Kalmar FF’s midfielder Viktor Elm has been chosen to play for the Swedish national team. Viktor and his two brothers Rasmus and David are part of the reason why Kalmar currently is the best football team in Sweden. But the trio are not only succesful on the pitch, they also have a very popular blog on the local newspaper Barometern’s site.
However, as the Swedish team meets to prepare for the first FIFA World Cup qualifier against Albania on Saturday, the Swedish team manager Lars Richt tells fotbollskanalen.se that Elm will not be able to blog while he is with the Swedish team.
– That is something that we don’t do when we meet and I will talk to him about it, says Lars Richt, and continues.
– I will talk to him and after that he will surely not blog.
The Elm brothers’ blog caused some commotion after the brothers blogged some negative comments about Henrik Larsson and how media portray him. Still, even if Viktor Elm is quite outspoken on his blog, it does seem that the Swedish national team should lighten up a bit about this command and control attitude towards media and everyone else, for that matter. Football is the sport that interests most Swedes and it wouldn’t be hard to use this commitment to get fans talking and discussing even more about football. A search for football on Twingly.com shows more than 4,000 Swedish blog posts during the last month. I think the Swedish Football Association is crazy not to participate in this discussion. Encourage your fans, let all players have a blog, invite bloggers to press conferences, build a social media press room on your site. There are many things you could do, and if you don’t know how, I can show you.