Inside chaotic Malmo style as Rangers prepare for ‘unsexy’ Henrik Rydstrom in Europa League opener

In Henrik Rydstrom, Rangers will face a manager whose team’s “chaotic” style is totally at odds with how their boss played.

During his days at Kalmar, where he spent nearly all of his career, he once blogged: “Our goalkeeper has a friend who thinks of me when he has sex with his girlfriend. He thinks of me to delay ejaculation. That’s how unsexy my style of play is.” His team played “boring” football, by his own admission. He told the Independent in December last year: “I didn’t think too much about it, but there were a lot of restrictions – ‘you’re not allowed to do this, not allowed to do that’. The coach was always thinking about what could go wrong.”

It wasn’t until Kalmar qualified for Europe and took on FC Twente that Rydstrom was exposed to a different way of doing things. He explained: “What I had been taught as a player was that you have to play forward as fast as possible, win the second ball, counterattack, defend. Then we played this team who moved the ball sideways and it was like, OK, you’re allowed to do that?”

Rydstrom eventually took the reins at Kalmar and transformed their style, which he has since implemented since moving to Malmo. “We played terrific football, it was like boom-boom-boom,” he said. “When I arrived here at Malmo everybody was like, ‘You can’t do that here. You need to win’.

“This was all new for them, so I really persisted: ‘Come to the ball’, and of course it went against their instincts. I showed some players how Fluminense overload, and that you don’t have to stay in ‘this position’. Malmo played more positional last season, and now I took away this prison they were put in.”

Simply, Malmo try to create chaos. It’s something Rangers will have to deal with when they kick off their Europa League campaign in Sweden on Thursday evening. It’s chaos within a plan, however and it’s proved successful. Rydstrom led Malmo to the Allsvenskan title last season after missing out to BK Hacken the season before.

The Swedes are no strangers to Rangers, although Rydstrom’s version will be different to the Jon Dahl Tomasson version that dumped them out of the Champions League qualifiers three years ago. But Rydstrom reckons more and more coaches will try to emulate his approach, although warns it won’t be easy.

“I think more and more will try to play this way, but it’s not so structured for the eye, so in one way it’s more difficult to coach,” he said. “It’s not that we just go out and play, ‘do your thing’ – it’s really drilled. We try to create chaos but we have a structure in that, and then you need to get the players to understand that. Positional play has online courses so even a Division Four coach in Sweden could teach themselves and then instruct the players.”

Rydstrom is attracting interest from outside Sweden. He was a candidate for the Brighton job in the summer, and Hearts fans are hoping Tony Bloom hasn’t forgotten about him when his Starlizard algorithm helps them look for a new boss. The Swede might be out of the Jambos’ reach financially, but he is keen to try his hand at another league at some point,

He added: “When I played I didn’t want to go anywhere at all, but now I really want to. If you talk about England, it’s not easy for a foreign coach to succeed. But to try another league, another country? Yeah, definitely. But I’m really enjoying myself here, so first I want to fulfil the potential in Malmo.”