In Angelholm, a sandy tourist town in the northwest corner of Sweden with a population of just over 40,000, there is a sense of bewilderment.
Their women’s football team, Angelholms FF, might just have had the most extraordinary league season in football history. They did not lose a game. They did not concede a goal. Yet, somehow, they did not win the league.
The Swedish sixth-tier side’s record was: played 18, won 15, with three draws and zero defeats. At an average of 4.3 per game, they finished the season with 78 goals.
An unbeaten regular season is remarkable but not extraordinary. Bayer Leverkusen almost went unbeaten for the entirety of last season, winning the Bundesliga and DFB-Pokal, the German Cup, before losing in the final of the Europa League to Atalanta.
Arsenal fans love to bait rival supporters with “Is yours gold?” after their unbeaten Premier League season in 2003-04 was marked with a specially made trophy in that colour.
Two decades later, they remain the only English club to finish the league campaign undefeated in the Premier League era. An ‘invincible’ season is rare and special, but it has happened before and it almost certainly will again.
Arsenal fans show their pride in their unbeaten season of 2004 (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
So, did Angelholms top that, along with all unbeaten seasons in an affiliated nation’s league pyramid? Attack Energy SC won the Afghanistan top flight in 2022, winning all 11 of their matches and scoring 41 times without response. Before that, it last occurred in Iceland’s then-four-team top flight in 1945.
“Not conceding a goal feels like a greater achievement (than going unbeaten),” says Angelholms assistant coach Lars Norberg. “After nine games, the team felt that it was fun that we managed to keep a clean sheet through our hard work all over the pitch and a stable goalkeeper.
“Then it became a thing for the opponents that, the longer the season went on, they just wanted to try to crack our clean sheet, and that became even more motivation for the girls to fight to keep a clean sheet for the rest of the season.
“It was also extra fun that our goalkeeper (Nellie Bengtsson) saved a penalty in one of the matches and also scored a penalty for us in another.”
Despite a historic debut season as a senior women’s side, Angelholms finished second in Division 4 Skane Northwest (a regional league in Sweden’s sixth tier), one point behind Ljungbyheds IF in the 10-team competition.
“It was a tough challenge, considering that the team’s goal for the season was to get started with a women’s team,” says Norberg. “The team is young and the average age is 17, so the challenge was to see how the team would cope with the transition from girls’ football to women’s football.”
They started relatively slowly, drawing 0-0 with Vastra Karup FK, the side that finished third. From there, their form picked up significantly, and they put some of the league’s poorer sides away convincingly. Hjarnarps GIF were hammered 10-0, with Ekets GoIF seen off 12-0 and there was a 9-0 victory over Perstorp Balinge IK too.
Arguably, their most important result was a 1-0 win over Ljungbyheds early in the season, the only defeat the champions suffered. It was further 0-0 draws with Vastra Karup and Ljungbyheds that cost them the title.
“We knew it would be a very tough match (against Ljungbyheds),” says captain Agnes Kant. “We won the first match 1-0 and it felt so good, the whole team fought. There were tough, close battles.
“After the second match, we had a little more control over how they played, and we went for a win like any other match, but this time, we didn’t score.”
“The double matches with Vastra Karup also ended in a draw and were a bit tough as the opponents borrowed some players from their first team who play in Division 2 (two tiers higher than Angelholms), but the girls once again showed courage and toughness,” says Norberg.
“Even in these matches, we were the better team overall, hitting the post and the crossbar — luck was not on our side in these matches.”
Several other unbeaten sides have failed to win their respective leagues. Most famously, Perugia finished the 30-match Serie A 1978-79 season without defeat but drew 19 matches (63 per cent) to finish second. AC Milan, the league winners that season, recorded 10 draws (33 per cent).
For reference, Milan finished second in Italy last season with nine draws from 38 matches (24 per cent), while Inter won the league with seven (18 per cent). Fifteen years after Perugia almost drew their way to the title, Serie A introduced three points for a win instead of two, incentivising clubs to pursue victories instead of settling for stalemates.
Other notable examples of clubs going unbeaten in the league season but not winning their respective domestic title include Spartak Sofia in 1951, Benfica in 1977-78, Galatasaray in 1985-86 and Red Star Belgrade in 2007-08.
Fortunately, the season is not over yet for Angelholms.
After progressing past Ros/Sva/Kagk in their first round of a promotion play-off — they won 8-2 on aggregate, meaning their clean-sheet record is no longer intact — they now play Strovelstorp GIF/IF Salamis on Sunday from the division above in the second leg of their second-round play-off, having drawn 1-1 in the first game. It leaves promotion as the only target still to be achieved.
“It’s a strange feeling, intending to have such an incredible season and then you fall on the finish line,” says Norberg. “If we had managed to win one of the three tied games, history would have been different. Now we have to win on Sunday so we put a Band-Aid on the wound by advancing to the next division.”
Still, the 2024 Angelholms team will forever be remembered as the first affiliated side on record to go unbeaten without conceding — and not win the league.
(Top photo: Angelholms FF)
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