In international football, you often hear of the idea that a team should be ‘built around’ a player. This is almost exclusively a retrospective request, a regret that a nation hadn’t appreciated its most talented playmaker and instead shoved them to the margins. In reality, you rarely encounter a top international side, especially a successful one, truly being moulded around a particular player.
Sweden are an exception. Kosovare Asllani, their outspoken, mercurial and divisive attacking midfielder, has unquestionably had the side built around her by manager Peter Gerhardsson.
“Peter has meant an incredible amount personally to me,” Asllani said ahead of Sweden’s semi-final against Spain. “Straight away, he gave me an incredible amount of responsibility and he put me in the position I love to play: an attacking midfield role.
“But what I especially like about Peter are his leadership qualities. He likes to give responsibility and wants us to make our own decisions. It is a kind of leadership that I like, where you lead by example. I think he has done an incredible amount for this Swedish national team, it shows in how well we’ve done in all tournaments since he took over. And footballing-wise — how he wants to play brave football out on the pitch — he gives us a lot of confidence. We love it.”
When Asllani made her debut for Sweden 15 years ago, there was no doubt about her level of talent. Few, however, would have predicted she would one day wear the captain’s armband at a World Cup.
Asllani was the opposite of a captain; a talented attacker but also a loose cannon, forever getting herself into trouble in the media and sometimes with her club too, as she recalled of her arrival at Paris Saint-Germain in 2012 in Den Andra Sporten (The Other Sport), a 2013 documentary about the development of women’s football in Sweden.
“In my first week in Paris, I broke all the rules, just to see how they would react,” she said. “I don’t like rules. I was fined for my behaviour. Now I know I have to follow the rules, even if I find it difficult… if you wear the wrong socks, you get fined… you can’t leave the table until the signal is given… you learn to respect those who make the decisions.”
Asllani playing for PSG in 2014 (Xavier Laine/Bongarts/Getty Images)
All that seems a basic part of being a team player, but for Asllani — a straight-talking individualist — it was a struggle.
A decade on, Asllani has matured into a dependable leader. While Swedish stalwart Caroline Seger is still officially the captain, her status as a backup means Asllani wears the armband, ahead of, for example, four-time Women’s Super League-winning skipper Magdalena Eriksson. Still outspoken off the pitch and still hugely influential on it, Asllani provides Sweden with the confidence and the ferocity that has sometimes been lacking.
But in another world, Asllani is a flash-in-the-pan, a what-might-have-been. Her international career started in difficult fashion at Euro 2009. “I hyped myself up and I wasn’t able to live up to it,” she later recalled. “That was a warning to me: I didn’t realise that what I said could affect me. The media attention affected me a great deal at that time.”
But worse was to come. Asllani was omitted from the World Cup squad in 2011 by Thomas Dennerby, who Asllani later complained never really trusted her, even when she was picked.
Things initially improved under the reign of Pia Sundhage, who took the helm in 2012 after five years in charge of the USWNT, which included winning two Olympic gold medals. Her priority upon returning to her homeland was bringing the mentality of the U.S. side to Sweden. Sundhage felt Sweden often didn’t fight enough. In Asllani, she found a player she could push harder as an example to the rest. Asllani, for her part, agreed with Sundhage’s feeling about Sweden’s meekness. In a brief spell playing for Chicago Red Stars in 2010, Asllani commented on the superior level of self-belief in the U.S., particularly in situations of adversity.
It was that, in part (along with personal friendships with U.S. players including former PSG team-mate Lindsey Horan) that led Asllani to defend the USWNT after their round-of-16 exit at the hands of Sweden, telling an American journalist to ‘not talk shit’ about the side. “The U.S. Women’s National Team, they’re pioneers,” Asllani later explained on Christen Press and Tobin Heath’s podcast, The Re-Cap Show. “You are raising the game. You are opening doors for the rest of the community, the rest of the world. You are first with everything.”
Asllani herself has sometimes entered into the debate for higher standards in the women’s game, calling for major changes in terms of equality of opportunity for girls who want to play football, and at other times talked about specific technical issues. A few years ago, she demanded a regulation football to be used in every Champions League game, at a time when different clubs used different types of balls. Last year, she said it was a ‘catastrophe’ that Euro 2022 used only 50 per cent as many VAR cameras as the men’s tournament.
Asllani’s tendency to speak her mind has inevitably drawn comparisons to Zlatan Ibrahimovic. While team-mate Zecira Musovic was visibly baffled about being asked “Do you know Zlatan?” after the penalty shootout victory over the U.S., that question to Asllani would have at least made some sense. Ibrahimovic was at PSG when Asllani joined the club in 2012, playing a role in Asllani’s official presentation (almost inevitably declaring that “to win, you need a Swedish forward”) and was also at AC Milan when she signed for them a decade later.
Asllani has never shied away from the comparisons. “We demand a lot from our team-mates,” she said upon her arrival at Milan. “It’s about the will to win all the time. That’s what he brought to Milan; it’s what I want to bring too.” That said, she was happy to criticise Ibrahimovic for his “unintelligent” comments in praise of the World Cup in Qatar.
Some of Asllani’s quotes could easily have been uttered by Ibrahimovic. “I saw an interview with a tennis player,” she once said. “He was asked what his goal was, and he said, ‘To be in the top 100 in the rankings’. What kind of goal is that? For me, the only goal is winning.” They have the same hero, too: Ronaldo. That’s the Brazilian one, although Asllani is unashamedly a fan of Cristiano Ronaldo over Lionel Messi.
