This article examines the debate surrounding an ice hockey museum in Örnsköldsvik, Sweden. In 2013, the local ice hockey club, Modo Hockey, received a loan from Örnsköldsvik municipality to build an ice hockey museum in its home arena. The ice hockeymuseum was a part of a bigger heritage project that involved various sites in the area around Örnsköldsvik, with the intention of increasing the number of tourists and branding the region as an attractive destination. However, the museum was never built in its intended form. The financial resources were instead used to cover regular costs for the club. This led to a conflict between Modo Hockey, Örnsköldsvik municipality and parts of the civil society. Theoretically, this study is inspired by heritage theory, stating heritage as a social constructed collective memory, yet also something that can be used for marketing and commercial branding. Lastly, the article is positioned against previous research about sports heritage in general, revealing that the planned ice hockey museum in Örnsköldsvik could be seen as an example of the priority conflict between balancing the heritage and continuing to be a financially strong elite club.
Keywords: heritage, sports heritage, museology, sports museums, history
Since the late 1990s, professional football players moving across national borders in search of the best possible livelihoods constitute a form of transnational labour migration that has grown enormously in scale and scope. The Swedish Premier Division has gradually been incorporated into this global player market. The development began in 1974, when Swedish clubs for the first time were allowed to sign foreign players. However, it was only after the Bosman-ruling in 1995, and the removal of restrictions on the number of foreign players, that the league was forcefully globalized. In this article, this globalizing development between 1974 and 2019 is analysed. The study shows that the development took place in three different phases, with the last phase (2009-19) constituting a break in the trend in globalization. From this point on, the number of players from countries in the nearby geographical area increased rapidly.
Sports historians have argued that the type of ball games common in the British Isles, which were practiced by two teams and in which the ball was driven with sticks towards predetermined goals – i.e., hurling, shinty, bandy and hockey – were never played in early modern Sweden. By highlighting descriptions of ballgames in Johannes Schefferus’s The History of Lapland (1674), a source previously ignored by sports historians, this article challenges such a claim. One of the games described by Schefferus has some similarities with the violent stick-and-ball game known in Icelandic sagas as knattleikr. Even greater similarities (such as the start of the game with a face-off and the goals consisting of lines on the short edges) emerge when the game is compared with the Scottish game of shinty. Thus, pre-modern Scandinavia does not appear to have been as isolated in terms of sports and games as has been suggested by Swedish sports historians.
This article sheds light on the history of Sámi sport and focuses on the emergence of the Sámi Ski Championships in Sweden, a winter sport event founded in 1948 in which the Sámi, an indigenous people living in the north of Europe, compete against each other in cross-country skiing and other sports with roots in Sámi culture. The championships have had an important function in shaping a Sámi identity through sporting activities. Although competition and performance were prominent elements of the Sámi Ski Championships in the early years, a superior aim was to create a space where Sámi could meet and socialize, and where the Sámi cohesion could be strengthened. However, in this study it becomes apparent that the event was not only an arena for inclusion but also for exclusion. During the first decades, only Sámi residing in Sweden had the right to participate in the championships, although the Sámi live in an area that stretches across the state borders of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia (formerly the Soviet Union). However, the exclusion went even further. In fact, only those (the Sámi) who had the right to carry out reindeer husbandry were allowed to compete, thereby excluding a major part of the Sámi population in Sweden. The article therefore provides an analysis of how a Sámi identity was constructed at the Sámi Ski Championships from 1948 to 1959 – a construction entangled with cultural markers related to state borders as well as ethnic boundaries.