Unrolling the metaphorical meatball that is Henrik Rydström
He'll be headed to Florida any day now ...
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A tip of the cap to Swedish journalist Christian Gustafsson, of the Kalmar-based newspaper Barometern-OT, who conducted a two-hour interview with new Columbus Crew coach Henrik Ryström earlier this month. Gustafsson took the beef from this sit-down at a local Kalmar restaurant (where "freshly rolled meatballs" were served) and turned it into two freshly rolled meatballs. They are delicious. Next round is on us, Gus.
Headline from story No. 1, published on Jan. 8:
The game behind the scenes – how Henrik Rydström got his dream job in the USA
Video meetings with top American executives while the daughter's shoes are being tied. Speed dating. A botched trip to the US. A quick visit to a secret luxury hotel in London. A meeting with a multi-billionaire in a bedroom. And, finally, a signature on a multi-million dollar contract – on New Year's Eve. Here's the game behind the scenes when Henrik Rydström signed one of the largest coaching contracts in Swedish history - and was signed by ColumbusCrew in the American MLS.
"I had drunk two quick glasses of champagne when I signed."
Bli meddelad när något nytt publiceras av
Headline from story No. 2, published on Jan. 10:
In Henrik Rydström's head: "I want a team that's like a fucking rock band"
He has moved back home to Kalmar - only to immediately move to the USA. Barometern-OT's Christian Gustafsson met with Henrik Rydström to talk about his new life in the USA, Kalmar FF, self-criticism, unemployment, the 50-year crisis, Åsa-Nisse English, meeting Messi, the interest in the Premier League and - even though he doesn't talk politics anymore - quite a lot of politics.
"I've always gotten shit for that. But of course it's possible to be a high-income earner and still be for an equal society."
Bli meddelad när något nytt publiceras av
Rydström on New Year's Eve was named the successor to Wilfried Nancy, the greatest coach in Crew history. Since, Rydström has been on the hamster wheel that slowly turns the visa application process. At last check (Monday afternoon), Rydström was still held up in Sweden. It's not likely he'll be on hand Tuesday morning when the Crew will trot out GM Issa Tall and select players to meet the local media at their training facility on Black and Gold Blvd., at the old place.
Players reported over the weekend. The team is due to leave for preseason training in Clearwater, Fla., later this week. It may be Rydström will get his first in-person look at his new team on the Gulf Coast, and we won't see him in Columbus until late next week. But that's just a guess.
Rydstrom was fired by Swedish powerhouse Malmö FF in September despite having delivered two Allsvenskan (top-tier Swedish league) championships and a Swedish Cup during his three years with the team. After his firing, he was linked to jobs with clubs large and larger. Here's Gustafsson's lede on the recruitment story:
Brighton, Burnley and Swansea in the Premier League and Championship. The big cutter Hamburg SV. The Egyptian giant Al Ahly. The giant Ajax. Hammarby and AIK. Clubs in the Arab world. "A club in Vienna.” They have all been mentioned in the same breath as “Henrik Rydström’s next club.” The rumors have been numerous and more or less concrete.
A few weeks ago the answer came. Henrik Rydström has signed a three-year contract as coach of the Columbus Crew, one of the heavyweight clubs in the American MLS, Major League Soccer. Probably one of the biggest contracts a Swedish football coach has signed – ever.
Those are some heavy hitters mentioned. A couple of notes: One, coaches with agents (and Rydström appears to have more than one) are often linked to gigantic jobs; and two, coaches in the Swedish leagues are not compensated all that well, at least relative to MLS. Same thing goes for players in the Swedish league.
The story of the Crew's hookup with Rydström is a wild one. Not in the "random encounter" sense, because Tall (and others on his staff) have scouted the Swedish leagues, Tall had seen Rydström's teams – and Tall took due note of Rydström's progressive system. Tall believes the possession-based "Relationism" which Rydström embraces is something that suits the Crew's approach to playing entertaining soccer.
Rydström told Gustafsson that he was one of "maybe 15 candidates" when he had his initial interview with Tall and technical director Marc Nicholls at the end of November. It was a video call. "It was like a kind of speed dating," Rydstöm said.
Rydström was in the process of packing up in Malmö for a move back to Kalmar, where he'd played and coached for more than two decades, when he had his second video interview. It was right around the time when he was supposed to drive his daughter to soccer practice. In the middle the interview, his daughter walked into his bedroom and asked him tie her soccer shoes. "It was a completely absurd situation," Rydström said.
