Football Season Guide

After mediocre last season Hammarby felt the need to change managers between campaigns and they replaced the Dane Michelsen with Stefan Billborn. Billborn has been Hammarby’s Head of Youth Development since 2015, before that he was Sweden’s U21 head coach, and despite this being his first job at senior level he knows the club and the players well. Green and Whites definitely had positive transfer activity in the winter with only three players leaving, just one of them regular starter, while six new names were signed, plus three more returned from loans, to boost the options in every part of the pitch. Hammarby have unique mixture of experience and youth, with the 37-year-olds Wiland on goal and captain and main playmaker Kennedy likely to be helping their teammates a lot with wisdom and example. Despite his age Wiland was one of the best goalies in Allsvenskan last term and he definitely looks like a keeper still able to produce solid performances any given weekend. To add even more experience to the squad Billborn made two recent forward signings of two 32-year-old players that will provide great alternatives for the wings and the centre forward position. Zengin is a vastly experienced wide player, while Djurdjic is proven goalscorer that will be battling it with Dibba and the 20-year-old star Svendsen for the two positions up front. Hammarby are one of the teams with best depth in Sweden at the minute and despite the relative inexperience at senior level of their new coach he will kindly welcome the fact that there is competition for starting places for almost every position on the pitch. Billborn seems happy with the standard 4-4-2 formation used by his predecessor, although Hammarby tested 4-3-3 and 3-4-2-1 in the pre-season with decent success and they obviously have the players and the knowhow to mix things according to their opponents.