Viktor Gyokeres: Arsenal’s new signing is a graduate of IF Brommapojkarna, the Swedish club with ‘no fans’ but Europe’s biggest academy | Football News

Viktor Gyokeres is adapting to unfamiliar surroundings at Arsenal but he shares common ground with two of his new neighbours in north London. Like Tottenham’s Dejan Kulusevski and Lucas Bergvall, he is a product of IF Brommapojkarna.

Gyokeres, Kulusevski and Bergvall are leading graduates of their youth set-up but there are hundreds more scattered across the continent. This tiny Swedish club, who struggle to fill a 5,000-capacity stadium, are said to have the biggest academy in Europe.

“We have no fans, really,” sporting director Philip Berglund tells Sky Sports. It is quite the opening gambit. “Our stadium is very small, ticket income is pretty bad, and it’s hard to compete commercially as the bigger clubs in Stockholm take all the sponsors.”

Instead, Brommapojkarna unashamedly focus their efforts on one thing and one thing only: the development of young players who can be sold for as much money as possible. “Everything we do is built to generate income through transfers,” adds Berglund.

That includes having a sprawling network of young players.

From the age of eight up, they have roughly as many academy players as they do seats in their Grimsta IP stadium. Most play for affiliated grassroots sides, where they get Brommapojkarna coaching and vie for spots in the ‘prestige teams’ based at the club’s headquarters.

Those teams typically dominate their domestic leagues. “In Sweden’s highest U17 league, for example, we currently have one team in first place and another in second,” says Berglund. They routinely beat prestigious opponents in continental tournaments too.

The aim is for the best of the best to rise through the club’s youth ranks and eventually gain first-team exposure, which is why Brommapojkarna officials celebrated when, having previously bounced between divisions, they clinched a club-record third successive season in Sweden’s Allsvenskan top-flight last year.

“Of course, we want to improve our first team and finish as high in the table as possible, but that’s not the main purpose,” says Berglund. “The main purpose of establishing ourselves in the Allsvenskan is so we can put a lot of young players on the pitch at the top level to increase their value.”

That in turn helps Berglund fulfil his stated remit when he arrived from Hammarby, one of the three bigger clubs based in the Swedish capital along with AIK and Djurgardens, in 2022.

“I came in in the year we came up from the second division with the main goal of starting to sell players for more money than the club had done before,” explains Berglund.

“It helps now to be in the top division because we can sell to big European clubs directly instead of selling to other clubs in Sweden, which is what we have previously done.”

Bergvall and Arrhov sales show progress

Bergvall, once a prized academy product at Brommapojkarna, is a case in point. The club secured a 20 per cent sell-on clause when they sold him to Djurgardens three years ago but it was their rivals who profited most when he joined Tottenham for £8.5m last summer.

“When we sold Lucas we had just got promoted,” says Berglund. “He only had one year left on his contract so we needed a deal with a good sell-on clause for him to join a top team in Sweden who win a lot of games three-nil and four-nil and can just put in young players.

“Compare that to us at the time, we were having to fight for every game, to get the points in order to say in the division, so the conditions were not ideal for young players to really shine.”

Gyokeres, who came later to Brommapojkarna’s academy than Bergvall, aged 14, from another small club in Stockholm called IFK Aspudden-Tellus, was a different case given he was sold directly to a European team in Brighton, moving to England aged 19 in 2018.

But the fee, for a player now valued at over £60m, was modest at under £1m, in part because Gyokeres had not had the chance to prove himself in the top division with Brommapojkarna, who were playing in Sweden’s third and second tiers at the time of his first-team emergence.

Fast forward to now and the benefit of being settled in Sweden’s top-tier – Brommapojkarna rose from 14th in the season after their promotion to 10th last term and now sit ninth – can be seen in the club-record sale of 17-year-old midfielder Love Arrhov to Eintracht Frankfurt announced in May.

In the stable conditions of mid-table, Arrhov has been able to shine for Brommapojkarna, with Frankfurt not only agreeing to pay a fee which could reach eight-figure territory in euros if add-ons are met, but delay his arrival until January, ensuring his boyhood club retain an important player for the remainder of the Swedish season, which runs from March to November.

The profits from his sale, Berglund explains, will be reinvested in the club’s youth operations. “It’s really important for the club that when we sell someone, we don’t use all that money to buy older first-team players. Instead, we reinvest in the whole club and the grassroots.”

That investment is key but the productivity of their academy is at least partly down to the sheer volume of players enrolled. They have established a monopoly on young talent in the Stockholm area having been one of the first clubs in Scandinavia to start running academy teams for players as young as eight.

The quality of the coaching and footballing education offered is of course another factor. The club are also careful to ensure alignment between their academy and senior sides. Their U17 and U19 coaches double as first-team assistants to help players make the step up.

Their success has made them a hugely attractive destination to young players. “If you are the best player of your age in Stockholm, you basically always want to play for Bromma,” says Berglund.

But their methods have raised questions in the country too.

An ‘unreachable dream’ or a path to follow?

In 2019, the Stockholm-based newspaper Aftonbladet published a series of articles in which journalist Patrik Brenning revealed many parents were paying disproportionately high costs to enrol their children at the club and access additional services such as specialist coaching and training camps.

“The idea is that it can help their kids fulfil their dream of playing in the Allsvekan, the Premier League or for the Swedish national team,” Brenning tells Sky Sports, “but the reality is that so few of them will, which raises the question, is it fair to sell a dream you know is unreachable?”

Brommapojkarna can for their part point to a lengthy list of players who have made it from their academy to the top level, with the Frankfurt-bound Arrhov just the latest example.

As well as Gyokeres, Kulusevski and Bergvall, the club count former Arsenal winger Anders Limpar, former Manchester City and Celta Vigo striker John Guidetti and ex-Juventus and Sampdoria midfielder Albin Ekdal among their most high-profile graduates.

But the percentages are of course vanishingly small, as they are for academy players in England and across Europe. The club do acknowledge the issues raised by Brenning.

“We now have a ceiling on how much parents can pay each year and the total can’t go over that,” says Berglund. “All our teams also have their own bank accounts, so if they want to go to extra tournaments or things like that, they need to find sponsors to pay.

“We never want a family to not be able to afford to be here. It’s really important to us that everybody who wants to play football can play football. Of course, our players don’t all come from rich families, so we also take the responsibility to sponsor specific players as well.”

Brommapojkarna were regarded as trailblazers in youth development in Sweden but they are far from the only club now trying to generate profit through high-potential players as a priority.

Brenning likens the scramble to recruit the best talents in Stockholm to an “arm’s race”. In May, Alexander Andersson, a player poached from Brommapojkarna by Djurgardens, set a record as the youngest player to feature in the Allsvenskan at 15 years and 24 days old.

Some in the country believe the priority given to young talents over experienced players is taking a toll on the national team. Despite a growing number of clubs developing better, or at least more sellable, young players, Sweden have only qualified for one of the last four major tournaments.

For Brommapojkarna, though, the success stories will keep coming.

They have secured a record-breaking windfall through Arrhov but he is not the only member of their current side to have attracted interest, with 19-year-old striker Ezekiel Alladoh, scorer of four goals so far this season, also expected to fetch a big fee.

In Gyokeres and his new neighbours Kulusevski and Bergvall over in north London, they and the many thousands of other young players on Brommapojkarna’s books have their inspiration.

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