I have to drag some attention to this guy and my Swedish boys from Östersund who, under this man, are doing something pretty epic right now. He’s taken them up 3 divisions in a handful of years to reach the top league in Sweden last year for the first time in their club history, Östersund being a smaller city up north with no notable footballing history whatsoever.
They finished midtable IIRC during the 2016 season (our whole season runs during a calendar year) but won the league cup and earned an early qualification spot in the Europa League. There they drew Galatasaray (some David vs Goliath shit) and beat them 3-1 agg, then some other team I don’t remember which, and then finally they beat PAOK from Greece on pens to make it into the Europa League. They are now at 6p after 2 games in their group, having beat Zorja Luhansk and notable Hertha Berlin.
Östersund is a 50k pop. city with a stadium that takes like 8k people and it is cold as fk there. I did my military service there, the weather there is hilarious, we had snowball fights on our national day (June 6th), it could drop to -30 during the worst winter nights.
That they’ve managed to climb 3 divisions and get to Europe and actually win games there is pretty epic, and a lot of it is probably thanks to this Potter here, who is clearly a wizard of sorts.
I put that match on for the last 5 mins and it was a German stream (only one I could find that wouldn’t stutter) and the commentator was calling him Harry Potter.
No, they have no money, they said after their last win it is absolutely unbelievable they’re making as much as 300 000 pounds for each won game in the EL group lol
Apart from the crowd issues vs Cologne Id agree with that entirely. Entertaining games, valuable minutes for players, good use of the massive squad we have. The negative was the crowd situation for some people against Cologne for some families but other than that
Europa League was quite fun first game with the whole fiasco with Koln fans and Kolas, Alexis goals but the BATE game was a chore to watch, makes you miss playing at the biggest grounds in CL. We’ll still win it tho
I found it gloomy & boring so far. It is only fun because Arsenal make it fun. I
Maybes because the games were not on HD channel but I have always found coverage of Europa league as gloomy.
Different types of fanbases you encounter makes EL slightly exciting, like our game v Red Star Belgrade away soon, that’ll be hostile, I’d love to experience it as scary as it potentially is. I’ll hold my own vs the ultras
It seems a laugh - but serious competitions shouldn’t really be a laugh. I don’t not like it but I probably won’t take it seriously until the last 16/last 8.
EL 2017 is the same kind of fun as the League Cup in the Carlos Vela / Fran Merida kind of era. I want to see a lot of these guys play. It actually has the potential to help build a bit of form / confidence too. Koln, Dooncaster and BATE are padding out our form nicely and I’m sure Red Star and Norwich will do the same.
Exactly, this is how I feel and what I believe as well. Nailed it. Bonus is that our younger players are getting legitimate European experience as well, which will only help their development even more.
Remember when we beat Sheffield United 6-0 with an average age of 19/20 in the league cup? That was fun.
