Djurgården Skolidrott: Building a Legacy Beyond Football Through School Sports Programs

We're locally phenomenons, dig deep, do your work where you're at. Don't look at these big giants because you can't copy them. I would say it's not a project, it's an organization. Okay. And this is a very important distinction in all the work we do. Because projects, they have an end. We don't see an end. Just basically show our CEO that we're not going to waste his money. And for him, it's very easy because he can just look at the sponsorship and how the sponsorship money is going up, up, up, up, up. And a lot of them is because they want a good sustainability program. Hello and welcome back everybody. It's your host, Wayne T-Fam. Today, we got staff and home back from U-Garden School Adort or U-Garden School Sport Association. A little heads up. This one is going to be a long episode, but it is packed with insights and inspiring stories we beyond football. So tune in to your How a Football Club, be your sports school with a 30-year vision to become a true, local phenomenon. Hi, stuff fun. Amazing to have you on the show. How is everything going in Sweden? Well, it's great. Today, it's a sunny September day. So we're not too spoiled with sunny days. Later on in the year. So I'm happy and content with everything. Yeah, likewise. I don't know if you had a chance to listen to our previous episode but we have a little tradition here. Just like football players have warm-up before the game. We would like to start with this warm-up question. How did you enter the football industry and what led you to the Joe Corden football and Joe Corden School Adort? Well, those are intertwined but also a little bit separate. So how I got into the football industry is. Well, it's a huge part coincidence. But also, there's some food involved and also there's one of our biggest rivals in Stockholm involved. In 2015, I was working with Adolescent Refugees that came without their parents to Sweden. At the organization where I was working, there was this guy who worked in economics and he was a supporter of one of our biggest rivals. One day we were having lunch and I asked him what his dream job would be. He said, "Well, my dream job would be to work for that club and to help them get their finances in order." They still don't have their finances in order and he does not work for them, so I'm very happy. But that also gave me the idea that there must be other jobs in professional sports and at my club that doesn't involve working with actual football, where I have absolutely no experience. So I started looking into that. It turned out that I had an old friend from high school that was working at the club. So I wrote to him and he wrote back and he said, "I've been following you since we graduated "or at least for the last, let's say, 10 years." And I don't think, because he was working in sales, and he was like, "This is not for you, "but I have this guy working with sustainability." And he's just started a major project called Enable. So he asks his hands full. And he needs someone to do the operational parts when it comes to sustainability work and corporate social responsibility work at the club. Would you be interested in taking a meeting? So I went to that meeting and that was a lunch that he set up where I met my now colleague, Philip. And we started talking and we started talking about basically how we view society. What is, let's say, not wrong, but what is lacking in society today, both from an operational standpoint but also from a philosophical standpoint. And we found that we agreed on a lot of those sort of major issues in regarding how to view humans and how to view society and so forth. We started picking up contact from that and eventually he offered me a job. The journey, however, with my club, with you Gordon, it's much, much longer, obviously. It started in childhood. I was born 1982 in Stockholm. But as a five-year-old, or, yeah, five-year-old, we moved to an island that's called Goltland because my parents had to move around a lot for work. And when we were living there, obviously, there was no clear club affiliation on that island because they don't have any professional teams. But we were used to play like street hockey out on the driveway. And half of the kids, basically, that I used to play with, they supported this one club that's not from Stockholm. And the other ones, they supported you, Gordon. I was sure that I'm sure which team I was supposed to support. So I went home and asked my dad. And I asked dad, what team do we support? And my dad being born and raised in Stockholm. And from the western parts of Stockholm. In Broma, he said, well, you know, in our family, we support you, Gordon. And this made me very happy because also one of the very cool kids, his older brother, that was even cooler. And he also supported you, Gordon. So that was sort of, you know, two birds with one stone. And that time I was about, I guess, about seven years older, something like that. And since then, basically, you know, I've been a you, Gordon supporter. I would say my most active years, we call it that, would be between 1990, four, 95, and 2001. Those were my most active years, where I had season tickets. And I did a lot of traveling, both for ice hockey, and football to watch the games. And after that, when I joined the military, to do my military service, obviously, I was stationed in the north of Sweden, and I couldn't go to any games. I do remember very strongly when we got back from, we did this, we were out on an exercise for about seven days, and it was going to end with what they called like a fast mark, which is basically that you're supposed to, in full uniform with guns and everything, you're supposed to run 20 case. And we ran this 20 case, and I got back into the regiment, and then the exercise was done. And I turned on the TV, and this was in 2002, and you would have had just won their first Swedish trophy since 1966. And I was so tired. I was about to die, and I was just sitting on this couch looking at the TV, and I was like, wow, I can't believe this is happening. We won the Swedish Championship in football in my lifetime. But yeah, so that's basically the story with you, Gordon. You know, stuff on this. First off, thank you. Thank you again for a personal story. And I told you, our podcast is so about story, and we want to differentiate ourselves from orders by having these human and personal touch. And I think today it's a beautiful story. Thank you. But, you know, I want to deep that year, and look at your LinkedIn profile, and it seems to me like, at one point you started your career as a behavioral researcher, slash a scientist. And so, was there a home moment that inspired you to bring Desk you into the world of football sport? Was it when you were working at the Refugee Organization? Not really. I would say that that began even earlier. That began in 2008, when I started working with juvenile criminals. I had been working in the security field, both in the Swedish prison system, but also in private security abroad. And I've been working in Molta, and then I've been working in Italy for two years. And I got back to Sweden, and I knew it. And I realized that I don't want to go. I don't want to go into the prison system again, because I felt it was quite destructive. I wanted to do something else, and I started working with juvenile criminals, because I thought that would be more constructive and working with helping people change their lives. And when I did that, I quickly noticed that, because at that time I was a quite. I was a pretty big guy. And when I told these young kids how to behave, they did as they were told, but not because they wanted to change their lives, but because from their logic, I would basically punish them in the face if they didn't do what I said, because I was a big guy. So I wasn't doing any change. So then I asked my mother, she's a psychiatrist, and works a lot with the cognitive behavior of therapy. So I asked her, "I need some books on behavior change. How do you do it?" And she provided me with some books. I got really hooked on that. I started studying at university, behavior of sciences, with a focus on education, and also read like everything on behaviorism that was ever published every original literature from Skinner and everything like that, to learn and back and all that stuff, just to