This small-town team in Sweden was a women's soccer powerhouse. Then Europe's big clubs took over

Associated Press

17-03-2025

UMEA, Sweden (AP) — Sprinkled around its small, shared office are trophies and mementos signifying the not-so-distant glory days of Swedish women's soccer team Umeå IK.
On one wall is the No. 60 jersey worn by its greatest ever player, Brazil superstar Marta. Across the corridor is a bookcase crammed with European and Swedish silverware and medals. Gathering dust in the corner of a room nearby is a trophy for the 2003 UEFA Women's Cup, the precursor to the Champions League.
Indeed, it's only 21 years ago that the team from this small northern city virtually unknown outside Sweden was a back-to-back European champion.
Now Umeå is adjusting to its new status in women's soccer — languishing in Sweden's second division, playing before average attendances of around 400 spectators, and battling debts.
A transformation of the women's game in Europe is well under way. As attendance figures and TV ratings rise, big-money clubs already well established in men's soccer – think Barcelona, Real Madrid, Chelsea – are taking over the show.
Umeå is among the unfashionable clubs of yesteryear who know they can no longer compete.
'Not to be harsh or anything, but I don't think it's possible anymore,' Umeå coach Edvin Erfanian said about the club's chances of returning to the top of the European game. 'But I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. The product of women's football is a whole lot better than it was 20 years ago.'
Champions League lineup
The changing face of women's European soccer is best illustrated by comparing the lineup of the Champions League quarterfinals taking place this week to that of 20 years ago.
On Tuesday, it's Real Madrid vs. Arsenal and Bayern Munich vs. Lyon. On Wednesday, it's Wolfsburg vs. Barcelona and Manchester City vs. Chelsea.
Rewind to the 2004-05 season and the quarterfinalists included Bobruichanka Bobruisk (Belarus), Energy Voronezh (Russia), Trondheims-Ørn (Norway), Turbine Potsdam (Germany), Torres (Italy), as well as Djurgården/Älvsjö and defending champion Umeå from Sweden.
Arsenal, a rare example of a top men's club that also had a strong women's team in those days, is the only quarterfinalist from 20 years ago that remains competitive in the Women's Champions League today.
The contrast in resources is considerable.
Barcelona, the reigning European champion, generated 17.9 million euros ($19.5 million) in revenue in 2023-24, according to analysis from accountancy firm Deloitte. Jörgen Crovin, Umeå's sporting manager, estimates that Umeå's revenue last year was about $800,000.
Accepting a new reality
Umeå IK is a club located around 400 kilometers (250 miles) from the Arctic Circle — the winters here are long and cold — and in a quiet university town populated by 130,000. The team has been surviving year-to-year, even week-to-week as recently as last November when a last-gasp crowdfunding campaign and donations from wealthy locals raised enough cash to keep the team afloat.
Expectations and targets have been realigned. Being European champion again is a pipe dream for a squad containing many students and only three full-time professionals. Crovin joined in 2022 and says the players brought in during his time have all been free transfers. Chelsea, meanwhile, just made U.S. defender Naomi Girma the world's first million-dollar female player.
Instead, returning to Sweden's top division and consolidating with a strong youth system and robust finances, while serving as a pipeline for the best players in the north of the country, is the best Umeå's soccer leadership can realistically hope for these days.
'We just need to find our own way,' Erfanian, a 28-year-old coach, told the AP. 'We don't have the finances and, in the end, that's what it's about. ... For us, what we need to do is put our resources in the academy and create a good environment for young girls in the north part of Sweden.'
The glory days with Marta
It's very different to the early years of this century when women's soccer wasn't such big business and Umeå was a benchmark in the European game.
In lore in these parts is the cold, gray day in February 2004 when an 18-year-old Marta, reportedly wearing flip-flops, arrived in Umeå from Belo Horizonte with her cousin, Marina, and threw a snowball for the first time in her life. Within months, Marta was scoring in both legs of the Champions League final against FFC Frankfurt as Umeå retained the title before losing the 2007 and '08 finals — by which time she was the Ballon d'Or winner.
'It's pretty much a different world up there — really small place, really cold — and she adapted,' Johanna Frisk, a teammate of Marta's at Umeå and now a pundit for Swedish broadcaster Viaplay, told the AP. 'Her skills were on another level. She could do pretty much anything.'
Umeå was a 'winning machine,' Frisk said. For Crovin, the club 'raised the bar' in terms of how much they trained and the ambition they had in using their money, pumped into the club from local and national businesses, to buy foreign players.
'Umeå was ahead of its time,' Crovin said in an interview in a cluttered office the club now shares with the city's indoor floor hockey team.
The powerhouses take over
Sponsors started to leave and debts started to build for Umeå. Marta left after the 2008 season and the team hasn't won a major title since.
Around that time, Europe's powerhouse clubs started taking women's soccer seriously. Paris Saint-Germain won its first major women's title in 2010 and soon was fueled by cash from the men's team's Qatari ownership. Barcelona won its first Spanish women's league title in 2011. Bayern Munich, which wasn't in Germany's top women's league during much of the 1990s, started winning cups and leagues in the 2010s. Manchester United's women's team was reformed in 2018, having been disbanded in 2005. Real Madrid's women's team was founded in 2020.
With resources, infrastructure and a brand name behind them, the big-name women's teams are flourishing. Even in Sweden, Malmö — the biggest men's club — relaunched a women's team in 2019 that just got promoted to the top division.
According to a Deloitte report, the 15 top revenue-generating women's clubs whose financial results were available for analysis brought in more than 100 million euros (dollars) combined for the first time during the 2023-24 season, a year-on-year growth of 35%.
'Investing in women's football is proving to be a good business decision, benefitting both brand recognition and the business models of football clubs,' Jennifer Haskel, knowledge and insight lead in Deloitte's sports business group, said.
The future for women-only soccer clubs
It seems the best way to be a strong, financially sound women's team is to be linked to a successful men's club — or have an owner with deep pockets.
Crovin says there are no immediate plans for Umeå to be affiliated with the city's men's team, which also plays in the second tier in Sweden and doesn't have so strong a brand.
Similarly in Germany, Turbine Potsdam — the Champions League winner in 2005 and '10 based outside Berlin — has slumped as hard as old rival Umeå amid the changing financial landscape. It's also an independent women's team, with a recent co-operation with the Hertha Berlin men's team lasting only three years.
Demoted in 2023 after 26 years in Germany's top division and now battling to avoid a return to the second tier after promotion last year, Turbine has struggled to bring through enough talented young players in recent years to get close to competing with powers like Bayern and Bayer Leverkusen.
'We need money,' Turbine president Karsten Ritter-Lang told the AP. 'It's really, really difficult to find sponsors ... I'm absolutely sure if we have enough money and we develop our sports school system, then it will be possible to be successful as an isolated women's football club.'
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