Mats Enquist is the first to admit he’s not an expert on the Tartan numbers game currently being furiously fought over as Scottish football engages in its latest internal TV squabble.
But the Swedish league chief can speak with confidence about the figures his nation is dealing with after throwing their lot in with the broadcasters - and they’re only going in one direction. The Scandinavian nation has found itself the surprise target of the SPFL spotlight this past week as the debate on Scotland’s new £30million a season Sky agreement threatened to boil over.
Rangers managing director Stewart Robertson reckons our game is still being chronically undersold and raised evidence of Sweden’s £48million tie-up with American media giants Discovery as proof of just how much we’re being short changed. That prompted Aberdeen chairman Dave Cormack’s scathing rebuke, with the Pittodrie boss insisting Robertson is comparing apples with oranges by measuring the new deal currently being thrashed out with Sky - which will see just 60 Premiership games screened each campaign - against Sweden’s package, where ALL 240 matches top-flight Allsvenskan fixtures plus the country’s entire second tier campaign are available for their partners to broadcast.
Swatting his Ibrox rivals’ arguments aside, Cormack claims SPFL clubs would risk seeing their season ticket sales “cannibalised” and revenue streams from gate income, hospitality and retails sales slashed if they went down the Swedish route. But the doomsday scenario painted by the Dons owner could not be further from the Nordic experience, where Sweden’s 16 top-division clubs are seeing bumper crowds to go with their lucrative TV windfall.
Despite allowing the cameras to capture every second of domestic league action, almost three million fans are expected to click their way through Allsvenskan turnstiles this season. And Swedish Football League's secretary general Enquist - Neil Doncaster’s counterpart in Stockholm - reckons the two trends go hand in hand.
He told Record Sport : “I went to strongly emphasise that I can only speak from the Swedish perspective. I can’t speak for the Scottish one. Currently all our games from the top two tiers are screened live.
“When I began working for the league 10 years ago, most of the games in the top division were televised but not the second tier. Since then we have strongly increased the number of games being televised. That has come during the same period that we have seen a big increase in the number of people coming to the stadiums.
“We’ve done that by treating the TV rights as a way to get maximum exposure for our competition and our clubs. But we’ve also worked hard on the match-day product to make that a different choice for fans who want a different experience.
“From our point of view, there’s a strong correspondence between the two. The more we’re televising our league, the more people we see coming to the arenas.
“Swedish football has never been more televised than it is today. We have partnered with Discovery as well as Telia and C More (Swedish streaming and pay TV sites) so it’s very much available for everybody.
“This year, touch wood, we’re going to have our strongest ever year in the stands. From a Swedish perspective, this has worked for us. I won’t say it will for everyone else.
“But we just feel that when we have our matches broadcast on TV, we raise the interest in Swedish football. And if we can work with the clubs to put on great match-day experiences, it will attract people to the stadiums.”
A deal has now been struck has after SPFL chiefs found a way to circumnavigate the Rangers' reluctance that was holding up the new agreement. Scottish football has long struggled to find a solution to squaring the circle when it comes to finding commercial agreements that satisfy both the cash-hungry Old Firm behemoths as well as smaller clubs looking for a bigger slice of the pie.
In Sweden, they’ve taken the approach that it’s better to look after the many rather than the few. Enquist said: “If you look across the total fixtures, we’re looking to reach three million spectators coming to the stadiums this season.
“That’s for a league of 16 teams, where obviously a lot of fans are pulled in by the big city teams. The big city numbers are not easy to replicate obviously but there was a big debate over this here in Sweden about 15 years ago.
“But our belief has always been that the more we can market the league, the more it will help all the clubs - rather than them being in conflict with each other. The fans who only want to see the game on TV can do that, but the people who really want to have a match day experience can still go to the game.”
Attendances in Sweden have doubled since the 1990s when the average game would pull in just 4,500 punters. Now up to around 10,000 per game, the increase has been matched by the extra splashes of colour that have swept across the terraces as ultra groups have been given increasing opportunities to play their part in creating the sights and sounds that backdrop the action on the pitch.
Enquist added: “We try to market the whole fan experience for the whole league. We have to be humble because we’re not the biggest league in Europe. So we try to focus on who is the best team in Sweden and what Swedish football has to offer.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years we’ve tried to figure out what the positive parts of fan culture are and support that as best we could while isolating the negative parts. I think that’s worked out very well for us as we now have a very strong supporter connection between the teams, the fans and the league. I’m very proud of the fan culture we now have in Sweden.
“We have a philosophy that a match day is not just two teams playing against each other. It’s also what’s happening in the stands and what’s working so well for Swedish football right now is the cooperation between the fan groups doing fantastic tifos and creating an atmosphere with their singing.
“But you can’t get that if you’re watching at home on TV. So many people come to the match because they want to feel that ambiance in the stadium. I’d say it’s only in very rare cases are there a conflict. The cases where we have someone saying I want to go to the game but instead I’m going to stay home and watch on TV, I think that’s very rare. The people choosing to go to the game do it for different reasons to those who stay home.”
