Swedes wooed by migrants’ soccer magic

‘Go boys, go. Technique is in your blood,’ shouts the club chairman as his army in shinguards is put through a training session. Even before it is played, today’s away match against IFK Gothenburg in the Swedish premiership is a masterstroke of Mesopotamian courage.

Thirty years ago Assyriska FF were a bunch of refugees who played football between shifts at the Scania truck plant. Now they are in the premiership – which is played in a summer season that has just begun – and their host town, S?dert?lje, has grudgingly conceded that its footballing pride is in the hands of ‘the immigrants’ team’.

‘The council has been very slow to respond to our success,’ said Bisso, who played for Assyriska from 1976 to 1984. So the club have started their first top-flight season without a home ground. It is being upgraded and will be ready for their last match of the season in October.

‘S?dert?lje has long been an ice hockey and basketball town,’ said Bisso. ‘The [last] local football team went bankrupt in 1992 and we were not seen as a vote-winner.’ Yet six government ministers turned up wearing Assyriska’s red-and-white colours when the team played their first premiership match last Tuesday at Sweden’s national stadium, R?sunda, against Hammarby.

About 50,000 Assyrians, Middle Eastern Christians, arrived when Sweden needed cheap labour for a postwar industrial boom. There was tension as Sweden’s population of eight million rose by a million between 1970 and 1990. The Eighties were marked by arson attacks on refugee camps, racism in football and a rise in intolerance that is only now subsiding.

‘The people changed more quickly than the politicians,’ said Bisso. ‘About 70 per cent of S?dert?lje respects us now.’

Enthusiasm among local people is mixed, however. ‘Of course they are our team. I first asked Father Christmas for one of their jerseys when I was three,’ said Fredrik Sonntag,18, an ice-hockey player. His friend Jimmy Albihn, 19, said: ‘Assyriska’s fans came and made a noise for the ice hockey team so we will support them all the way.

But taxi driver Pertti Salonen was less charitable. ‘S?dert?lje’s real pride was Bj?rn Borg,’ he said.

Club executives are defiant about local reticence. ‘We are the national team of Assyrians all over the world,’ said administrator Fehmi Tasci, 43. ‘We are the most successful Assyrian sports club anywhere. We have fans all over Europe, as well as in Canada and Australia. They come to our big matches, and watch us on Suroyo satellite TV which is available in 83 countries.’

The crest of the players’ jerseys is based on the Assyrian flag – a sun within a four-pronged star. Asserting the identity of the community, which has three Syriac Orthodox churches in S?dert?lje alone, remains a major objective.

‘Our success is a great gift. We have been persecuted for centuries and there has been silence about us in the history books,’ said Tasci.

But footballing success has not come without some concessions. ‘In 1990,when we reached division three we decided to admit non-Assyrians. It was a tough decision but it was the right one. We are now the biggest sports club in the region, with 30 youth teams, including three for girls, and 500 players.

The players at the training session in a village 30 kilometres (about 19 miles) from S?dert?lje, include Serbs, a Bosnian and Portuguese coach Jos? Morais.

‘We are southern, warm-blooded people who like to run with the ball. It’s good to have a couple of solid Swedes at the back. We haven’t had an Assyrian goalkeeper since 1987,’ said Tasci.

Most of the players see their objective for the season as surviving relegation. Midfielder Stefan Batan, 20, said Morais had not understood the team yet: ‘We lost 2-1 against Hammarby because he had us playing defensively. But we are attackers. It’s in our blood and it is our strength.’

Midfielder Ivan Isakovic, a 27-year-old from Serbia-Montenegro, enjoys Morais’s emphasis on tactics. ‘Our strength is that we’re better as a team than as individuals and he can help us improve.’

S?dert?lje’s Social Democrat mayor, Anders Lago, who claims the local council has done as much as it can for the team, believes Assyriska have ‘a good chance’ of avoiding relegation, principally because rival teams may underestimate them.

That is a mistake that the Assyrians themselves have been taught by history that they must never do. In about 700BC, their King Esarhaddon conquered Syria, Palestine and Egypt. With the spoils of his campaigns, he expanded his capital, Nineveh, near the present Iraqi city of Mosul, and built himself a fabulously expensive palace.

Then, however, Babylon and Syria revolted and Egypt declared its independence – teaching Assyrians a lesson not lost on today’s footballers of Assyriska.