sort of understand the basic psychology behind it. When I entered Duke or then, I had also. ahead of that I had worked at the Royal Institute of Technology with a researcher, his name is Simon Out of Nass, and we had basically been working. what you could. I guess you'd call it applied behavioral analysis in organizational settings, behavior management, you know, something that people are fond of, has normally many names, but so basically I had been working with that all along, and when I got into you, Gordon, that was basically my framework of reference, like how would I look at what we're doing here, the processes that we are using, the goals that we're setting, and the behaviors that we are expecting, but also that we can measure our success from. So I would say that I took behavioral signs to you, Gordon, because I believe that it's a good and very effective way of getting things done. You know, there are two key texts away from your story here. First up, I think I shouldn't mess with you. We met in person. I was just. I'm kidding. Well, and the second point is that, why I don't have experience with complex environments, like dealing with juvenile criminals, I can see that shifting to sport, it's certainly a drastic change for you. It's like you solve both size of human motivations, or in a way, just like a carot and a stick metaphor. And, you know, that's a perfect way to transition to the main focus. One of the main focus of today, I hope I pronounced correctly. Is it a project? Okay, I'm trying. Is it a project? You failed it, right? Yeah. Well, it's staying beyond football. Yeah. I would say it's not a project. It's an organization. Okay. And this is a very important distinction in all the work we do, because projects, they have an end. We don't see an end. There's an end game into what we're doing, but there's no end to the organization. So, there will be no time where we sit down and say, okay, we're done. Let's evaluate. We evaluate all the time, but we're never done. But, basically, what inspired us to create, you're going to school adult and school adult, and then in English, for the English speaking audience, would be school sports. You could say, you're an school sports association. This was based on an analysis of us as a football club being that we needed to increase our relevance in the city of Stockholm. And in order to increase our relevance, we could do two things. We could either try to make everyone think that football is relevant, or we could do things that people already feel are relevant. We decided to do things that people already feel that these things are relevant, instead of trying to make everyone feel that football is relevant, because that's a much harder and bigger task, and our budget was not big. So, that was basically the analysis that we had, that we need to make our club relevant, and we need to address things that people think are relevant. We did this by doing our research, and what we found was, which is all over the West and Hemisphere at the moment, that we are not physically active enough. And this goes for adults, and this goes for children. In Sweden, we can see that about only about 20% of Swedish children are physically active enough every day. So for us, this was a very, from a societal perspective, relevant issue to address. Also, we were like, "Okay, we need to reach every single child." And there's only one place where every child in Sweden must go because it's mandatory. And that's the school. So we said, "Okay, we need to create something so we can integrate ourselves into the school system." When we started, we didn't have the school sports association. We had something we called mini-camps, and mini-camps were basically that we did fun exercises with a football for 60 minutes with a kid since school. And when we started this, everyone told us that it was going to be impossible for a professional football club to enter a public school. But we basically said, "Well, that's because we haven't been relevant enough." So now we have to be relevant enough. So we started looking at what the schools must achieve according to the laws and the legislation that they have to follow. And we found certain phrases and paragraphs that we could attach the mini-camps to. So basically, we did that, and it became a huge success. We thought we were going to do like two or three hours a week, and we did like four hours a day at different schools all over Stockholm. When we did that, a lot of the principles that the schools started approaching us and they said, "Well, you know, we want to do more with you." Because you're doing a good job. But it can't be limited to just football. It needs to be other things as well. And for us, that was great because we were like, "Okay, now we're talking relevance here." So then, we looked into the Swedish system of organizing sports, which is done in associations. And you know, all these associations have their own federation. And there is actually a federation for school sports. But it was kind of, it was not that active. So we contacted them and asked them, "Well, are there any limitations to a professional club starting a school sport association?" And they said, "No, there are no limitations." So then we said, "Okay, let's do it." So we created this school sports association. We started working. This was in the winter of 2019. And we started it in like January of February 2020. We were planning on going live in March 2020. And then COVID came. But luckily for us, the Swedish strategy was to keep the schools open. So everything shut down except the schools. And this made, we could work without any limitations, basically. I mean, obviously, there were like some, how much this kids could interact with each other and whatnot. But we could continue to practice sports in schools all through COVID. And that made us also grow quite rapidly through COVID. So that was like the, I would say, that was the U Gordon side of why we decided to do it. On the other side, we could also see that there is, in Sweden, today, we have like, once you're done with school, the school day ends when you're young. When you're the age 6 to 9, there's something called free dance, which is basically you go there and you learn, but not through a curriculum. There's more like play-based learning. Then when there are 10, there's something called free dance club, which is supposed to be a bit more mature than the one for the younger children. But the attendance rates are very, very low. So basically what happens is that a lot of kids, they leave school at 230 and they go and do whatever until six o'clock until when their parents come home. The principals refer to this as the black hole. No one knows what the kids are doing. In the United States, especially in California where they have great after-school programs, especially when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, what he looked into was that what they could see that young kids, they were most crime active between three and six in the afternoon. Well, the same time period that we in Sweden referred to as the black hole. And I could go back to my own childhood and I could see that this process was happening already then in the 80s and the 90s. So basically what we said was that we need to do activities in that time period, the black hole time period. This also to make it easier for families, basically, because the Swedish system that we have, it's created 100 years ago. It's created when the husband was working in a factory and at five o'clock the factory shut down for the day. There was no even in shifts, there were no night shifts in the factories. The woman normally, she was to stay at home home and took care of the kids. That was the society when we created both the system of sports and the system of schooling in Sweden. Now in Sweden both parents work full-time and are doing careers. But the system, we have basically trying to fix it with duct tape. So we saw that there was a huge opportunity for us to go for something that could make an extended school day and that could create a beginning, I would say, a beginning of an after-school program, the sports side of the after-school program. So that was basically what inspired us to create the organization. And today, since 2020, through COVID we have grown. So today we have about 32, 33 full-time employees. And our yearly turnaround is about 1,800,000 euros. And that has been all organic. First up, congratulations on your program and break story. And you know, I can relate so much about it because I'm coming from Vietnam. A third word, a country, so to say. And it's even different from Sweden or the United States, as you say. We kids, most of the kids we study in 2004. So they started around 8 a.m. and 4. We saw nerds, if I may say. But I can totally understand, it's a dilemma for the parents. With this black hole, time frame. And this is a huge opportunities to, you know, get the burden away from the parent's shoulder and let the kid do something in their active, active time frame rate. Yeah, that's constructive. Exactly. Yeah. I remember you mentioned in our intro call that, you know, time working in the US and, you know, you were so inspired by the call it sport and the sport system there. Yeah. And even I'm not mistaken. What you're doing at your Gordon is merging the elements of both the US sport model and the Swedish sport model, right? So can you elaborate on that a bit more? