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Swedish football (Swedish:Svensk fotboll) was a code offootball devised and played inSweden from the 1870s to the early 1890s, when the modernassociation football was introduced. Swedish football rules were a mix of theassociation football rules and therugby football rules, most closely resembling the former.
The inspiration for Swedish football came from theEnglishfootball[clarification needed], however, whenball games first were introduced in Sweden in the 1870s, the distinct rules of the different codes of football that had been adopted around ten years earlier in England were lost on the way over to Sweden, and no distinction was made between the codes. This caused confusion as some played the game with the round ball, while others played with the oval ball.[1] One of the first mentions of football being played was in an article inGöteborgs-Posten on 24 May 1874, where the readers were told that agymnastics society had been founded inGothenburg, and that the society also had played "a few football player games, which seemed to be of a very animated nature".[2] A year later,Göteborgs Bollklubb were founded, and the club had amongst other sports football on the programme.
In 1880, the first set of rules for Swedish football were published in the bookFria Lekar. Anvisning till skolans tjenst by Lars Mauritz Törngren. He had visited England to study sports and returned to write down his experiences in the book. He had misunderstood—or completely failed to notice—the codification of football made almost 20 years earlier, and his set of rules were thus a mix of association and rugby football, "a middle course", as he expressed it. The rules were hard to understand and did not come into widespread use.[3] Instead, five years later in 1885, Göteborgs BK along with the leading clubs in Stockholm (Stockholms Bollklubb founded 1879) and Visby (Visby Bollklubb) met and established a set of rules that were to dominate the Swedish football scene in the following years.[4]
The first association football match played on Swedish soil took place inMalmö on 12 October 1890 whenKjøbenhavns Boldklub visited the city and two of the teams of theDanish club played an exhibition match. But it was in Gothenburg that the modern football had its breakthrough, and the first national match was played 22 May 1892 between the two Gothenburg clubsÖrgryte Idrottssällskap andIdrottssällskapet Lyckans Soldater. By 1895, association football had outrivaled the Swedish variant, with much help by the English,Scottish andAustralian immigrant workers that introduced the modern code at their workplaces.[5]
The rules of Swedish football were much like the association rules, with two main exceptions, the players were allowed to catch the ball with their hands and run with it a short time beforedrop kicking it away again, and the goal did not have anycrossbar. The number of rules written down by Lars Mauritz Törngren were ten: