'We're making a team that can survive the test of time' - inside the football club run by teenagers

Just like every other club in Sweden, Johanneshovs FF recently wrapped up their season before the cold of the winter set in. They finished in the middle of the table in one of Stockholm’s amateur leagues – not bad for the very first season of their existence, but it isn’t their performances on the pitch make them remarkable. Johanneshovs FF are different because they are founded, managed and run entirely by youngsters.

Ryan Caruana and Adrian Imani Herdies met at a barbeque in the summer of 2023, and quickly discovered that they had a mutual interest in working behind the scenes in football. They were just 15 years old, but within weeks had started the work of founding a brand new club, one with a vision – a club where everyone from players to staff were young, which could help out the local youth community, and which nobody would pay to play for.

“We don’t want any money from players to join the club,” Caruana, who recently turned 17, explained to 3 Added Minutes. “Football should not be based off how much money you make, or your parents make, it should be based on how much you love the sport, how much you want to improve the sport, and your passion.

“The youth should have a say in the sport… having sports and teams for 12 to 15-year-olds, but all the administration and the key parts are controlled by people in their forties and their fifties? That just doesn’t fit.”

Johanneshovs FF is rather more than just a youthful passion project. As presidents of their brand new team, Caruana and Herdies are determined to do it properly. They estimate that they have already spent up to £4,000 of their own money to bring the team together and have started creating the kind of infrastructure more typically associated with professional sides – they have a 16-year-old sporting director in place and have just appointed the club’s first head coach.

“We’re looking at making a sustainable team that can survive the test of time,” Caruana continues. “A short-term and a long-term ambition is having the club stay afloat, and then we’re thinking of building up to something, making the club bigger.

“We’re planning on eventually playing in the professional leagues… and from there we [would] try to advance just like a traditional club would, move up the ranks. Create additional teams – we’re not just a team, we’re a whole club, so we want academies and female teams.”

Building a fully-fledged football club from scratch isn’t the only goal, however. Caruana and Herdies are keen that the club also does work within the local youth community, and have additionally been invited to speak at a meeting of the Diversity Charter Sweden Network.

“We’re very focussed on wanting the best results, getting the wins, just like any club,” adds Caruana. “But we’re also using it as our pathway to help the community through sports. They’re interconnected. We want to help the youth in areas that are maybe impoverished and the people that live within them.”

Finding a manager was a key step. Maximiliano Gullbrand was a player with Allsvenskan side Brommapojkarna’s youth academy before injury curtailed his professional ambitions, and had already been taking the first steps towards a coaching career with an Under-13 team before the opportunity to coach JFF came up. At 22, he is the elder statesman of the project, but still considerably younger than most managers.

“We said that we wanted a young manager, under the age of 25. He mailed us, explained who he is and also talked about his vision for the club,” explains Herdies, who will turn 17 in December. “Our sporting director called him and they had a very long talk about the problems going on in the society of youths and they talked about football.

“We basically let him train our players and then we let the players [offer] their opinion about him. The players loved him right away.”

Gullbrand, like Caruana and Herdies, isn’t paid, and the club remains a strictly amateur concern, although costs are now being covered by sponsorship deals with local businesses, with national press coverage in Sweden and an active social media presence helping to boost the club’s profile.

A planned kit release is tentatively inked in for April, when their next season gets underway, but there is a huge amount of work to do between now and then. That includes finding new players – the club’s preferred recruitment method is to find footballers through TikTok – as well as new sponsors to keep the finances healthy.

Next season they will play in a larger Under-19 league, which means stiffer competition but also added expenses. Herdies, whose personal ambition is to get the club into the seventh, lowest tier of Sweden’s formal football pyramid, is optimistic, however, describing the administrative and financial health of the club as “healthy” and “pretty positive”.

The concept of JFF is, of course, to be run by and for youngsters, and eventually that might mean Caruana and Herdies move on and give others their chances to take the helm and handle those same responsibilities.

“We want it to keep on being youths in the future, even when we are adults,” says Herdies. “What I want in the future is to build a good academy, but also to make sure that the coaches are very, very young and then when they get older, they can join bigger clubs like AIK or Hammarby.”

There is a long way to go before the two teenage club presidents and their equally youthful colleagues can realise all of their ambitions for JFF, but the speed with which the club has gone from being an idea between two new friends to a team with a manager, directors and squad suggests that it would be unwise to bet against them reaching their goals.