Top flight club bans foreign language use

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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"This is a non-issue," BP chairperson Ola Danhard told The Local on Wednesday.

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.