‘The whole journey was fantastic’: how Bob Houghton led Malmö to European Cup final

Early in the 1979 European Cup final, Kenny Burns misjudged a long ball and ended up lobbing it up in the air for Jan-Olov Kindvall. He, in turn, attempted to knock the dropping ball over Peter Shilton but the goalkeeper was not as close as he had perhaps anticipated and Shilton ended up catching it simply. The chance was gone and, with it, Malmö’s hopes of beating Nottingham Forest. “I had quite a good chance to score and then they were the better team,” says Kindvall. “But maybe if we had got the first goal, maybe we had a chance. We were very good when we didn’t have the ball ourselves. We had good organisation in the defence. And Forest were very good without the ball as well. It was more difficult for us to play against a team who were more like our team. We played the English way.” Related: Forest reach the summit That was because Malmö had an English manager in Bob Houghton, who was in the process of revolutionising Swedish football. Houghton had been on the books at Fulham and Brighton without making an appearance for them when, at 22, he joined Hastings United as player-manager. He moved on to Maidstone, where his assistant was Roy Hodgson, before becoming assistant to Bobby Robson at Ipswich. Houghton had been one of the keenest students on the coaching course established by the Football Association’s technical director, Allen Wade, which sought to break down football into its component parts, focusing training on match situations. Like many who had studied under Wade, Houghton became an advocate for a back four, zonal marking and a direct approach. Houghton was not an obvious candidate when Malmö offered him the job of coach in 1974. For one thing he was only 26, younger than several players, and for another, like most Swedish teams, they played with a German style libero and man-marking system. Malmö had won the league in 1970 and 1971 but had gone two seasons without success. As their veteran chair, Eric Persson, steered them towards professionalism, they were ready for change. Many players worked as PE teachers or in a bank. The defender Roy Andersson was an engineer. The midfielder Claes Malmberg was a sales manager for Toshiba even when he played in the European Cup final. “Football opened a lot of doors for me,” he says. “I made a lot of sales out of that.” For the players, Malmberg says, the most shocking thing about Houghton was less the stylistic shift than the way he approached pre-season training. “Every year when we began training, we didn’t take our boots,” he says. “Just trainers. Running, running, running. We ran in the park, no ball at all. But Bob took us straight on to the pitch and we became afraid that we wouldn’t have the fitness.” Houghton eventually introduced more running. It was typical of how he operated, talking to senior players to achieve consensus. “He was convincing, he was persuasive,” says Malmberg. “He was very good in discussions, very intelligent.” For Kindvall, the key was Bo Larsson, a midfielder or forward who was the club’s most celebrated player when Houghton arrived. “If he believes in it, then it must be good.” Malmö won the league in 1974 and 1975, confirming the effectiveness of Houghton’s approach, even if there was resistance from the Swedish football establishment. Then, when Halmstad were looking for a new manager, he recommended Hodgson, thinking it would be useful to have an ally in the culture wars. Halmstad promptly won the league in 1976. Malmö reclaimed the title in October 1977, which secured their place in the 1978-79 European Cup. By then, Houghton’s system was well established. “I think the big difference to now is that now the skills for the individuals are higher,” Kindvall says. “But the skills for organisation and defending and the hard work to try and repeat defence was much better for us. We would repeat, repeat, repeat. Some training sessions were quite boring. Every training session, we had one part that was defending. “When we won the ball back, he would stop, give the ball back, go again … The whole organisation was built so that each player had to help the others. If you understand, you build it up. If someone didn’t work, the link was broken. The defence was very linked. And even the attacking football was more linked than maybe what I see today.” It was an approach that took Malmö past Monaco in the first round of the European Cup, where Kindvall scored the winner in the away leg. “We went out and we bumped into Ringo Starr, who lived there because of tax,” Kindvall says. “And he was sad because Liverpool had lost to Forest; he had no idea who we were.” That meant a trip to the Soviet Union as Malmö faced Dynamo Kyiv in the second round, the first leg of which was played in Kharkiv. “We had Abba records, jeans and things like that, and we got gifts and caviar from them; it was a good swap,” says Kindvall. “In the first rows were the military and the police. There were about 70,000-80,000 at that match but next to no women.” Malmö drew 0-0 with arguably their best performance in the competition, then Kindvall scored again in a 2-0 win back in Sweden. Four goals in the final 25 minutes of the second leg got Malmö past Wisla Krakow in the quarter-finals before a 1-0 aggregate win against Austria Wien followed in the semi-finals. English football had been shown on Swedish TV since 1969, so Malmö knew what they were up against in the final. “I knew Trevor Francis, Viv Anderson and Shilton, of course,” Kindvall says. “Brian Clough was a big figure for us, quite controversial.” Related: Frozen in time: Forest v Malmo, European Cup final, 30 May 1979 Larsson and Roy Andersson were ruled out of the final because of injury. The captain, Staffan Tapper, then also sustained an injury in the final training session. He tried to play but was forced off after 20 minutes at the Olympic Stadium in Munich. Malmberg came on for Tapper. “I walked to my place and I did my job,” he says. “We knew exactly what we should do. Every metre, every centimetre, we knew exactly our position. We knew each other so well in the team. So no problem: I wasn’t nervous at all.” Still, the injuries clearly affected Malmö. “To have three of our most experienced players not playing the game … I think we were better in April than in May,” says Kindvall. It said a lot about the respective statuses of the sides that while Malmö could name only four of the five permitted substitutes, Forest’s winner was scored by Trevor Francis, England’s first £1m footballer. It would be an exaggeration to say Kindvall is haunted by his miss but, equally, he clearly thinks a lot about what might have been. The prevailing sense, though, is almost disbelief at how close Malmö, with a squad comprising players born within 40 miles of the city, with only five full-time professionals, came to European glory. “The whole journey was fantastic,” Kindvall says. “It would be absolutely impossible today.”