Lucas Bergvall: Sweden's next big thing

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.

“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 Cup

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.

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…

Lucas Bergvall's style of play

First up, it’s important to sketch out the sort of style and system Bergvall was playing in at Djurgården this past season. They were a steady side in 2023, finishing fourth in the league with underlying metrics that suggested they should.

DIF relied on their wide players a lot, both to progress play and force it into the box. No team crossed the ball more often than they did and only a couple of teams had more touches in the opposition box than they did, yet 34-year-old centre-back Marcus Danielson was their top goalscorer with a measly five.

Possession wasn’t much of a concern for them, ranking at about the league average; they looked to attack quickly and directly when they had the chance, often breaking out from a decent mid-block structure.

Bergvall’s typical role was that of a typical interior in a typical 4-3-3 shape. He predominantly operated on the right side of DIF’s midfield three, suiting his stronger right foot and picking up different spaces in different phases.

A top-level athlete (already)

Bergvall is a pretty big boy for his age. He’s by no means a Bellingham or Zaïre-Emery - one of those once-in-a-blue-moon freaks that can handle the rigours of elite-level football as soon as they’re dropped into it - but the Swede has the makings of an athlete that can more than hold his own at those echelons.

He has plenty of room to grow, that’s obvious and undeniable, but the base attributes of his athleticism promise plenty: he’s listed as 1.87 metres (or 6’1”) and often looks like one of the tallest on the pitch in any given Allsvenskan game. That’s a frame which lends itself well to the increasingly-demanding physicality of the best of the best, especially once he fills out into it.

As a runner, Bergvall already ranks above the average for Allsvenskan midfielders in terms of speed and intensity, as per SkillCorner’s unique data insights. There are team effects to take into account, but the data speaks for itself.

On the pitch, he flits between the languid and the intense: he moves with an attractive smoothness most of the time, particularly on the ball, gliding through the gears, but has the burst of speed over mid-range distances to recover defensive positions, for instance. He’s also able to shift direction pretty nimbly, showing no signs of heavy-footedness despite his bigger frame. 

The bottom line? He’s 17 years old. That’s the fact you have to keep referring back to. To be an above-average athlete in a top-flight division at his age is impressive, and it becomes exciting when you consider he still has the margin to get a bit bigger, a little more physical, a step or two quicker. The groundwork is there for a Premier League level competitor. 

More faciltator than playmaker

Bergvall has already been linked with the likes of Barcelona, and that may be because of the way he interprets his right-sided eight role within Djurgården’s 4-3-3 shape. As the subtitle says, Bergvall is more of a facilitator than the playmaker, more Martin Ødegaard than Kevin De Bruyne.

One of Bergvall’s outstanding traits is his patience and composure. He’s very willing to let the game develop and come to him, rather than chase around and look for touches. He operates with a sensibility that belies his age, instead of succumbing to the overambitious. He knows what he is - or what his role is - and executes it to instruction.

Technically, the 17-year-old has a lot of the attributes that midfielders of his role and profile require to operate at the highest levels. He reads the space around him quickly and has a broader awareness of the pitch, his touches are clean, he opens up the game by taking the ball comfortably on both sides and on the back foot, his passing is crisp and controlled too.

His passing in general is among the most impressive aspects of his skillset currently. He connects play through the thirds with composure and accuracy, often picking line-breaking passes that progress play. 

Above is an example of what he likes to do: slipping a pass through a line of pressure into a team-mate in a better space. The instance above is particularly notable for two nuances: first, the four scans over his right shoulder in about two seconds, then the disguise he executes the pass with. Those are the little bits that set Bergvall out from the rest.

Those are two more examples of his line-splitting passing in a game against his boyhood club, Brommapojkarna. This is what he does on the regular for DIF, and the way he does it suggests he can do it at a much higher level.

I really want to emphasise his scanning, too. It’s an oft overlooked fundamental which Bergvall has down to a tee. He does it all the time, snapping his head sideways twice a second, and it informs his positioning on the pitch and next decision in possession. He can execute these line-breaking passes before the gaps tighten up because he’s seen them before he’s received the ball.

Furthermore, SkillCorner’s data packs this point up. The 17-year-old ranks well above the Allsvenskan average for the frequency and accuracy of passes into runners ahead of the ball.

I’m bullish that Bergvall has the raw abilities to become a high-quality midfield passer in a top-five league. I think his value will be as a number eight that can help build play in the first phase and develop play in the second phase. His repertoire will include the threaded pass into receivers between lines, the run-releaser into space in broken play, and the cutting needle ball to create goal-scoring opportunities.

He won’t be an Alonso-esque sit-and-sprayer or a dominant controller such as Rodri, but more of a needle-mover in the ilk of your Gündoğans, your De Jongs, your *checks notes* Ødegaards (when he isn’t obsessed on being a box-crashing second striker).

