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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Sport
Michael Butler

Henrik Larsson: ‘I have 106 caps for Sweden but I see myself as foreign’

Henrik Larsson outside his childhood home in Helsinborg, Sweden.
Henrik Larsson on the small lawn where he started playing football outside his childhood home in Helsinborg, Sweden. Photograph: Emma Larsson/The Observer

Henrik Larsson is standing in front of the patch of grass where he first learned to kick a ball. Behind him is the block of apartments where he spent his childhood, the balcony from which his mum would call him in for dinner. In front of him are the swings through which he would shoot, and the ponds on top of which he would play ice hockey in the winter.

Närlunda is an estate on the ­outskirts of Helsingborg, a quiet city near the most southerly tip of Sweden. Närlunda is a complicated place, an idyllic and green high-rise estate by English standards but also the scene of a brutal murder in 2021, where a man was shot dead in a nearby underpass. But then Larsson is a complicated person, devoted to his country but also unsure of his identity.

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