One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Is the real Sweden the team with a ton of really good players or the team that lost all their qualifying games?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group F preview. You can also read previews of Japan, the Netherlands, and Tunisia.
Is the real Sweden the team with a ton of really good players or the team that lost all their qualifying games?
Here is Cillian Murphy in the movie Oppenheimer talking about the 2026 Swedish national team.
It's both. It can't, it's paradoxical and yet it works
— archive (@acervoclassicos) March 30, 2024
Oppenheimer pic.twitter.com/079mi8WqLF
Sweden have a roster that features several of the best players in the world and have qualified for the World Cup. Also, for most of 2025 they were pretty much the worst team in Europe.
It’s paradoxical, but will it work at the World Cup?
Sweden went winless in their qualifying campaign, their only points came via a pair of draws against Slovenia. By the grace of the convoluted UEFA qualifying format, they backed their way into a playoff tournament thanks to their performance in the Nations League. After a straightforward win over Ukraine and a dramatic win over Poland, Sweden became the only team to qualify for the World Cup without winning a single non-playoff qualifying game.
And it’s completely plausible that they will be good despite it all. There are plenty of examples of teams who back into qualifying and then perform well at the tournament. In 2014, Mexico needed divine intervention from Graham Zusi to qualify for the tournament in Brazil at all, and then came within a controversial penalty kick of the quarterfinal.
Sweden made a coaching change ahead of the playoffs, appointing Graham Potter to guide the team to the World Cup. Despite a couple of embarrassing appointments to West Ham and Chelsea, Potter is still a very competent coach, and is precisely the kind of detail oriented personality that is probably better suited to planning for the specific window of an international tournament as opposed to managing the palace intrigue at a megaclub.
Potter’s biggest challenge will be getting Sweden’s elite talent to mesh together in a way that they have not yet been able to. Players like Lucas Bergvall and Yasin Ayari and Anthony Elanga are all talented attackers and Benjamin Nygren is considered one of the big rising talents in Europe.
But Potter’s biggest challenge will be finding a way to play Alexander Isak and Viktor Gyökeres together. Both Swedish goalscorers have had slightly off season, with Isak mostly injured for his debut season at Liverpool and Gyökeres only slowly rounding into form at Arsenal.
But those two players are the real difference between a hypothetical good Sweden team and almost anyone else in the world. Nations wait for decades to have a single top-quality center forward. Some even develop incredibly popular animated TV shows based on the fact that they don’t have a top-quality striker. Sweden have two.
They are slightly different players, in a way that might be complimentary. Isak is a technically skilled smooth runner, someone who does a lot of combining and moving and shot creation in addition to scoring goals.1Or at least he did when he was at Newcastle. In his first season at Liverpool he has mostly been injured or not quite in shape. Gyökeres meanwhile is more of a prototypical striker, someone who gets the ball and shoots the ball, though occasionally he does get the ball and then dribble with the ball before shooting it.
There is a world where these two players develop some chemistry together, and these skillsets compliment each other.
Potter figuring out how to make that happen will be key to whether Sweden can resolve its paradox. Isak was injured for the qualifying playoffs, meaning Potter didn’t have to confront the puzzle. Meanwhile, Gyökeres and Isak played together in a 3-5-2 for lots of those disastrous qualifying matches, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Sweden are an enigma, but they are an enigma with lots of good players. If they can figure out how to get those players to actually play well together for the first time, then we might be exiting the realm of quantum physics and entering the world of World Cup soccer.
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