Where his playmaking ability comes to the fore - and where he is more De Bruyne than Ødegaard - is when he crosses the ball. He doesn’t do it a lot, but he whips them in with a hard and flat delivery that is difficult to defend (and easy to attack) from those inside spaces that the Belgian machine has made his own at Manchester City.

That one against Hammarby is the prime example - Bergvall swivels on the spot to whip a wicked cross into the ‘corridor of uncertainty’, causing all sorts of goings on at the back post - and there were a couple more in his limited season sample that achieved similar. He doesn’t take the set-pieces at DIF, but you can imagine his crossing technique lending itself well to those as well.

Relieving the pressure

‘Press-resistant’ - wherever you look, you’ll see it in modern football analysis. You have to be able to deal with pressure to play at the highest levels in this day and age.

Guess what? SkillCorner have their own unique model, facilitated by their bespoke tracking data, for determining a player’s aptitude under pressure. And guess what? Bergvall shows up well on it.

As illustrated above, he ranks in the second tier for retaining the ball under pressure, nestling beneath the excellent Samuel Gustafson and Lasse Berg Johnsen. I should note that this data set only features his DIF team-mates and midfield peers from BK Häcken, who averaged the second-most possession in the league, and Malmö FF, the champions who played an almost unique brand of possession-dominant football under Henrik Rydström.

When the pressure is ramped up to ‘high’ - which is determined by the speed of player approaching the ball - Bergvall ranks similarly well, bettered only by the team-mate Rasmus Schüller, the impressive Johnsen (who does all of the key Malmö midfield business) and Häcken captain Gustafsson, Samuel.

How does Bergvall do it? Mainly by shifting away from closer-downers with the ball at his feet, showcasing the all-important concoction of awareness, composure, skill and athleticism to do so. He’s alert and elusive, balanced and controlled.

He does the above a lot, sensing pressure on a back shoulder then quickly twisting and shifting away from it. Not only does he find the solution in otherwise tricky situations, he often changes the angles of the game and opens the pitch up with the tight turns. Awareness, control and quick-footedness are the principle traits in the instance above.

He does the above a fair bit too, taking players on in more isolated situations. These exhibit the range of his game: he can stride past defenders in bigger spaces just as well as he can twist and turn in tighter areas. His speed, balance and composure are the outstanding attributes in the instance above, beating one before driving into space and being yanked back.

Beyond the more routine and regular, Bergvall showed flashes of real brilliance when escaping tight spaces in 2023 too. He loves a backfoot touch to take a defender out of the game in one simple step, and he doesn’t mind a humiliating little ball roll or dragback to kill an opponent on the spot.

The above against Hammarby stands out: having received the ball after a little inside run, he feels for the defender back to goal, uses his arms to pin him, dragged the ball back and rolled to the byline. He almost stabbed down on the ball, spinning it backward on the artificial pitch. It was creative and clinical.

I loved that one (above) against his former club BP, where he stood on the ball, sucking in the defender, then pushing away with his studs, leaving him grasping at his shirt, flat-footed, dead and buried.

There was this one against BK Häcken, as well, where he roulettes a pass into a team-mate from the touchline, taking two defenders out of the game. These are pertinent exampels of a creativity and technicality that has been on show in one way or another throughout his junior career.

He can also beat pressure with the simple bounce pass. It might not seem like much, but Bergvall’s one-touch passing is sharp and accurate when he drops to the ball. He punches them straight back to the initial passer with few bobbles and at a good speed, even with a defender trying to impact him from behind, and doesn’t bite off more than he can chew. Simplicity is a strength.

His dainty press-escaping and powerful ball-carrying does bare similarities to the elite evaders like Frenkie de Jong. Like the Dutchman, Bergvall can slip pressure in the defensive third then drive play into the attacking third with a sleek ease. It’s perhaps the single-most outstanding trait of his skillset.

Goal threat?

Bergvall does carry a goal threat. It would be a stretch to call it a strength of his skillset, but he’s shown enough in what I’ve seen of him to suggest that he will score goals in senior football. He scored three during the 2023 season, which is a decent return given he only played just over 1,000 minutes.

Bergvall arrives into good areas at good times, just like he does when facilitating play. That’s his main method of getting shots.

He’s not an box-crashing, Bellingham-like instigator that strives to get on the end of deliveries nor a Bruno Fernandes-esque spammer; he tends to support attacks from depth, arriving in the second wave of attackers, ghosting in to capitalise on pullbacks and loose balls. And if you can do that well, you’ll score plenty.

The screenshots above are an example of what I mean - there he is against Hammarby, floating in to get a good shot off a pullback. His shot choice (a first-time side-footer) was the correct one, it just lacked precision. His patience to let the play develop means he drifts into that space with nobody near him, and that’s the consistent feature of his shot-getting threat.

Here he is again, practically sauntering into a little pocket to finish with a weak-foot volley at the near post off a pullback against BP. He comes alive at the right moments and tends to hit the right spaces, which happen to be the obvious ones.

