Sweden's national sport is, in practice, football, with ice hockey as its winter twin; no Swedish law or decree names an official one. Football is the country's most popular sport, with more than 240,000 licensed players, another 240,000 youth players and around 3,200 active clubs, and the Swedish Football Association has run it since 1904. Ice hockey, organised separately since 1922, has posted the highest total league attendance in Swedish sport and has given Sweden 11 world titles. Both arrived from abroad: football from Britain, with Scottish lacemakers carrying it to Gothenburg's Örgryte club in 1891, and hockey through an American film director who coached Sweden at the 1920 Olympics.
Gothenburg, 22 May 1892: Örgryte and the Scottish Lacemakers
Football reached Sweden in the 1870s, played mostly by gymnastics clubs that tried every new sport going. England and Scotland were the models, and by 1885 clubs in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Visby had agreed a common set of rules. The first international club match followed in 1890. Gothenburg quickly became the dominant football town.
The key club is Örgryte IS, founded in Gothenburg on 4 December 1887 by Willhem Friberg and still the oldest active sports club in the country. Football was brought to it in 1891 by lacemakers from the Newmilns club in Ayrshire, Scotland, and on 22 May 1892 Örgryte took part in what is recorded as the first football match in Sweden played to modern rules. A memorial on Heden, an open ground in central Gothenburg, marks the spot, and another stands inside the Liseberg amusement park. When Svenska Idrottsförbundet, founded in Gothenburg in 1895, staged the first Swedish championship, Svenska Mästerskapet, in 1896, Örgryte won it.
National structures came quickly after that. The Swedish Sports Confederation, Riksidrottsförbundet, was founded on 31 May 1903 at the Royal Central Gymnastics Institute, with 35 clubs present and Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf as its first chairman. The Swedish Football Association, Svenska Fotbollförbundet, followed in Stockholm on 18 December 1904, and was among the associations that founded FIFA and, later, UEFA. The men's national team played its first international in 1908, against Norway. The first stadium on the Råsunda site in Solna opened in 1910 and hosted football at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.
A true national league took longer, because financing one had proved difficult when Svenska Serien tried it in the 1910s. Clubs met in Stockholm on 13 January 1924 to found one, and the first Allsvenskan match was played on 3 August 1924. GAIS of Gothenburg were its first winners. Because Sweden stayed neutral in the Second World War, Allsvenskan never paused, and by 2025 it had run for 101 unbroken seasons.
Antwerp 1920 and Raoul Le Mat: How Hockey Crossed the Atlantic
Ice hockey is younger in Sweden than bandy, the older stick-and-ball game played on large outdoor ice. Swedes had skated and played bandy for decades, but the Canadian game arrived only around 1920, and it came through an American. Raoul Le Mat (1875–1947), a film director, worked with Ernest Viberg and Thomas Cahill to introduce it, and coached Sweden at its first international tournament, the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. That year Sweden joined the International Ice Hockey Federation.
At first the sport sat inside the Swedish Football Association. The first recorded official game on Swedish soil was played at Stockholm Stadium on 30 January 1921, when IFK Uppsala beat Berliner SC 4–1. On 17 November 1922 representatives of seven clubs met in Stockholm to found the Swedish Ice Hockey Association, and Le Mat, a founding member, refereed the final of the first Swedish championship that year. The SHL's championship trophy, the Le Mat Trophy, is named after him; he donated it in 1926 with money from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The national team's identity took shape in the 1930s. The three crowns from Sweden's lesser coat of arms first appeared on its shirts on 12 February 1938, at the world championships in Prague, giving the team its nickname, Tre Kronor. Its first world title came in March 1953, in Basel and Zürich, Switzerland.
Gre-No-Li and the 1958 World Cup Final at Råsunda
Swedish football's first golden era was built around three forwards: Gunnar Gren, Gunnar Nordahl and Nils Liedholm, known together as Gre-No-Li. They led Sweden to Olympic gold at the 1948 London Games. Within a year all three had joined AC Milan, where Milan scored 118 goals in 38 matches in 1949–50 and won the Serie A title in 1950–51, the club's first in 44 years. Nordahl was Serie A's top scorer in five seasons between 1949 and 1956. In between, Sweden finished third at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil.
