Östersunds FK

Four local clubs in Östersund folded into one another in October 1996, and the side that came out of it spent its first years well down the Swedish pyramid — far enough that in 2010 it dropped into the fourth division for the first time.

Graham Potter arrived in 2011, an English coach with no reputation to speak of, and stayed seven years. The fourth division was won that first season, the third the year after, and by 2015 the club finished second in Superettan and went up. Potter had players read poetry and stage theatre productions in the winter; the club paid for it, and the Swedish press wrote about it more than it wrote about the results, until the results caught up.

They caught up in 2017. Östersund beat IFK Norrköping 4-1 in the Svenska Cupen final, which was the first trophy the club had ever won and the ticket into Europe. What followed the next season is the part people in Sweden still talk about: past Galatasaray and PAOK in qualifying, then second in Group J behind Athletic Bilbao — no Swedish club had come through a Europa League group before. Arsenal ended it in the round of 32, 4-2 across the two legs, though Östersund won at the Emirates and the away end never stopped.

The fall was quicker. In April 2018 the chairman, Daniel Kindberg, was arrested on fraud charges; Potter left for England that summer. The club held on in Allsvenskan until 2021, six seasons in all, then went down.

Potter remains the name attached to the place — the man who took a fourth-division club in a town of 8,466-seat capacity to a group stage, and who is still explained, in Östersund, by what he asked his players to do in the off-season.