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't use the work in the United States. I went to high school in the United States in the great state of Ohio. There's any Americans listening to this. Basically, what I experienced in the United States when it came to extracurricular activities and after school programs, where they had a seamless integration. Between everything you did, all sports, you did all music. I used to play the trumpet. And I was in the band at school. And there was a seamless integration. This created a situation where my school day went from 820 in the morning until about 630 at night. It also created a situation where the band director or my tennis coach or my swim coach, they had a direct access to all my teachers. So they knew if I had been doing something that I shouldn't been doing during class, they could address it with me. I also needed to keep a certain GPA, a certain grade, to be able to participate in these activities. This experience, what it also brought me was that. First, if I could look at, now it's not sports, but it's music. If I looked into the band and the structure of the band in the United States, there were kids in that band that would never be in a band in Sweden, because it didn't have the parental support that you have to have to be in a band in Sweden. So that made me think, because a lot of times, at least in Sweden, our way of looking at the world is that we're super equal, and the United States, they're not equal at all. And all of a sudden, there was this situation for me as a teenager looking at this system and saying, "Well, this is giving much more equal terms for children and kids to participate in extracurricular activities than we have in Sweden." That was the first thing, so it was the thing of equality. The other thing that I was very inspired by was the quantity of practice that we caught. Because if I looked into the amount of practice that I would get in full ensemble, in full orchestra, in Sweden, growing up, we would get about three hours a week, I would say. In the United States, we were doing four to five hours per day. It was massive, and we basically, it was no like a leap. This was not an academy or anything. It was just the marching band and the symphony band and the jazz band. It was just the orchestra of the school. And obviously, I mean, I think practice makes perfect. So if you look at the end of the year, an orchestra that's been playing together for four or five hours per day, or an orchestra that's been playing together for three hours a week, it's going to be a completely different sound by the end of the year. Yeah, a simple math, right? A simple math. And this goes for football as well. I'm basketball, I'm wrestling, and whatever you're doing, right? So basically what I said, okay, and also what was interesting was that I was never home after seven o'clock at night. So I did all this practice, and still I got home to dinner. While back in Sweden, I was trying to juggle all these different activities, and I would get home at like ten o'clock at night. And then I had to eat dinner, and then I had to do homework, and then I had to go to bed and wake up the next morning to go to school. And it was exhausted. So I just looked at it, and I said, well, you know, the integration of it, it just, it makes, it makes for a more effective use of resources. Human resources, in time, and financial resources, where you can put all these things together and use the resources collectively. So that was very inspiring, and well, basically has been, and still is, as you might imagine, from, I want to talk about this, still a foundation of my analysis of what needs to be done when it comes to the integration of extracurricular activities, or whatever you do on your past time and school since Sweden. Yeah. But you know, that actually brings up a very important point. So what aspect of the, let's say, US sport model, or call it sport model, that Swedish or European market could actually adopt, or are there any, or are there too many differences in culture and structure that, you know, hinders to do this? Well, I think that, I think that the major error that a lot of people are doing in Europe when they're analyzing the US sports market, is that they're looking at US professional sports. And they think that that logic goes all through US sports. Professional sports in the United States, it's just entertainment. You know, if I live in Atlanta, I will support the team from Atlanta, and then I moved to Chicago, and I'll support the team from Chicago. You know, I'll go to a hockey game, or I'll go to the movies. This is, and this, when we as Europeans look at it, it has nothing to do with us, because for us, professional sports, for a lot of us, and how, is culture. And it's something that we were brought up with. And it's, you know, it's, it's in the small, tiny details that's even harder to grasp. You know, that's why it's very interesting for people to do sociology, to study professional sports in Europe, I think. However, if you look at sports on the college level, and at an high school level as well in the United States, they have much more in common with the European sports than we normally tend to think. First of all, you can't move. So you can't move the university and you can't move the high school out of the place where they're at. So they need to work with their local community. This is very much like European sports, you know, you can't move our club out of Stockholm. And there's a lot of other clubs all over Europe that you can't move from where they're at. So at college in a high school, they must work with a local community. This then creates an importance for them by working with identity. So almost taking a sociological perspective on what sports could be. That sports could be the creation of group identity. So basically what the US college and the high school model must do, they must work with their local community. Now, there are some clubs in Europe that are able to work with the more US professional sports logic. But these clubs have a unique selling proposition that we lack. I would say that there are some major clubs in England and there's some major clubs in Spain, especially, that are able to do this. Maybe also there should be some major clubs in France that could do it. Basically what they can do is that they can create a global brand based on that they come from dominant cultures. Cultures that have spread throughout the world were also their language has spread through the world. Now for a small club from Sweden that people have a very hard time pronounciating, we're not going to be able to become a global brand. And to be honest we're membership owned and I don't think our members want us to be a global brand. So what we have to do is that we have to look at the place where we're at and dig deep. And this is what the colleges and the high schools must do as well. And you know close to where I used to live in Ohio there's a university that's called Ohio State University. And for most people in Europe they never heard of Ohio State. But Ohio State and Ohio State Buckeyes, their college football team has an attendance of over 100,000 people each game. And the value of their team and this was before the NIL rules. So this was when college athletes could make a single dollar from what they're doing. The value of their