Swedish Immigration Policy and the Make-Up of Its Men’s and Women’s National Teams

The United States men’s and women’s national teams both took on their respective Swedish counterparts recently. The men lost 1-0 in a friendly while the women won 2-0 in the first round of the Women’s World Cup (if a tie-breaker were needed, perhaps we could use the Davis Cup, where the American tennis team beat Sweden in the semifinals).

I, sadly, was unable to watch any of these matches (tennis included), but my parents did and pointed out an interesting contrast between the makeup of Swedish men’s and women’s teams. While the women are almost exclusively “typical” Swedes with names like Johansson, Forsberg, and Lundgren, the men have much wider variety of names that hint at their more diverse backgrounds.

Perhaps the most well-known Swedish player with a less than typical Swedish last name is Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The lanky striker, who has played incredibly in the early part of the season for Inter, was born in the Swedish city of Malmo to a Bosnian father and Croatian mother. He grew up in a neighborhood where, he claims, around 90% of the people were immigrants.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic (photo: BBC)

Zlatan is not the only Swedish national team player whose family comes from the Balkans. Center back Daniel Majstorovic and midfielder Dusan Duric both have families from what is now Serbia. Ajax’s Kennedy Bakircioglü is Assyrian (his parents were born in Turkey), a group that has formed their own team, Assyriska (about which I have previously written). Former Arsenal goalkeeper Rami Shaaban has a Finnish mother and an Egyptian father. And Sweden’s most famous player of all time, Henrik Larsson, has a father from Cape Verde, thus enabling the fantastic dreadlocks the striker sported at the 1994 World Cup.

Henrik Larsson (photo: svt.se)

Why are so many members of the Swedish men’s national team from immigrant families? One reason has to do with the country’s relatively open immigration policies. After World War II, Sweden found that it needed laborers and opened its doors to immigrants willing to fill this need. The wave of immigration that followed filled Sweden’s labor needs and the policy toward immigrants tightened a bit.

But beginning in the 1980s, Sweden opened its doors to refugees. Today, Sweden is one of the countries taking in most Iraqi refugees. Sweden is known as a country both willing to accept more refugees than others and with policies that assist new citizens to adapt to their new country. As Francis Kohn wrote in 2005, “Sweden is generous towards its legal immigrants: they enjoy the right to vote in local elections, as well as speedy naturalisation procedures and Swedish and mother-tongue language courses financed by the state.”

Though not its intention, Sweden’s open immigration policy has given the country some of its best male players. Without this policy, the national team would be deprived of some of its stars.

But why is the Swedish women’s national team so stereotypically Swedish? It’s not as if the large numbers of immigrant families only have male children. The reason, I suspect, may be tied to culture. Many of the immigrants settling today in Sweden come from countries where soccer is played almost exclusively by males. Such beliefs often remain throughout generations, even when people have settled in countries whose people often don’t share them (Sweden has long been open to female players and has perhaps the strongest women’s league in the world).

Very Nordic-looking Swedish players Caroline Seger (R) and Nilla Fischer (L) surround North Korea’s Sonu Kyong-Sun (Photo: AFP/Goh Chai Hin)

The question of whether female children of immigrant families end up playing soccer is tied closely to debates about assimilation and multiculturalism. Sweden, like many countries in Europe, initially chose a policy of allowing immigrants to maintain their own cultures. As Professor Sture Oberg has written,

In 1975 the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament) introduced a more “generous” policy for immigrants. It had previously been a matter of course that those who moved to Sweden would learn Swedish, work for their living, and adapt to the Swedish way of life. This idea of assimilation was rejected and a multicultural society was promoted in its place. Public administration was changed to incorporate this new idea. Cultural relativism became a political fact.

But recently, just as in several other European countries, some in Sweden are speaking out against what they see as the problems the country’s multicultural policies have created.

If Sweden does choose to go in a direction that requires more assimilation by its immigrant populations, one might wonder whether such a shift would see more females from these communities playing soccer. Will a greater emphasis on assimilation lead to a shift in attitudes that will make possible a Swedish women’s national team of the future as diverse as that of their male counterparts?

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Ethnicity/Race, Europe, Immigration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.