Malmö FF: The Radical Style Dazzling Swedish Football

Swedish manager Henrik Rydström woke up one morning and decided: enough is enough.

A defensive midfielder in his playing days, the Malmö FF head coach openly admits in interviews that two decades of safety-first, conservative, clear-your-lines football as a player ultimately snapped something deep within his psyche. When the time came to hang up his boots and retire, Rydström moved into coaching intent on making football fun again, for both himself and his players. He wanted to do things differently. He wanted to do things his way.

The young manager took the reins at IK Sirius for one season before moving back home to manage Kalmar FF, where he spent his entire playing career and is their all-time highest appearance maker. At both clubs, he completely revolutionised the style of play, turning two middling teams into two of the best possession-retaining teams in the league in consecutive seasons.

At Kalmar, Rydström transformed a team that had finished in the relegation playoffs in back-to-back seasons into an exciting, dynamic outfit that finished sixth in 2021 and then fourth in 2022. 

Such achievements marked Rydström out as one of the most interesting upcoming coaches in European football, securing him a move to coach one of Sweden’s biggest clubs: Malmö FF. There he has continued the success to such an extent that clubs across Europe are starting to take notice of this manager and his different way of thinking and playing.

Playing Style

Malmö FF are a highly fluid team under Henrik Rydström. Far from wedded to one set system, Wyscout data has them down as playing up to eight different formations during the 2024 season - ranging from anything between 3-4-3 and 4-3-1-2. Such is the tactical flexibility demanded by the manager, and he is also fortunate to an extent in that the squad at Malmö’s disposal facilitates his desire for a dynamism that few teams in Sweden have the personnel or squad depth to compete with.

Nonetheless, though Rydström likes to empower his players to play all manner of different styles, there are some underlying core principles to Malmö’s game. 

First, they look to attack as much as possible. Regardless of shape, one of the full-backs - usually Gabriel Busanello or Jens Stryger Larsen - look to get high and often wide in the attacking phase. 

Second, Rydström adopts a philosophy of ‘tilting’ the playing field - that is, congesting one side of the pitch with a large number of players bunched closely together to bounce off each other and put the opposition under intense pressure through the construction of numerical overloads.

This dynamism and close interaction of players is what Rydström wants from his teams. There is a high level of positional fluidity.

The manager has cited Colombia’s 1994 team of Carlos Valderrama and Faustino Asprilla as an inspiration, and it is this relational play and enjoyment of football that he seeks to implement.

The results? Simple: Malmö won the league this season by a record-breaking eleven point margin - never before managed in a 30-game Allsvenskan season. 

They scored the most goals by far (67), enjoyed the most possession of any team (60%), recorded the lowest expected goals against (31.42 with 25 conceded), registered the most shots (489 - more than 70 more than any other team with Vasteras SK second on 428) and had 167 more touches in the box than any other team in the league (897 total).

Key Individual

It says a lot about just how influential Sebastian Nanasi was to Malmö’s successful season that despite leaving the club midway through the campaign for an €11 million move to RC Strasbourg he was still named Allsvenskan Player of the Season.