American football team was $1 billion US dollars. And the yearly turnaround of the university is $8 billion US dollars. Wow, smile blowing, that is larger than Real Madrid or any football club in Europe. And most people in Europe have never heard of these guys, but they're massive, they're massive. And they have achieved this when you can look at it in many different ways, but I would say that they have achieved this through relevance and digging deep. So they're big in Columbus, Ohio, you know, and in Columbus, Ohio they're huge. And they own land houses, they own a hospital, they own loads of things, a huge university with dorms and everything like that. Because they've dug deep, because of the realization that they can't move. So as a European football club from a smaller country, but still a wealthy country like Sweden, that opens up huge opportunities to think that, wow, instead of thinking how we could be big in Japan, we could think of how can we be more relevant in Stockholm? Because Stockholm is a huge economy, in a huge market. So that is what I think a lot of European football clubs could learn from the US model when it comes to college and high school. And you don't mean you have to realize that the attendance even at some high school games that I would say there's several high schools in the United States that have much better stadiums than most football clubs in Europe. And they were not even talking about the college level. I think you really hit the nail on the head because I totally really, I did my semester exchange in Wisconsin back in 2018, just six months, right? But then the college sports culture, college sports scene is one of a kind. Like you say, so deep rooted. And if you go to a university in Wisconsin, you got to support the bachelor's, for example. And the ground is crazy, like you say, a hundred thousand people for college level insane. And if you look at it. At first glance, when we look at one of those events, we would think, oh, this is commercial. But then you don't realize that all the traditions and all the things that you take part in when you're when you're part of the college experience. There are traditions that I've been growing through the student culture through decades. So, for an example, since I said I used to be a trumpet player, I follow the Ohio State marching band quite a lot. And if you look into their traditions, you know, you could just skip the whole football game and just look at the band during the entire game day. Because there's so many different traditions of what they're doing, the different sections they're doing this and they're touching that and this and that and it's this song here and that song there. And it's all these different things that they do that then they pass on through generations, right? So, we think of it as like, oh, wow, it's a laser show. But if you look at the college, that's not the case at all. I mean, I'm not saying that there's not laser shows, they might be and I don't want them in Swedish football. But there are so many other things that we can look at and what's interesting is not what the end result. The interesting part of it is how these results were created through initiatives created grassroots initiatives that were created and passed long generations for generations for generation. And this creates this thing that like some of my friends now have one of my U.S. friends, he lives in Washington, D.C. now. And he told me, well, you know, there are sports bars in D.C. where they were everyone that went to Ohio State, they go there to watch the game. So, even if he would support a professional team from Washington, D.C. now, when it comes to the college level, that's when they're loyal, that's when they never change. And this is very interesting for us as well because European sports and European soccer is much more oriented towards the lifetime loyalty. So therefore also the way that they create that identity that stays for a very long time is very interesting from your European football perspective in my opinion, of course. Yeah. And when you spotlight, let's say in the due accordance school sport case, how would you do? How would you carry on with the hell? Like, if you can explain it to the fifth grader, how would you describe the program at due accordance? Call it short. Well, it's quite simple really. The school sports association have a framework that we must follow. This basically says that a school sports association is the students sports association that is run with support from adults. So what I would tell a fifth grader or a first grader for that matter is what do you want to do? Then let us go do it. So then of course we do a leadership program at the schools and we do a board program so we teach this to kids how to manage a board because the kids are on the board of this board association at the school. And basically the kids run the run the association at the local level at the school level, of course, not at the you level, but at the school level. They run the association and they are and they are young. They do the leadership programs. And then we just ask them, you know, do you want to do you want a school team in basketball? Yes, okay, let's set it up. No, okay, let's not set it up. You know, do you want to do so at some schools, we have school teams in football, in basketball, in ice hockey. In some schools, we have school teams in chair leading, in volleyball. And you know, for the young kids, we basically just play because it's for them, it's about finding the joy of being physically active. Right? Yeah. So it's very, very simple. It's like before school at seven o'clock, what do you want to do? Do you want to be physically active? Okay, how? After school, do you want to be physically active? Okay, how? Let's do it. Gotcha. And that's first off, these are incredible vision, but let's say given the long term approach, how would you sustainably finance this model? I mean, like when we talk about the American sport model, it's been there for so long, right? So they have the massive investment in facilities, cultural identity. How would you sustain your vision now in Sweden? Yeah, well, they, those are, they're intertwined, but they're also separate. The program we're running now with the school sports association is basically funded from the schools and from the contribution that you get from the Swedish school sport association. So that's, that's funded. Then when it comes to the larger picture, then it's about, in my opinion, it's about trying to make more and more people in Sweden, more and more stakeholders that work with these issues, understand that when they build a school, they must build sporting grounds right next to the school. If I look to the major sporting grounds to Stockholm today, normally it's about one K, one kilometer from that sporting ground to the low to the closest elementary school. And that's used to closest elementary school, and there are several others that are even further away. For small children, you know, aged six to nine, they're not going to move one kilometer, go to sports, not during the school day. So basically what that creates is that the schools then must create their own gymnasiums and all these facilities are empty during the day and then is rush hour traffic during the afternoon when everyone needs to go there instead. So you need to build schools right next to the sporting grounds. So you can use all the sporting facilities during recess. It's cool. And also during that black hole period, during the afternoon, that I would say, and then it's to be honest, I think you would just remodel the thing I told you about earlier, three days and three days. And also there's something called that that's not run by the school system, but it's called free. It's God was basically like a community hub, where adolescents can go. If you would just restructure those three, you would create an amazing afterschool program, an amazing afterschool program that would allow the children to indulge in their interests. And with that infrastructure that's already been created through the construction of the school. So to be honest, I think my very humble, non-economic calculations, because sometimes an economist, it would be a huge, it would be a huge surplus. And they would benefit Sweden tremendously for a fraction of the cost. And also you would unleash a huge potential of what you could call