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If Lennart Johansson was the biggest football fan we had, Lars-Åke was the second biggest because he, like Lennart, never claimed to be a leader in the world of international football.
And on that summer night in Paris in 1998, when Lennart Johansson was duped during the FIFA presidency, Lars-Åke was just as sad, disappointed and bitter. With Lennart at FIFA, Lars-Åke certainly saw a future at UEFA.
But in Sweden, in Swedish football, nobody was bigger than Lars-Åke.
And when I say pamp, Lars-Åke was, like Lennart, an old-school pamp, a man who came from the working class, acquired a solid social democratic base and came to power through a popular movement where football was An important part.
Lars-Åke gained power.
He knew how to use it.
And he was not afraid to show that the fists of the popular movement were also pinched hard.
The biggest accusation he received from us in the media was that he was always available.
Anytime.
Around the clock.
About everything.
Today, when no one is available for more than a minute on a podium between training and showering, Lars-Åke was always available and never gave in to subject choices.
If he didn’t respond, the person reading a message knew that Lars-Åke would call back.
Of course, we must not forget that there were other media and a different media climate at that time.
Personally, I liked to worry about him.
He liked to debate and it was fun and thought-provoking to kick him off during various national team training sessions and provoke him to something that maybe, but maybe it didn’t lead to a propagation, a text or a chronicle.
We fight in private and in the columns.
Or “fought”.
Lars-Åke knew very well what roles we both played and after criticizing the television deals and scattered rounds, I had to apologize, more than once, when it turned out that the decisions that I thought were completely idiotic turned out to be good for Swedish football .
“Lars-Åke was right, I was wrong,” as it said in a headline.
He never took credit for himself, but the fact remains that it was with Lars-Åke as president of the association that Swedish football achieved its first and greatest successes.
European Championship in Sweden 1992.
VM i United States 1994.
The selection of Tommy Svensson as captain of the national team.
Viewership figures for Allsvenskan, which went from a few hundred on an old wooden stand to new, modern, large and packed stadiums.
During Tommy Söderberg and Lars Lagerbäck, the accessibility of the media was restricted and I called Lars-Åke and told him that this was serious and that we should discuss it.
He quickly made lunch at that strange restaurant on the corner of the Sheraton Hotel in Stockholm and I tried to explain how difficult it had been for the Expressen reporters at the time to do their job, which in the long run meant that the information readers, that is, supporters, worsened.
Lars-Åke listened.
He accepted.
I don’t think there was a major change, I don’t remember, but it says a lot about how I worked, how I acted.
And that was the only time I was in that tavern.
If he appears here as a 100% welcoming uncle, that is not true, that person is and will not be if you acquire the power that Lars-Åke had.
He could be completely furious and I once heard him standing in a hallway in Söderstadion and yelling on the phone. It was a crisis, a business and someone who had failed and then broke for Lars-Åke, who used words that we do not write here.
In his book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Soccer”, Olof Lundh describes a conversation that ended with Lars-Åke roaring that Lundh was never allowed to call him again.
Lars-Åke was in Öster.
He was even governor of Kronoberg County for four years.
His Småland style was such that many could imitate him. He had a special way of pronouncing his wife’s name, Yvonne, which he used to mention.
– It was like when Yvonne and I had a beer.
Through the mundane, he made the public, union work, less grand.
All was silent after Lars-Åke.
This is often the case when strong men – they are often men – resign and, with complacency, naivety, or forgetfulness, did not name or even attempt to form a successor.
The current president of the Swedish Football Association is called Karl-Erik Nilsson.
Kind of.
Lars-Åke, on the other hand.
