Lucas Bergvall: the next big thing in Swedish football

The definitive SCOUTED50 profile.

SCOUTED50 is our collection of the fifty young talents we believe are best positioned to break into the mainstream during 2023/24. Throughout the season, we’ll be detailing all fifty in definitive profiles.

The full list can be read here. Next up is Sweden’s Lucas Bergvall.

This profile was produced as part of a commercial collaboration with SkillCorner, SCOUTED’s official data partner. SkillCorner’s tracking and performance data is used by more than 140 of the world’s biggest clubs, leagues and confederations. Learn more.

All stats correct as of 05/01/2024 unless otherwise noted.

You’ve probably never heard of IF Brommapojkarna, and that would make sense. On the face of it, they’re a modest club that have rattled around the top three tiers of Swedish football, dwarfed on the western fringe of Stockholm by the Big Three - AIK, Djurgården and Hammarby. 

Scratch a little deeper, though, and you’ll uncover one of the most prolific - and largest - youth academies in Europe.

At the last count, BP had over 4,000 young players on their books playing across hundreds of teams from under-six upwards. They count Spurs attacker Dejan Kulusevski and Sporting striker Viktor Gyökeres among their academy alumni, among a throng of former and current senior Swedish internationals in the men’s and women’s game. Big clubs from across the continent battle each other to pinch their young players, most recently Bayern München and Bayer Leverkusen. They may be small, but they boast a mighty footprint in Swedish football.

Lucas Bergvall is another that has come through the BP pipeline, and he’s already looking like one of the best to ever do so.

The 17-year-old had been billed as BP’s next big thing for a long time prior to his senior debut. His performances in various tournaments at club and international level - not least at the Madrid Football Club, where he won the MVP, in 2019 - put him on the agenda at prestigious clubs all across Europe.

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“You think foreign clubs have much better academies, but it doesn’t have to be that way. They may have better conditions and more money, but as long as you play great football you can achieve a lot. We showed that it didn’t really matter how many coaches or how much money you had. When we played Bayern Munich, they came with seven coaches and there we were with one coach and one manager and we beat them 3-0.”

Lucas Bergvall on the Madrid Football Cup in 2019

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He spent time training at Manchester United and Feyenoord following his senior debut as a 15-year-old, then he played a part in BP’s promotion back to the Allsvenskan as a 16-year-old - but that’s as far as he’d go with his boyhood club in Bromma.

12-time Swedish champions Djurgården IF, one of Sweden’s grandest clubs, gobbled him up before the 2023 Allsvenskan season had begun. They invested a whopping fee to bag him: €900,000 plus a few future incentives, a price only surpassed by the one they paid for then-19-year-old Kim Källstrom back in 2002. Peter Kisfaludy, Bergvall’s former academy coach who himself had made the same switch across Stockholm less than a year prior as a technical director, was the dealmaker.

Since then, DIF have managed Bergvall’s minutes carefully. He appeared in all but five of their 30 league games, averaging 39 minutes per appearance, and his first top-flight season was split into four distinct periods: regular substitute then a run of six straight starts through the height of summer, then back to being a regular substitute, before five back-to-back full nineties to close the campaign.

Unsurprisingly, his 974 minutes and 11 starts couldn’t be matched by anyone his age in Sweden this season - he was the only 2006-born player to start a game and score a goal in the Allsvenskan, and his game time was almost 10-times the amount of the 2006-born player with the next most.

It was a season full of promise, one which has a lot of people excited for what’s to come. And that may already be another milestone move - there are already murmurings that his first Allsvenskan season will be his final, with a string of clubs reportedly interested in picking him up this winter.

Why are big clubs already in for Bergvall? Read on for a defenitive profile of the next big thing in Swedish football.

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In this profile:

• All the details of his top-level, Prem-ready athleticism

• More facilitator than playmaker in on-ball skillset

• Frenkie-like ability to escape pressure and drive possession

• Crashing the box from deep with awareness and timing

• Defensive issues and the ways in which he can improve

• The best next steps for Bergvall, and plenty more…