alternative costs. That today costs, because today, obviously when the Swedish sports system is based on voluntary coaches, and all these voluntary coaches, you know, when they're not voluntary, they're not looking into, they're not just sitting looking into a wall. They're normally working. And in Sweden, we have a productivity issue where people are not working enough. A normal 40 hour work week as we have in Sweden means that you should work about 2000 hours per year. And in Sweden, we work about 1,400 hours per year. So we lack 600 hours per person per year of work. That obviously if you could make people work instead of being in the current system that we have now, that would unleash huge amounts of money, that would then be able to go into creating all these facilities that we need. But also roads and, you know, rails and for trains and trucks and on all these different things, all the kind of infrastructure that we need. The whole ecosystem, yeah. The whole ecosystem. And we're not talking small amounts of money. When I calculated it, I actually been running this through some economists and they say, and they don't say I'm not off. You have to say that the number could be as high as 1.67% of Swedish GDP. It's worth the investment now. Yeah. So it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Because it's so interesting what you say about, you know, let's say 1,400 hours working per year. So you have a little gap here. But if there's a voluntarily base from sport activities or jobs, I feel that people would eager to do so. I think that's what we experience in Austria. Like people maybe in wealthy Sanford or North Europe, we tend to prefer to reduce our working hours more and more. And then there's a research. They say that, okay, if there's like a four working day per week, what would you do for the rest? Yeah. And the result was quite surprising because people like to say they want to work on something they passionate. Yeah. Not like resting. So I think this spot on, right? Mm-hmm. Right. So Stefan, you mentioned earlier that something really calm attention, the share value model. Yeah. And if we bring it back to the context of football, so how does that work for a football club and order stakeholder in society? Yeah. Or maybe you can share one, two example in practice. Yes, of course. Well, I can do the school sports association because it's created from the share value model. Creating shared value was created by two. I think one is a consultant, but the other one, Porter, he's a professor at Harvard. And normally he works with strategy. And what he did was he started looking into the corporate social responsibility and charity, say businesses and the logic of those two fields. And also what he was interested at looking at was why it was so hard to scale with that traditional corporate social responsibility logic. We had already been thinking we had already found the problem with the corporate social responsibility logic when we found the creating shared value model. We were looking for a model that could better explain logically how we could affect society and also benefit ourselves from doing so. Basically, what the shared value model says is that you need to look, you need to look at societal issues through three dimensions. First, you need to analyze the actual societal need, whatever it is. You need to find it and you need to sort of limit it so you understand where the borders go to other issues and whatnot. After that, you have to look inside to your own organization. You have to ask yourself an honest question. Do we have the competence to address these issues? This comes to human capital like do we have the know how and do we have the money? We have so resources both in finance and in knowledge. If we have the knowledge and we have the resources to address a specific societal issue, we also need to look at will there be a business if we decide to address this issue? Because if there would be a business addressing the issue, it would quickly grow and it would be able to scale through a completely different logic than you would do in traditional charity work. Also, there are some people in Sweden, however, very few, in need of traditional charity. Most people living in Sweden do not need charity and do not need to participate in any kind of charity project. Also, for us, it was very important because no person wants to be a social project. No one wants me to come to you and say, well, you know what I'm going to do this? Because your life is crap and you don't have good parents or you live in a bad neighborhood and you do with this or that. And, you know, I feel sorry for you. People don't want my pity, particularly opportunities. And when we approach something like a business, we treat people like adults. So we treat them like if I give you an opportunity, you will take it. So basically, that's why we wanted that model. When we found them out, so basically the model says, society will need resources, business, opportunity. When those, when these three issues interact with each other, you have the opportunity to create shared value. Shared value, which means value created for every stakeholder involved. So, what we then did was when it comes to the Hugo Sports Association, as all of you said, we saw sedimentary behavior. Kids are not being physically active enough. Hey, societal issue. Did we have the resources to address this issue? Yes, we do. Because we have the know how we also have, it's very, even though maybe not a lot of people like this word, but it's very on brand. And no one is going to be like, well, why are you talking about, I don't know, like, you know, the polar bears and the Arctic, you know, you're a football club. It's very logic. It's logic. A football club will address people not being physically active. It's very logic. You know, it's logical. So there's no, there are no thresholds. Then, when it's okay, the business opportunity, well, then we go back to relevance. Everyone cares about three children. That's just normal. So if we do great people, great things for people's children, the majority of people in Stockholm will think of us in a more positive way. And that is also, and then we lot people ask, well, you know, there's this rivalry between between the in Sweden Stockholm, I would say, made three major clubs. There's a rivalry between the three major clubs and our club is one of them. But, you know, sometimes I describe that rivalry as a as a naval battle with toy boats in a drinking glass. So for us, that's taking part of the rivalry is huge, but in the global perspective, it's nothing. So for a huge part of the people living in Stockholm, these rivalries are irrelevant because they don't even care about football. And those are the people that we wanted to create a relationship to. We want them to start caring about our club. And we can do that by doing relevant things for them. And then we can make them care about football eventually down the line. So instead of trying to cater to the smaller group that are already obsessed with football and the rivalry between the different clubs and they follow all the place. Those guys, they basically now on social media, they create their own content, they create their own merch, they do everything. They're already set up. We just need to have a dialogue as a club. That's not my job to other people at the club. We need to keep a dialogue with them what they expect from the club. So we can, you know, have a good relationship together, especially in Sweden as they, those guys are the members of the club, so they own the club. It's their club. But we need obviously as well. This is not, you know, this is the complimentary issue that I work with. We need to complement that with working with the large group of people that don't care about football. So that was basically how we did the shared value model and how we integrated it and the logic behind it. And that was also, and why we entered the schools and we did the school sports association was also because we started looking at, okay, because everyone was saying, well, you know, the kids, they're not participating in sports and they're not doing this and they're not being physically active. But and everyone was trying to fix it by doing more of the same. But the same is what created the issue to begin with. So we're not going to fix the issue by doing the same. We need to do different. So