‘The Frölunda way’: Inside a Swedish club’s prospect pipeline to the Red Wings and NHL
GOTHENBURG, Sweden — Three miles southwest of the Göta älv — where brick sidewalks separate the river from the opera house here in Sweden’s second-largest city — stands a silver building under grey skies. The place introduces itself with bold black lettering above 20 feet of windows. This is Frölundaborg, where hockey’s future grows.
Inside, down in the gym, 15-year-old boys swing kettlebells and deadlift, while others do more dynamic workouts on a three-lane blue matted floor. They ring a bell on the wall when they achieve a personal best.
You don’t know these boys, but you will. In the last seven years, 27 players from Frölunda Hockey Club’s academy have been drafted to the NHL. Three in the last four years have gone in the top 10. Nashville Predators forward Matt Duchene, who came to play here during the 2012-13 lockout, recently called the club “probably one of the best franchises outside of the NHL in the world.”
This is its home base — both for the five-time Swedish champion senior team, and the academy that fuels it.
In the corner of a downstairs hallway by the locker rooms, the club’s development manager, Mikael Ström, is sitting at a black table with a white hockey rink at its center. Faded marker lines are still visible on the glass. He’s trying to explain how Frölunda does it. He’s trying to explain the system.
He has brought a laptop with a PowerPoint he made last spring at the request of the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation. On the first slide are some of the club’s goals. At the top: Become Swedish champion with a roster that is 50 percent composed of players from its own academy.
On the second are the team’s values, and under the heading “Compete Hard” is the phrase Alla Alltid. It means “everyone, every time” — a mantra that applies to players and ticket sales staff alike. This is a club with a plan. On the ice, they emphasize individual development inside the team, and short-term, player-specific goals.
They keep the long view in focus, and their championship banners and the long list of alumni they’ve sent to the NHL are proof of concept.
Recently, one NHL team in particular has tried to become the beneficiary. In the last three years, the Detroit Red Wings have drafted six players out of Frölunda, including Lucas Raymond and Simon Edvinsson, picked fourth and sixth overall the past two years.
The night they picked Edvinsson in July 2021, Detroit’s director of amateur scouting, Kris Draper, said his team’s recent run of Frölunda picks was a coincidence.
Then, the next day, the Red Wings reached back to the club’s academy again, taking Liam Dower Nilsson in the fifth round.
The answer to why Detroit — and the rest of the NHL — keeps gravitating toward Frölunda players is not on Ström’s PowerPoint. Not completely.
But it begins inside these walls, with the people, and the attitude, that bring it all to life.
“Everyone who works in Frölunda believes in this way,” Ström says. “And normally, it works.”
