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May 26, 2012
Top flight club bans foreign language use
Published: 10 Mar 10 13:39 CET | Double click on a word to get a translation
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/25452/20100310/
Swedish top flight football club, Brommapojkarna (BP) have introduced a language policy requiring all players to speak Swedish to each other in order to be eligible for selection.
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As almost all of BP's players are home grown talent - with 17 of the 23 first team players from its youth set up - Danhard argued that a language policy was little more than a formality.
But Danhard did confirm that the club's board had voted to establish a policy for the exclusive use of Swedish within the club, both in its changing rooms and on the pitch.
"It is important for the collective that everyone in the team speaks the same language," he said.
Danhard told The Local that BP has a very successful youth set-up, drawing on talent from the greater Stockholm catchment area. He pointed out that while many of the players are from immigrant families and are multilingual, all can speak Swedish.
"In the changing room if you are going to use a language then it is much nicer if it is a language that everybody understands," Danhard said.
Danhard told The Local that they have been working with the issue for some ten years and there have been no negative reactions to date.
"Like I said, this is a non-issue. We should all speak Swedish within the club," Ola Danhard said.
Brommapojkerna are widely recognised to have Sweden's best youth set up, which is the largest in Europe in terms of the number of active teams of all ages (250). The club's most famous recent prodigy was Albin Ekdal, who joined Juventus in 2008.
Peter Vinthagen Simpson
news@thelocal.se
+46 8 656 6518
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Otherwise immigrants will never learn to speak swedish ..... do you think they will tolerate players to speak in another language in china?
Good on you Brommaboys ... .. we are not Brommagirls!!!
ha ha
How about some of those boys playing outside sweden some day. Will they have to use exclosively the local language as well?.
Very very bad management. Its fine to encourage Swedish to be spoken but not to force it. A good manager would try to get the most out of their players regardless of language. On these silly principles, what if say the next Henrik Larson or Ronaldo was at the club and denied his place in the team (even though he was clearly 10 times better than the other players)just because he couldnt speak Swedish..
Should Juve have tuened Albin Ekdal away as he didnt speak Italian??? They should have, would have taught this club a valuable lesson
Did this guy actually just use China (of all places!) as some sort of model to be duplicated?
I don't know about Sweden, but I'd expect that in Finland this could lead to a noisy discrimination case. There would need to be a good, legal basis for a ban on using other languages.
He has a point.....what's he going to do otherwise have a team of translators on the sidelines and in the dressing rooms.
Do any of you play team sports??? It disrupts everyone if a few don't understand whats really going on
Maybe it´s just another sponsorship strategy, they try to sell the image of "proud to be swedish" no matter if they are gonna be downgraded this season...
If it is such a "non-issue" Ola, then why the rule? This is what is the worst about Swedish society that obsesses about tying the whole country up in ill conceived regulations introduced by neo fashist board members. Time and time again a governing body over here introduces a discriminatorty policy mostly because they feel it makes common sense. Only later to realise that sitting on a board actually means that one has to represent the majority of an organisation not the personal zenophobic feelings of a board members ego. Rasism by any other words is what this is and let's make no mistake. They can wrap it up as commonsense or non-issue but it is discrimination based upon an appathetic attitude to the realities of the modern world.
Go for it Ola your silent rasist views have now been vocalised. Bravo you have placed your self in the land of the idiots...is that really where you wish to be?
The name of the game is football, agreed with you all guys, the team is non competitive so lets not bother!!!
Oh yeah, now immigrants are gonna speak swedish!!!
I play football, although on a rather much lower level than even the P13 junior team of Brommapojkarna.
It is OK to require players to understand the language of operation, so that they know what the trainer says and can obey instructions. But this wasn't about players understanding what is said to them in the dressing room or on the pitch.
Players sometimes use coded speech. E.g. when planning an attack they could give instructions in a veiled way, so that the opponent cannot anticipate what is planned. They could say "gå nu", or they could code it and say "traktor!", or they could code it and say "mene!" or "انتقل الآن" and I don't see why the latter two should be banned and the former not.
Or could it be that this is a veiled attempt to ban derogatory expressions in a foreign language? If players swear at each other in Aramaic, an ethnic Liberian referee cannot know what happens. But if this is the reason, why isn't it said aloud?