what we said was basically we said, well, you know, there are four major thresholds to being physically active. It's distance, geography, right. You have to move. It's money that costs money to participate. It's social in certain aspects. There are some areas where the children are allowed to participate. Could be for religious reasons, for cultural reasons, for whatever, especially I would say girls, but also also guys. And then their psychological thresholds. And basically what we said is that if we integrate ourselves with the school, we can remove three out of four straight away because we take the sports to the kids so there's no transportation so the geographies out of the door. It could financially the school pace. So yeah, finance is out of the door. Socially, it's mandatory to go to school. And when we come through the school, it gives trust to these families that earlier were not allowed. So I have a very good story about this. And we were working at a school in Stockholm. And at this school, they had a lot, a lot, a lot of kids from a certain Christian religious group that were not allowed to be part of any associations. But they went to their church and they asked for a special permission to be part of the school support association. And because it was affiliated to the school, the leadership of the church gave their approval and all these children for the first time ever in their life could participate in organized sports. So that's the social thing. Then obviously it's a psychological thing and that's a whole different story and a whole different ball game. But that's individual and that's very hard to remove on a systemic level. You have to work on a much more individual level to remove those obstacles. You know, like that's actually one of one of my questions, like how would you finance and more importantly, to trust, let's say one of the key target audience here is the key target group is the parents, right? And I think it's so spot on with you say, if you, you know, team up with the school, like, hey, that's self. Yeah, yeah, but you know, I want to ask you about one of the key challenge for your vision or for this concept, especially when you, when you first pitch this idea to the club to juggled and football or juggled and hockey. Usually the owners say what would be our ROI? I know this is such a long term why, you know, most club sport club, they would think like year by year. Yeah, so how would you persuade I want to business criteria, so to say. Well, I think it's it's nowadays all clubs must have what you would call a CSR program. In the non membership owned clubs, like in England, they're obliged to put up a trust. And then they let their trust to do whatever so they can say that look we did something. But it's keeps it's separated from the rest of the club. In Sweden, and this was also early in, and the U Gordans history working with corporate social responsibility. We took a model from the UK and moved it into a Swedish context. And this was a huge failure. It costs it costed so much money. And the effect on society was impossible to measure. Not this not saying that the actual activities being performed were bad, they were not the activities were good. But then we have to come back to the alternative costs, right? If I put one million euro into this program and the result for society is zero, then it would be better to put the one million euro into another program where the result for society would be two million euro. Or even one million euro and one euro, you know, because at least you would benefit. So basically what happened was when I entered the club, the logic between the CSR program was that, you know, we're going to say that we do great things in society and people are going to throw money at us. People don't throw money away so that didn't happen. And well, you know, and basically it didn't do anything for the club. It just costed money. So it was actually, and this is why, you know, I'm a big fan of the 51% rule that the members run the clubs. Basically some members. At the yearly, you know, the yearly, what's that called in English? And now the yearly meeting where we do all the voting and stuff like that. They had a motion that they said that they wanted the club to be more active outside its core area of downtown Stockholm. That motion in dialogue with the members then created the foundation of what today is the school sports associations. So in that case, we didn't need an ROI because the members already told the CEO that this is what you have to do now. But then obviously the CEO decides how much money is going to spend on something. So obviously I have to be able to show some kind of return investment. But basically today, this is, this is an extremely cheap program. So basically what I said was that basically what we had to do then was that we had to just basically show our CEO that we're not going to waste his money. And for him, it's very easy because he could just look at the sponsorship and how the sponsorship money is going up, up, up, up. Because we're not, we're not calling it CSR anymore. We're calling it sustainability, sustainability program. And so basically he could just see the bottom line what the money he makes versus the money he puts in and the ROI is home. Exactly. I mean, I was talking about like most people mistake in CSR sustainability program is like a, a charitable act. It's not, it's can be profitable. So spot on. So Stefan, this is the next question is my all-time favorite, but it's a bit of a curveball for most guests. Are you ready? Yeah. If you can only pick one, okay? Only one. One success story and one lesson learned from your time at Duke Gordon, School of Drought or Duke Gordon. He's for schools association. What would it be? Mmm. One lesson learned. One lesson learned in ones. Yeah. Well, I want to choose with. I will start with one lesson learned. That is the importance of being humble in relations to everyone. And I will tell you what I mean by that. The problem with working with a club like mine when you're also a supporter of the club is that you were the why that I had going into the club was crystal clear. I knew exactly and I thought the club is the best thing that ever happened to the world. Right? So my why was so crystal clear. And that made it hard for me to explain the why for others that did not support my club. So if I wanted a business owner to invest, it was very hard for me to explain why he should or she should invest in us because my why was so clear and I was like, oh, we're going to take over the world and we're going to win this Swedish championship and go to the European cups and whatever, right? So to be extremely humble, I think is very, very, very important to me. Nothing does we have done now is worth anything. We have the best days ahead of us for this absolutely convinced and we have to work on being humble every day and looking at every day as a new opportunity as something new that could be learned. To learn from our predecessors, what they have done right, what they have done wrong, we have to use their knowledge in our society today to become even better. So what I always say when it comes to our job is that, I always say that the important thing for me is that we recruit people and that we work when we work as people that want the crest of the club to shine. You don't want people that want to shine in the light of the crest. And there's a lot of people working in football that want to work for the status of working in football. We don't want those people. We want people that want to work to make the crest shine even brighter than it's shining today. That's a big lesson learned. A memorable success story. Well, there are, there are many. But I could say one that's that's that I that was today and it's not like it's not like one of those feel good American stories. It's more, more I would guess, Germanic oriented. It's about processes and policies and whatever, but I was talking to, um, and the girl that runs our HR department for for the school sport association. So all the recruiting and and and basically we have been working very, very, very hard from the get low with getting a system in place with clear processes that describe every different step of what we're doing. And also a very good leadership model of how we can train our employees once they're on location. And when I spoke to her today because now we have the new we have about six new coaches that work with us since August. I think they're six anyhow. And she does follow up talks with them and we can really, really see how far we have come since because I remember it August of 2020. We went from three schools to 10 schools today were 32 schools, but we went from three schools to 10 schools in August. And this this girl that works HR for us, but also another one of our coaches, they were with us that first day in August. And I was standing at the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, that used to be our home pitch, beautiful stadium. If you ever come to Stockholm, go visit. And I was standing there and I said, no one has ever done this in Sweden. We have no clue how to do this. We just have to be humble and we just have to talk to each other a lot because we are we are going to fail. And we're going to fail miserably, but we just have to pick up ourselves and keep going because that's the only way we're going to learn how to do this. And now when I sit with her and she describes how we work through each process from the recruiting, the recruiting process with all the tests that we do and trials and everything that we do through the onboarding process, through how they work through the system and how fast they become leaders in the schools where they work because of how good they are. The leaders, the coaches are great, but also the system is great. But when she tells me this, you know, I used to call the guy that hired me back in 2015, Philip, I used to call him and he said, you know, man, it's, it's an amazing program. It's crazy. How are we able to, how are we able to create this? You know, and it's just, I'm just so fortunate and blessed to have all these great people working with me with this and this great system in place so we can make a huge difference for the kids, for the schools and for our club. You know, as cheesy as I may sell, I think what you just shared is that really a spot on one thing. The best part is on about the journey and I'm so looking forward and you know, I will keep you guys work in my radar because it is the best days of still there. The best they are yet to come. Of course, inspiring. Thank you. And you know, we coming to the last part of the episode. So let's take the claims into the future. And first off, what would be the man goes for Jew Gordon, Scully George in 2024? Yeah. I would say in 2024, we have, along with the things that I was already talking about, sort of making the whole system work the way we wanted to. And I think we were really achieving that now, which is great. And also that we get a good talent acquisition program in place so that the coaches that enter our organization can have a career. Which I think is very, very important and a lot of times is lacking in sports. That is one thing. Another thing that we're doing a lot is that we're working together with the school sports association in the district of Stockholm. With creating more tournaments between the different schools. We have the school championship of the Stockholm region tomorrow. We have more than 70 teams that have, they're going to participate in the tournament. This is great. And we're going to have another seven different tournaments in different sports all through the year. And this is a great success story. And it's also been one of the last things that we wanted to add to the palette of what we're doing is the competitions between the different schools. Because as of now, we haven't done it during COVID, obviously we didn't do it. Then we've done it on terms we've been doing some conscience, but now we're moving together with the school sports association and that is that that will be great. That will be great. So that is what we'll do in 2024. I think. And then also we're doing budget work for 2025. Hopefully, hopefully we can grow. And you know, we talk about, you know, most clubs, they only play in one year ahead. And then you talk about having a 30 year vision, thinking one about intro call. So can you share that with a listener today? How does that look like? To me, it's, you know, a lot of times, I think in the Western world, a lot of times we lack long term planning. You know, where you come from in Southeast Asia, a lot of countries there, they have a totally different way of viewing time. And I have a good friend of mine who works at the Stockholm's business school, Stockholm School of Business. And he used to live in China for many, many years and he speaks Mandarin and all that stuff. And we were out walking because he lives close to where I live and we were out having a walk one night. We started talking about this whole way of what, looking at time. And he said, you know, a short time frame in China when they plan things is 30 years. They have a thousand year plan, but let's not have a thousand year plan for the club, but you know, they have a 30 year plan. And what a 30 year plan does is that it makes your shoulders, you know, sink a little bit. You get more relaxed. Because you know that every failure I do now is just a part of the process of achieving what we want to achieve in 30 years. So we set out this plan me and Philip in 2020 of where we want the club to go in 2050. And we're basically working in that direction. So we have a 30 year, we have a 30 year vision for the club where we want to be. And obviously I can't tell you all the details about it, but it also involves people that I don't want to talk about here, but or clubs. But basically what it says, the basic idea of it is we need to increase our relevance. That's number one. We need to become stronger and broader in the scope of the things that we do and how we interact with people in everyday life. And we need to create a platform for identity structuring and identity building over time and not in a commercial manner be like, well, you know, collect this and tokens and whatever, yada yada, nothing like that true identity, true identity. So not from a commercial perspective, but from a social logical perspective, we need to create a stronger identity. And we need to become, as I said, relevant relevant to the people of Stockholm, relevant to the city of Stockholm, really relevant to the metropolitan area of Stockholm. So I always say, you know, in Sweden, there's a saying that when people go to vote, the three things that they really, really care about is education, sort of the elderly treatment of the elderly and the disabled. And healthcare, those are like the three big big fairs, right? Then sometimes it could be like crime could be up there, defends could be up there, depending on what happening, right? In my vision, when people go vote in Stockholm, it should be, you know, taking care of the elderly, of course, of the disabled, very important school, super important. And I mean, that's like how we can compete for the well-educated society, healthcare, obviously, very, very important. And then fourth year, we're done. So, yeah, that's not very long, they're not even realistic, but you know, sorry, carry on. No, but that's sort of, that's how we think about it. That's how relevant we want to be. You know, sometimes the vision has to be big enough so everybody can, can be a part of it, so fair enough. And I think, I remember I look into one of your podcastes in Swedish, but I try to translate it. And they say that one of the vision you want is for these young people, when they meet each other, maybe 30 years later, they all have the same common thing. And I think it's important because also we need that, especially in a city like Stockholm where there's a lot of people moving in and out all the time. It's very international. We need those common identities, common stories that we can all belong to. And I believe they're really, a football club can really make a difference because a football club, you know, is not something that based on your ethnicity or religion or anything, one of those, you know, issues that's hard to change with yourself or your sex or whatever, right? It's something that you can choose. It's an identity you can choose. And that makes the identity strong. And it makes it very inclusive. The last question from my side today, because we, you know, what, and I can't have myself am asking, you know, like, what would you think would be the most impactful trains for the football industry? I asked this question for so many guests before and