellent coaches myself. Carlo Ancelotti was very inspiring, and of course he is still going strong. At Feyenoord I was part of a team that won the Eredivisie. That team was managed by Leo Beenhakker, who has been around for many years. After Beenhakker, we won the UEFA Cup with Bert van Marwijk as head coach. Under his management I got a lot of responsibility on the pitch and was more or less in charge of how we pressed as a team – how front-footed we were, or how much we sat back.

So I picked up different things from all the coaches I played for. Bits and pieces, plus a lot of inspiration. Then it was up to me to make my own model.

As a head coach you need to have a very clear vision of how to do things. There needs to be a connection with everything you do. The way you talk about football, and the way you train, has to be connected to what you see in games. So you must be very transparent and clear on what you expect from the players, on and off the pitch.

A lot of coaches talk about identity, and it sounds very good, but you don’t actually see it on the pitch. It is important that your words match the story. For me, the key word in coaching a team tactically is ‘principles’. I want a quick game, so I don’t want my team to play unnecessary balls sideways. One of my principles is ‘one or two touches within one or two seconds’. That is a way of talking on the pitch in a way that everyone can see. A non-verbal communication that makes your game more fluent.

“We must not forget that we need to take care of football as a product and give something back to the fans”

Football is a game of 90 minutes, but on average the ball is not even in play for an hour. You can only score if the ball is in play, yet I see games where, in the first minute, players take ages to take a throw-in, or a goal-kick, or they are on the ground for ages. My aim is to win football games, and the idea is to have the ball in play, to play forward and create something – not to play the ball around and around and around, and create a boring game. The goal is in the middle, so we play towards the goal.

We must not forget that we need to take care of football as a product and give something back to the fans. There needs to be excitement, even if from a coach’s point of view you want that to come with control. I don’t want chaotic football; I want to control chaos and dominate with and without the ball.

I was an assistant coach with Denmark from 2016 to 2019, during which time we were quite successful. We were unbeaten for three and a half years, during which we qualified for and played at the 2018 World Cup. There, we lost only on penalties to the eventual finalists Croatia – and after that we qualified for the Euros.

Then Malmö came calling, where my task was to win games while creating an exciting, different way of playing with new, young players. We managed to win two Swedish league titles in two years, and qualified for the Champions League group stages. That was huge for the club.

In some ways, the task I faced at Malmö was a bit similar to when I went to Blackburn – to create an attacking, modern way of playing football, developing youngsters, and winning games. We came very close in my first year to reaching the Championship playoffs with a very young team. But we played without a senior striker for the last, important games of the season. In the end, we missed out on goal difference – but it was the club’s best finish in a decade, and we also the best cup run for a long time.

Now, with Sweden, the job has also been to make a turnaround. They haven’t been successful in the last few years, missing out on the World Cup and Euros, and were relegated in the Nations League. So my job has been to turn things around and do it with exciting, attacking, modern football, creating a new identity.

“With my staff, each week we follow 55 players and analyse each game”

If you can see a team that has a very clear identity and way of playing, and if they play with energy, you will see that they are playing with a smile on their face. And then I think they will be more creative, run quicker, and help each other even more.

In football it is quite difficult to win at the same time as building for the future. With Sweden we have a young, inexperienced side in terms of caps, but it is not always bad to be inexperienced. Certainly, the Swedish players’ hunger is great.

We have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. With my staff, each week we follow 55 players and analyse each game, in relation to my principles and the way I see football. This is so important, because unlike a club team, we don’t have time on the training pitch. Scouting the players can make the puzzle easier. We can see who is able to do the right things at the right moment, and who can make connections with each other. Because football is a game where you need to make connections and play together.

So we are looking at 55 players and discussing them every 14 days. We are also building data that is relevant to my principles. This is all helping us to create an identity even without training a lot together. Then we can put the right players into the right spots.

After one year as head coach of Sweden, we have a very clear way of playing football. Everybody can now say: “Okay, this is a Sweden team, and this is how they play. They are front-footed, extremely intense, they want to be in charge of the game, and they want to create chances.”

The stats also say that we are doing the right things. First and foremost, we made a turnaround in the first year with the Nations League, winning our group. We had 152 shots in our six games, averaging more than 25 per game, and scored 19 goals. That was more than any other country in the competition.

“We have a group of players who would crawl on their knees to Sweden to play”

What is also important is that the fans are proud when they see their team play. In the stadium, the fans need to be proud of the team. If they are at home and watching on TV, they should be proud of the team. The fans should feel a connection, and we are steadily creating that with Sweden.

It has pleased me a lot that we developed into a team that the Swedish fans can be proud of. When I meet the fans, they are very happy with the way we play, because they want to see excitement. They want something for their money, because it costs a lot of money to go to football.

As I said, we have players who are extremely hungry. There is a lot of competition in the dressing room, which is important if you want to do well. The boys did an excellent job winning our Nations League group, and now we will try to take the next steps in our development.

Going into qualifying for the 2026 World Cup, we are not the favourites in our group. When you haven’t performed for a few years, then you are not seeded. So we are in a group with Switzerland, who are top-seeded and a very solid team that has done really well in recent years. Then there is Slovenia, who reached the knockout stages of Euro 2024, and Kosovo, who had a good Nations League. So we are not the favourites, but we need to believe that we have a huge potential. We will go into every game to win it.

It is important that we remain humble, but still very ambitious and know our quality. We have a group of players who would crawl on their knees to Sweden to play games. That togetherness and spirit is important if you want to win anything.

Up front, we also have three great players in Alexander Isak, Viktor Gyökeres and Dejan Kulusevski. When I came to Sweden there was talk that they were not connecting and couldn’t play together, but after the way we played in the Nations League nobody would say that.

“One of the ideas has been to build a ‘scenery’ around these three attacking players”

With the way we want to play, with those players in the team we are able to create a lot of chances. Instead of being passive and only creating two or three opportunities in the game, we want to be very front-footed. We want to play with high intensity and create eight or nine opportunities. Because we know, with the quality of those players, they will score.

It is about getting them into the right position. I always say that the other players have extremely important tasks – tasks that they did so well in the Nations League. That means winning the ball and playing it forward, with a few touches, instead of playing it around and around. If you take too long it is more difficult to create, because then you have 11 players you need to play through.

So one of the ideas has been to build a ‘scenery’ around these three attacking players. They are great lads who want to play for the team and have been really humble.

Together we want to take the next step – the biggest of which would be to qualify for the World Cup. We need to make the people proud again, so they can share that proudness together when they are watching the national team.

That is what success looks like for me.