His goal against Landskrona in the Svenska Cupen to kick off the 2023 season showed more of his ball-striking ability, bending a right-footed shot into the bottom-right corner from the edge of the box. Ball/shot-striking is something I need to see more of before I can give a solid appraisal, but the indications are promising.

Interestingly, he has shown some ability to be a threat as an attacker at set-pieces. There have been a few examples of him getting across defenders at corners and free-kicks to glance a header past the post. There was an acrobatic overhead kick attempt against BP too, that caught the eye. I think both further underline his athletic capacity and potential.

The defensive issues and upsides

To the surprise of nobody, Bergvall has plenty of room to improve as a defender. To the encouragement of many, most of them are technical aspects that can be developed relatively easily.

Point number one? He’s too fast when closing out to the ball. Bergvall tends to rush out toward the ball, standing too rigid, too upright, then gets beaten by simple changes of direction. He does this big wafty followthrough that harms as much as it helps. How can he fix that? By slowing down in the last five yards, lowering his base, keeping his nose over his toes, and shifting his feet in smaller steps. He does the initial bit well, moving to the ball with speed, then fails to capitalise on it.

He can be stronger in duels as well, making better use of his bigger frame. That’s something that tends to come with experience though, and he doesn’t lack for effort or enthusiasm in general. As he fills out into his frame, Bergvall could be a pretty formidable opponents when defending body-to-body.

Speed is a problem, but it’s also a significant advantage. The 17-year-old has the change of pace to jump to the ball, counterpress, recover defensive positions and cut the attacker’s line effectively when he really needs to. His defensive reactions are pretty sound for the most part too, and he often gets back well in transition. It’s just about honing the final action(s).

His quick scanning comes in handy in this aspect of his game as well; his little shoulder checks are as noticeable when he’s defending space as they are when he’s looking for it on the ball. He doesn’t do them as often, which isn’t a surprise, but he does them enough to know where he should be standing. He’s by no means a passenger in the way DIF shift as a unit.

The next steps for the Swede

Despite playing fewer than 50 games and 1,600 minutes in senior football, Bergvall is already being credibly linked with winter moves to some of the grandest clubs in European football.

Internazionale have been attributed with an active interest, and DIF’s sporting director, Bosse Andersson, substantiated the links to Barcelona:

“Yes, I can confirm that we have been in contact and in dialogue with Barcelona. But it’s not a negotiation yet, in my world. There was some contact with Barcelona last week. But this week we haven’t spoken to them.”

Would those be good moves for him? No is the short answer. Bergvall is good enough to be playing first-team football right now, and those particular transfers would likely park him in B team football that’s beneath him, on a hastily-arranged loan, or on the substitutes’ bench for at least a year.

Instead, I want to see him make an incremental move. The very specific next step I’ve been fixated on ever since I first watched Bergvall is Feyenoord, a club where he’s already spent time on trial relatively recently.

Playing for a dominant, possession-oriented, 4-3-3-y side in the Eredivisie and working under a renowned, talent-developing coach in Arne Slot would be the near-ideal environment for him to maximise his potential. It would be a launch pad to the better teams in the best leagues across Europe.

Williot Sweberg - another teenage midfielder that burst onto the scene in the Allsvenskan a couple of years ago - represents a cautionary tale for jumping too high, too soon. His move to Celta Vigo was loaded with excitement and sentiment, but he’s yet to start a LaLiga game for them over 18 months on. I really wanted to see him go to a club like AZ Alkmaar back then too.

He’s 17 years old. He can go to Barça in five years time.

Lucas Bergvall has the capacity to play for one of the better - if not best - teams in a top-five league. His multifaceted athleticism, line-breaking passing, press-evading skill, goalscoring upside and overall versatility produces a valuable profile that the elite teams need in their midfields. It’s pretty easy to imagine him doing the business in the progressive eight role many top sides utilise.

He should go on to be a significant player at a Champions League level team in a top-five league at least, in my estimation, which would be a real boon for Swedish football. They don’t produce players like Bergvall often.

July 2024 update:

Just after the winter window closed, Lucas Bergvall was snapped up by the talent-gobbling Tottenham Hotspur. He is an excellent addition to a burgeoning core of top emerging talent that includes Pape Matar Sarr, Destiny Udogie, Mikey Moore, and soon Archie Gray and Luka Vušković.

Spurs makes sense as a next step for Bergvall. It was the Feyenoord move I wanted — the step up where he becomes an unequivocal starter straight away, launching him to the top — but it’s a much better fit than a Barça.

I genuinely think Bergvall can play Premier Leage minutes straight away. I also think he can make an immediately impressive impact in Spurs’ pre-season preparations under Ange Postecoglou. Whether that converts into a starting role is probably unlikely, but he can fill in if/when needed.

Looking a little further down the line, a loan to get him those consistent minutes will probably be on the cards but I can see him pushing into the first-team reckoning from within. I’m excited to see how he goes.