usually it's going to be, you know, the technology or the commercial potential. But I just love what you say about, you know what is identity? It's relevance. So I'm expecting something here different. Well, I mean, the most impactful trends for the future of the football industry, well, to be honest, I would say, I mean, the first thing I'm just going to be very boring, the most impactful trends for the future of football industry is how well our societies will be doing. So we need to look at it from a broader perspective, right? If the Swedish society is going bad, well, football will go bad as well. So we need to have a strong continuously strong society. That's the major trend. If we can't do that, nothing else is going to matter. Then, however, I would say to me, I mean, technology, I don't know enough about technology to say how it would impact the football industry, I have no idea. What I could say is that the people, the thing that's been key before we had any of the technology that we have now and even before we had the wheel or the fire is the group identity. It's storytelling, it's being part of something bigger, feeling that you matter, feeling that you're important. And this I think are key, and it's key for everyone who's trying to do anything except like selling a very physical product that it's used as art. Food, I don't have to feel like I'm part of anything to feel the need to buy food, wherever I go in the world I want to eat. But as soon as we go away from those absolutely most basic human needs, which we can say most of them are quite well met in the Western world from most people. Then we come down to those completely different things of group identity, of belonging of self-worth and feeling that you're needed in a group, but all these things. And I can tell you a story, this was even before we began our work with the School Sport Association, this was right when I started working at U of Order in 2015. There was a huge influx of refugees coming to Sweden, and everyone there were telling us, "Well, you have to work with integration." And I was like, "Okay, so what are you suggesting?" But suggesting because I just came from working with integration. And they all said, "Well, you know, why don't you let these refugees go to a football match?" "Well, how are they integrating by doing that?" I understand that they're activating themselves, this I understand. But integration takes that you need to interact with someone from the culture. And if I put, you know, 10 people from Syria in the nosebleed section of the stadium, they're not going to interact with anyone. So what kind of integration is that? It's just activating them. So what I said is, "Okay, we don't need that, but we do need assistant coaches to our youth teams." So I said, "Okay, we put out, you know, advertisement on LinkedIn and all that stuff, asked if you just came to Sweden, and if you like football, you can be an unpaid assistant coach in one of our youth teams." And we had these people coming along, and we had this one guy who came from Syria, and he became an assistant coach. And why that was so important is because if the assistant coach doesn't show up for practice, everyone starts asking, "Where is the assistant coach?" So this person, he's not activated, he's integrating, because he's doing something that's valuable to many, many people. We need him. This then creates a situation where he needs us, and we need him. Maybe we need him even more than he needs us to be honest, because we need assistant coaches more than he needs, you know, us specifically. And this has created, and today he's a huge fan of the club, and he goes with the kids to the games, and that's tough. But it's also very interesting, because when we did this, everyone heard, "Oh, you have a refugee, a assistant coach in your teams." Yes, I wanted to do a story about him. Yeah, sure we could do a story. Everyone wanted to do play the victim card, that he was a victim, and we were helping him. You know, we were the good guys, and he was a victim that we helped. That was like, it's on the, it's on the, it's reverse, it's a way to reverse. Without him, the team doesn't have a coach. Let's say, I wouldn't call us a victim, but we are the beneficiaries of his work. He is doing more for us than we're doing for him, but we're also doing things for him, which is great. And I think a lot of times, that is a good story of how identity can be created, and we need to scale that in many, many ways in football. I would say, football industry, but remove the big, you know, top five Premier League, top three for La Liga, you know, top one in France. Remove some of those clubs, because they are just global giants, they are now producing mac and cheese in different boxes. But for the rest of us, we are basically locally phenomenons. Some of us are bigger, because we're from a bigger place, and some of us are smaller, because we're from smaller places. But we're basically locally phenomenons, and realize that that's what we are. Don't look at these big giants, because you can't copy them. You can't, you don't have the resources, you don't have to have the platform, because, as I said, you know, people can't even pronounce our club's name. And that goes probably the same for most clubs in Austria, and Slovakia, and Croatia, and all these ISIS, right? We don't have global reach through our languages, we don't have any of that. So, we have to work with what we got, and dig deep, where we're standing, and try to create value for people, and when we create value for them, they will create value for us. And then we can grow, and become even more resourceful, and do even more, and more and more better. And hopefully we're living a lot of football matches. Absolutely. Stefan, this is so inspiring, and I think I'm very touched by your whole hot-fail story today. I think this is a perfect way to conclude our today's episode. But, you know, before that, I just wanted to tell you two things. I feel like it's so insightful, and this topic is so complex sometimes, it's more than football. So, where can myself or the audience find more information about Jewel Gordon Swartz School, or your motto, or your case study? Well, if you don't speak Swedish, you probably email me. You can put my email somewhere in the presentation of this podcast, or you can find me on LinkedIn as well. And that's very good. Maybe we'll just put my LinkedIn, and then people can find my LinkedIn. If you speak Swedish, it's very easy to go to our website. You go to football clubs, website, and find school EF, and there you can read all about it. I think you speak, sorry, carry on. But if you don't speak Swedish, do the LinkedIn thing, and I'll tell you. Not for sure I will do, but, you know, like, I think it's time for you to put to five of volunteer who can, you know, translate the whole concept of 90 in English on your website at some point. Because, you know, where I come from Vietnam, we don't even have trust or any connection to the domestic bleak. Like, I mean, of course, some people do, but like, come on 100 million population. I'm sure when you, maybe more than 90 percent, we don't. And we watched the top five European football leagues. And I feel like this is exactly any other smaller country, smaller leagues can create. It gives me hopes. And it's all start with, you know, you know, dig deep. They're relevant. It's not about just making money and winning things. Because if you dig deep and you're relevant, you will make money. That's exactly bringing battles. Yeah. So it's just about creating value, about the value creation. But the value creation, you know, it goes customer first, right? People first. Because the customer is not, it's a person, it's a human being. So people first. Yeah. So before we close, do you have any final words or to sharing, we would like to share with the listener today? I don't know. I hope that we will win the Swedish Championship. Not this year, unfortunately, I think the train has already left the station, but in the years to come. And if you're interested in learning more about what we're doing and collaborating in some way or whatever, please feel free to reach out. We're very interested in talking to people from all over the world. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. Thank you everyone for tuning in today and we hope to see you soon in the next episode. [BLANK_AUDIO]