The other link with Ibrahimovic, of course, is that both have family roots in the Balkans. Asllani’s heritage could hardly be clearer from her first name; her parents moved to Sweden a year before she was born. Asllani has spoken proudly about Albania and Kosovo, has a tattoo of the Albanian double-headed eagle on her ankle, and once performed the corresponding celebration after a goal against Ukraine in 2018.
Whereas Ibrahimovic grew up in Rosengard, a suburb of Malmo infamous for its crime, Asllani grew up in the quaint surroundings of Vimmerby, a city of 10,000 people, nowhere near any major cities. Just as Tottenham Hotspur’s Dejan Kulusevski suggested that Ibrahimovic’s rise “opened doors” for men’s players of similar backgrounds, Asllani was the first equivalent women’s player. When she received the Kosovan Presidential Medal of Merits, following in the footsteps of the likes of Rita Ora and Dua Lipa, it was notably given for “contributions to sport and furthering social equality”.
Asllani in action for Sweden at this year’s World Cup (Noemi Llamas/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)
In the international setup, Asllani’s initial positivity towards Sundhage didn’t last long. Although appreciative of Sundhage’s winning mentality, she was one of several players who felt alienated by the insistence that players should be louder, more outgoing; a bit more USWNT. Asllani, outspoken in the media but a quiet, introverted figure, felt uncomfortable. Sundhage failed to get the best from her, and it’s notable that when Sweden’s players are asked why they’ve thrived under Gerhardsson, their answer is always some variation of “he lets us be ourselves”.
Gerhardsson places huge trust in his players, very rarely getting up from the bench to reorganise tactics. In the group stage fixture against Italy, Sweden were outplayed for the first 20 minutes, seemingly surprised by Italy’s use of a diamond midfield. On two separate occasions, the players gathered together in the centre of the pitch to discuss how to re-shape. Asllani was always at the centre of the debate. Somehow, they not merely steadied the ship but went on to win 5-0.
Asllani’s role in the side is intriguing. She wears No 9, although Sweden are unique in traditionally handing that number to a midfielder rather than a centre-forward. Therefore, when Sweden release their starting XI on social media, Asllani is depicted as a midfielder in a 4-3-3.
But she is surely a No 10, and while Asllani turned 34 on the day of the victory over Italy, she’s actually an incredibly modern No 10. She’s not necessarily a hugely penetrative passer and dribbles less frequently than she used to, but her appreciation of space is excellent. She likes receiving the ball in inside-right channels and making quick passes around the corner, and she happily drags opponents out of position to create spare for others, particularly Fridolina Rolfo.
More than anything, Asllani is a brilliant presser. Sweden’s greatest quality is their ability to compress play, particularly by boxing opponents towards the touchlines. They did this excellently in the 2-1 victory over Japan, when they prevented their opponents from having a single attempt in an incredibly dominant first half. Asllani is a major part of that, with her energy, her intelligent runs to block off passing lanes, and her instructions to team-mates.
“She has such good awareness of the game,” said Gerhardsson last summer. “She’s incredibly good in the defensive work. It’s (the attackers) that start most things. They’re very good in a high press.”
Asllani is sometimes criticised for her lack of goal contributions, and there are some who suggest that this side should be built around Rolfo — who hasn’t quite replicated her club form at Barcelona for Sweden recently — rather than her. But Asllani’s pressing has made her this side’s leader. She was excellent at World Cup 2019 — scoring three times, all firing home a loose ball having anticipated where it would drop — and then at Euro 2022, where her set pieces were very effective.
In the win over Japan last week, Asllani came close to one of the goals of the tournament with a long-range half-volley, foiled by a brilliant save from Ayaka Yamashita. It was notable that the pass came from Rolfo, an unusual ball, chipped to Asllani between the lines. That was a common feature of Sweden’s approach in that game, constantly lofting ambitious balls from deep towards their captain.
She also played the free kick into the box that led to Sweden’s opener. Although Jonna Andersson’s left-footed corners have provided most of Sweden’s assists at set pieces, Asllani’s right-footed deliveries can be equally effective, even if there’s something visually odd about her technique, as if she’s striking the ball tentatively. It works, though — in 2019 she scored directly from a corner twice within the space of five weeks, against Latvia and Slovakia.
But the curious thing about Asllani is that for a player who relentlessly talks about the importance of winning — admitting she’ll throw the board on the floor and storm off if she loses a game of Monopoly — she hasn’t won many trophies outside of Sweden.
She won the title in each of two spells with Linkoping, although has constantly been critical of the standard of Swedish domestic football and has spent most of her career abroad. She helped Manchester City to the WSL title in 2016, although it wasn’t a happy spell, in part because she was fielded out wide. She’s been a runner-up in both the Champions League and the Olympic Games, and finished third at the previous World Cup. Individually, although she’s never come close to the Ballon d’Or, she was the first — and thus far only — female recipient of the Golden Foot award last year.
In that sense, maybe you could still consider Asllani a ‘nearly’ player, who hasn’t quite won football’s biggest prizes. But by the end of this week, she might just have captained her country to the World Cup.
(Top photo: Ulrik Pedersen/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
