Sportradion’s Richard Henriksson ended his all-Swedish football career at just 27 years old, about 12 years ago. Among other things, he won an Allsvenskan gold with Djurgården in 2002. After his active career, he became an expert commentator on Canal +, later a football expert on Radiosporten. There he remained, to their great happiness one might add.
Now he is one of Sweden’s very best in his field, which it is now. Football expert is his title, and as such he is brilliant, but after listening to his podcast series “The Match” on Radiosporten, he is probably now as much a sports journalist as an expert. Well, that’s a significant difference.
It is when I hear his episode with former elite judge Jonas Eriksson that it strikes me. “The Match” is the program series that focuses on only a single football match, twice 45 minutes, but Richard Henriksson also gets so much more. He talks to Nilla Fischer, to Kurt Hamrin, to Kim Källström, it is incredibly initiated and exciting sports history.
In the case of Jonas Eriksson in particular he pushes him into the corners, and then it’s more about politics and business than about football. They have certainly met to talk about Jonas Eriksson’s World Cup effort in 2014, and with a special focus on the match Cameroon-Brazil, which Eriksson judged, and it’s good, and it’s interesting and instructive – but it really only gets hot when Richard Henriksson rather cunningly tricks Jonas Eriksson into talking about politics and business. Jonas Eriksson is now really doing away with himself, without even noticing it himself.
Jonas Eriksson has a special relationship with, among others, Qatar, and with Paris Saint-Germain’s current chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi. They have made big deals together in the early 2000s (Jonas Eriksson has, among other things, sold TV rights to Al-Khelaifi’s media company), they are close friends, and when Richard Henriksson asks about Jonas Eriksson’s relationship to the heavily criticized World Cup current Qatar, then a hymn to the country and its positive development – and Jonas Eriksson believes that the World Cup will be a really well-arranged championship. He’s like a live ad for Qatar’s Tourist Board.
Richard Henriksson points out malpractices, the lack of democracy, the hot pursuit against, for example, homosexuals in Qatar. “It is important to shed light on these issues,” says Jonas Eriksson in an attempt to dodge. And to divert the conversation from the oppression in Qatar, Jonas Eriksson now instead starts talking about how it was at least in Russia during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, not to mention fascism’s Italy (!) In the 30s, and then he drives right down into the ditch. The international boycott of South Africa in the 70s and 80s and the disgusting apartheid system now claims Jonas Eriksson was a failure: “It did not get better”, he says.
My God, did it not get better ?! The prolonged international isolation greatly contributed to the regime first being forced to negotiate, then hand over power. The disgusting apartheid system went to the grave thanks to international pressure. Would we go there and play, tennis, football, and maintain “open borders and have a dialogue” as Jonas Eriksson means? What had that timetable been like for the tormented South African majority?
When Jonas Eriksson also says that he has “many times” been invited down to Qatar to referee matches during the winter, well then you really start to wonder what the freelance trips looked like, and how the agreements were designed. Nice country and nice culture, says Jonas Eriksson. Did he think of the whipping, specifically?
Scandal is a rather watered-down media concept, but I think Jonas Eriksson’s relations with Qatar and his frivolous political analysis are more or less scandalous. No one who intends to question the almost canonized Jonas Eriksson?
Read more sports in TV chronicles by Johan Croneman:
The cracks in the facade make the portrait of Tumba strong
How good Pelé was is impossible to answer – the question is what he was
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