The high point came at home. Sweden hosted the 1958 World Cup, and Råsunda Stadium in Solna, rebuilt and reopened in 1937 with room for about 36,000, staged the final on 29 June 1958. Brazil won 5–2, a 17-year-old Pelé sealing it with a header in stoppage time. Liedholm, aged 35 years and 263 days, set the record as the oldest scorer in a World Cup final, and Sweden became the only host nation to lose a World Cup final. It remains the men's team's best finish.
Råsunda went on to a second distinction: it hosted the women's World Cup final in 1995, making it one of only two stadiums, with the Rose Bowl in California, to stage both a men's and a women's final. Its record crowd, 52,943, came for Sweden against West Germany on 26 September 1965.
1953 to 2018: Tre Kronor's Eleven World Titles
Tre Kronor added world titles in 1957 and 1962, then went a quarter of a century without one while collecting a long run of silver and bronze medals. The domestic game was reorganised in 1975 with the founding of Elitserien, renamed the SHL on 17 June 2013, and Swedish players began to move to the National Hockey League. Börje Salming, Mats Sundin, Nicklas Lidström and Henrik and Daniel Sedin are among the best known.
The drought ended in 1987, and three more titles followed in 1991, 1992 and 1998. The defining night, though, came at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. The gold-medal game against Canada went to a shootout; in the seventh round Peter Forsberg scored, then goaltender Tommy Salo stopped Paul Kariya, and Sweden had its first Olympic hockey gold. Football had its own summer of 1994: at the World Cup in the United States, Sweden scored 15 goals, more than any other team, and beat Bulgaria in the match for third place.
Twelve years later Tre Kronor did something no team had done before. In February 2006 they beat Finland 3–2 in the Olympic final in Turin, and that May they beat the Czech Republic 4–0 to win the world championship, the first team to win both in one calendar year. In 2013, as co-hosts with games in Stockholm, they beat Switzerland 5–1 in the final and became the first team since the Soviet Union in 1986 to win the world title at home, and titles in 2017, after a shootout win over Canada, and 2018 took the total to 11.
The women's game grew in the same decades. Sweden's women's football team, set up in 1973, won the first European championship for women's national teams in 1984, reached the World Cup final in 2003 and took Olympic silver in 2016 and 2021, with World Cup bronze in 1991, 2011, 2019 and 2023. Club football had its continental moments too: IFK Göteborg won the UEFA Cup in 1982 and 1987, still the only Nordic club to win a major UEFA competition, and Umeå IK won the UEFA Women's Cup in 2003 and 2004.
Strawberry Arena, the SHL and Three Million Club Members Today
Today the two sports share the calendar. Allsvenskan runs from late March or early April to early November, 16 clubs playing a 30-match season; Malmö FF lead the roll of Swedish champions with 24 titles, ahead of IFK Göteborg with 18 and IFK Norrköping with 13, and Mjällby AIF won the 2025 title. The national team moved in 2012 from Råsunda, demolished in 2013, to Nationalarenan in Solna, called Strawberry Arena since 2024, the largest stadium in Scandinavia with 50,000 seats for football. Zlatan Ibrahimović holds the men's scoring record with 62 goals.
Hockey wins on total attendance. The SHL drew 1,974,388 spectators in 2013–14, the highest overall figure in Swedish sport, and its average of 5,983 per match is beaten only by Allsvenskan. Since the first championship of 1922, Djurgårdens IF and Brynäs IF have been the most successful clubs. Behind both games sits a broad club culture: the Swedish Sports Confederation counts about three million members in 22,000 clubs, and floorball, bandy, handball and orienteering all have large followings. Floorball took off in the 1990s and now has more participants than any team sport except football.
So the answer depends on the season more than on any law: football from spring to autumn, hockey through the long winter. The cities that host the big clubs, from Malmö to Gothenburg and Stockholm, are mapped in Sweden's largest cities; many of the players named here feature among the famous people from Sweden; and for the neighbour that beat Sweden in the 2006 Olympic final, read about the national sport of Finland.