The next meeting was face-to-face, at a luxury hotel in a high-end section of London. "We sat for three hours talking at the hotel. We analyzed their squad, individual development and how they want to play."
Crew officials next wanted Rydström to fly to Ohio to meet majority owner Jimmy Haslam. It was Dec. 17. The moving vans were rolling up. Christmas was a week away. He told them, “We are in the middle of a move, I can’t put the family on the brink, it just won’t work.”
According to Gustafsson, the reaction on the other end of the line was ... "silence."
After a few days passed, another video meeting was arranged. This was Haslam's meeting and, apparently, Jimmy was in full Tennessee Volunteer mode.
As Gustafsson quoted Rydström: "We talked for an hour and a half. He is a fantastic figure, the archetype of man American. He called me: “My favourite soccer coach” and said “just tell me what you need.” Bullshit or not, but the whole club has made a very good impression."
An offer was tendered within days. Negotiations followed. The contract was ready for Rydstöm's agent by New Year's Eve and it had to be signed by the stroke of midnight. Rydström were at a friend's house for a formal holiday celebration. He stole away to a bedroom to sign the contract. Then, at the request of the Crew's communications staff, Rydström's delivered a brief, video introduction to Columbus.
"So my wife had to film a bit where I'm standing in a New Year's costume. I had also had two quick glasses of champagne, so I wonder how that film turned out…haha."
@columbuscrew96 Here’s to a 2026 filled with passionate football 🥂 Happy New Year’s Eve from your new coach, Henrik Rydström 🖤💛 #mls #soccer #football #sweden #henrikrydström
♬ original sound - Columbus Crew
The meat of Gustafsson's interview for Barometern-OT
Gustafsson's lede to the second piece:
Interviewing Henrik Rydström is both easy and almost impossible. Easy in that it's just a question, and he answers, asks his own follow-up questions, develops rigorous reasoning, sidetracks here, sidetracks there, discusses some old Suede song, refers to "The Emigrants," asks a counter-question, jokes at someone he knows in the room, reflects on what he just said, before finally landing in:
"To answer your question…"
For example:
Q: What does it do to you to be unemployed for the first time in your life?
“To answer that question, you have to zoom out and ask yourself: What the hell is success?
"... In all my clubs, things have only gotten better and better and better. We established Sirius in the Allsvenskan, came sixth and fourth with KFF and won the Swedish Championship gold medal my first two years in MFF. But in a way, this year has been more developing and interesting. Because I don't fully identify with the results. I have distance from my profession and don't want to make myself too dependent on external factors. At the same time, it is difficult, because it is the results that everyone else judges me by.”
Rydström won in his first two years at Malmö. He developed players that were sold off to clubs in bigger leagues. He said "it was completely absurd" that he got fired after his third season there.
“A success factor is continuity, but many clubs, including MFF, are so anxious and react instinctively," Rydström said. "Instead of us being able to build on and become even more united, a completely new team is now going into MFF. New analysts, head coaches, assistants, fitness coaches and a chairman and CEO. Expensive and then an entire organization will have to go through all the phases that organizations go through.”
There's density and length to this Rydström interview. I'll attempt to synthesize with some bullet points before getting to the Crew-related stuff.
- He practices meditation and applies Buddhist thinking. “All the time. The easy way to explain it is that we always become our thoughts, I feel, we have our thought patterns. Conditioned mind. ... Buddhism is very much about how to get away from it. That you shouldn't be your thoughts.”
- His English is good (see above TikTok video) after three years at Malmö, where English is the public-facing language for the club. "I'm like Dolph Lundgren when he came home from Hollywood when I have to speak Swedish...haha. Well, but it's been much easier and better than I thought to lead in English. Then again, as a Swede, you don't have that slightly sexy English dialect like a Spaniard, for example.”
- He is well-versed in dealing with the media and he has a philosophy about it. "I know many coaches who are calculating in what they will answer, I never am. I just answer and try to be myself. I am always nice, transparent and damn open to the media. Sometimes it can backfire, because it can become a quote or a headline, but in the long run it also makes more people understand you. It becomes a little harder to take out the chainsaw and just saw if you also think that: “Damn, Rydström, he's pretty sensible, after all.'"
- He has made peace with his next big birthday – he will turn 50 on Feb. 16. "Think of when you talked to your grandmother when you were little and thought she was really old and then she was … 42. I'm turning 50 now. But I don't feel like 50. I can still go and do a training session without warming up and I don't have to get up to pee at night," he says, stroking his bald head, which has been bald for many years. "I shaved my hair off when I was twenty-something. You can definitely see that I'm aging, but it's not that huge difference, because I've kind of looked old from the start. So, no, no 50-year crisis in sight. "
- He hopes to someday return to Kalmar, either as the coach or to "build something from scratch together with other forces. ... It's a little dream."
- His politics are ardently and unapologetically left-wing, but he doesn't put them out front anymore. “We can discuss taxes," he said. "I tax more than 60 percent of what I earn. It is clear as hell that it is a lot. I also have a greedy side, but my mother has MS. She has had a stroke too and has difficulty walking. She gets help three times a day. Or take my children, two of them were born by caesarean section. When you see it, when I see the help that my mother gets from the home care service, yes, I would gladly pay 60 percent in taxes. It is damn worth it.”
Rydstrom and the Crew
Rydström and/or his agent(s) had contact with a number of big clubs. He chose the Crew (and vice-versa).
“I understand that people think it is an unexpected choice," he said. "But of all the clubs I had contact with, Columbus was the one with the clearest plan. ...
“They said straight away: ”We have an eye on you, we know how you play” They had been there and seen Malmö FF. 'My Malmö' was at the top in all the underlying figures that they think are important. And I had an eye on Columbus, I've followed them a bit, it's a club with a clear philosophy. ...
"Their general manager (Issa Tall) told me: 'It's important to win, but sometimes we've won games and you've died a little bit inside because of how badly we played.' That appealed to me, there was something in their tone of how they see football. Life is too short to eat bad hamburgers, life is too short to play bad football. ...
I've always liked Anders Wendin. Moneybrother. Partly because he's a friend, but above all because he just drives. I love him. It doesn't matter what the context is, he just drives. My wife and I went to see him recently and it hit me that that's how I want to be as a football coach. I want a team that's like a fucking rock band.”
It is still necessary to explain to fellow Europeans where MLS fits in the global scheme of club soccer. Rydström put it this way:
“In Sweden, people love English football and many would have probably thought it would have been fantastic if I had ended up in something like Oxford. But we have different driving forces. MLS is a good league now. Football is really strong in the USA, there is a lot of interest and there are huge resources in Columbus. Columbus Crew is also a powerhouse. The club won the MLS in 2023, the Cup in 2024 and plays continuously in their Champions League. The home arena Lower.com Field (now under a new name) is always sold out, 24,000 people. The club's owner, Jimmy Haslam, also owns an NFL club (Cleveland Browns) and is part-owner of an NBA club (Milwaukee Bucks).”
“Just take the newly built training facility the club has. Columbus is close with Aston Villa and when they were going to build the facility, they looked at Aston Villas and said: 'This is top in Europe, we should have one like that too.'"
Gustafsson continued:
Another aspect is the trampoline potential. Rydström's predecessor Wilfried Nancy was bought out by the Scottish major club Celtic. The road to the European major clubs is now somewhat shorter. Henrik Rydström, who has a master's degree in literature, talks about the Ohio mission as an adventure and uses – not surprisingly – Vilhelm Moberg's "The Emigrants" as a reference.
“We Swedes easily get a bit anal. It's easier to stay and farm a land that consists of stone boulders. It's safer. What you don't know is always scary. But it's like Karl-Oskar said: "There's a world out there too.”
- Rydstrom about moving his family to Columbus: “That's the idea. We have a break in MLS in May (May 25-July 16, for the World Cup), then I will go home to Sweden. Then the ambition is for the family to move over, at least for periods.”
- Rydstrom on MLS salaries: “Most people don't have a good grasp of MLS, but take a player like Wessam Abou Ali, who was successful in Sirius in 2023. He was first sold to Egyptian Al Ahly. Now Columbus has bought him for big money ($7.5 million). He would never go to the Allsvenskan at this stage of his career, but he's going to Columbus. That says a lot.”
Let's allow Gustafsson to take his Rydström interview down the stretch. It's only proper.
In addition to great facilities, sky-high salaries, enormous resources and a reasonable club ideology, there are other details that make it interesting for Henrik Rydström to be a coach in MLS. Like facing David Beckham-owned Inter Miami with Luiz Suarez and a certain Lionel Messi at the forefront.
“They stand out and it's clear that those types of names add even more luster to the league.”
Do you already have a plan for how you are going to stop Messi?
“When the match is over, Messi shouldn't have touched the ball. That's the plan.”
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