[ Can you tell me a little about your background? ]

I've done almost 50 years in football. I started as a player at 6 or 7 years old and played until I was 38. In parallel I also did a career as a football referee, I've been refereeing regional, national and international games. From time to time, I’ve been involved in running small clubs here in the north of Sweden as club chairman.

In my professional life I’ve been working as a business developer, working with startups and established companies with international ambitions.

I was born in Norway and my father was a reindeer herder from the Sápmi people - I have my own reindeers, so that’s my origin and heritage.

I’m actually not so super interested in football. It’s not my passion (anymore). My passion is to help people grow and expand. For me, personally, football is a tool for a higher cause.

So these three cornerstones - my Sápmi heritage, my football background and my background as an innovator and business developer - all came together in a perfect mixture, when I created CONIFA back in 2013.

[ How did you get involved in Non-FIFA football and come to found CONIFA? ]

First, I think it’s important to talk about the drive and passion from a personal perspective. The Sápmi people, my own people, an indigenous group of people in Northern Scandinavia that (especially in Sweden) have been bullied and abused by society for a long, long period that continues even today.

So I always had a very, very strong passion and feeling for underdogs, for marginalized people living in the outskirts who have to fight for the right to exist like everyone else. That's my driving factor or motivation for actually doing this.

I was a ‘normal’ referee back in 2006 when the president of the Sápmi Federation called me and asked me to follow them to France to referee in an international competition. I didn't know what it was all about, I’d never heard of the competition. But the offer was, a free flight, a 4 or 5 star hotel in the French Riviera and to referee football - so I said I’ll go!

It was the first tournament of the N.F.-Board. It was a complete mess, total chaos! I learned afterwards there was a clash between the N.F.-Board and Northern Cyprus - leading to Northern Cyprus launching their own tournament, the ELF Cup, at the same time. In the end, only 4 teams arrived in France, so it was not a big tournament.

But on the pitch together with the players, I felt, ‘wow! This is something completely different to what I was used to’. Even if it was a small tournament, it was so much more than football. Since I followed and lived with the Sápmi national team, I became very close to the team and the players and I could really understand how important it was for them.

I started to become more and more interested in this world and started to get involved. I became very good friends with the president Christian Michelis. I’m a business developer, so I started to help the organization grow. If you compare the first tournament in 2006 - where there were maybe 20 people in the stands and a complete joke from an organizational perspective - with the last tournament in 2012, where we had 35,000 people in the stands and it was extremely professional. I was helping on a voluntary basis, I was never on the board or had an official role. And I was actually the only one that refereed all the N.F.-Board tournaments!

I think during those 6 years, I started to get some kind of a reputation as a good guy in that world, so when the N.F.-Board collapsed in February 2013, some teams contacted me and asked me, ‘can't you build something new?’ and ‘can't you help us now?’

I sat down and started to write a new constitution based on Nordic ethics like transparency and democracy where the members have the power, not the board.

I presented it at a football tournament called Tynwald Hill on the Isle of Man where some potential members in the new organization were playing. They liked it and on August 15, 2013, CONIFA became registered in Sweden. I became close with a German guy, Sascha Düerkop, who became our general secretary. He made a fantastic contribution to CONIFA and its growth, we have a lot to thank him for.

I organized everything myself for our first tournament in 2014 in Sweden. I gave it my all and was burnt out after. It took me at least a year to recover mentally, I was completely drained.

I wasn’t so impressed by the number of people in the stands but we had a really, really professional TV production, a streaming platform and lots of media interest which amazed me a lot. Afterwards, we did an evaluation and realized we reached 164 million people - with nothing, no resources, preparation or anything! Then I felt, wow, this is actually something really good that interests a lot of people around the world. That was the beginning of CONIFA.

[ How does CONIFA differ from other sports organizations like FIFA? (I don’t think we associate words like ‘transparency’ or ‘democracy’ with them :) ) ]

In Sweden we are quite used to running nonprofit organizations and there's a lot of people that are volunteering. I realize now, if you look at the rest of the world, we are blessed with our situation in the Nordics, because we have spare time that we can allocate how we choose. We’re lucky some people choose to allocate their time to CONIFA, which is amazing.

Our founding tenets are transparency and democracy. Everyone can engage themselves and have their voices heard, it’s a fully democratic system. Of course, everyone is not always pleased with every decision but that’s democracy!

We always show our finances, we have no secrets. Every year we conduct our annual general meeting (AGM) where we decide on all the important directions of the organization - the members have 10 votes and the executive committee members (like me) have only one vote. So the members are the priority. One of our core values is that we, the board, are here to serve our members.

[ Occitania became the newest CONIFA member just a couple weeks ago, how does membership work, what are the requirements? ]

We have quite an open atmosphere and our basic principle is to welcome as many as possible. But we also have to have some kind of regulation when it comes to membership applications.

Members should be an official ethnic group, if you compare us to FIFA - they have 211 members - there are more than 5,500 officially recognized ethnic groups in the world. In addition, we also affiliate cultural areas like Occitania, it's not an ethnic group - it's more about celebrating their language, so it’s actually a linguistic membership.

So we’re quite open but we need some criteria because if we allow everyone, we lose our identity. From time to time, we receive applications that we have to deny. For example, the first we denied was from Sealand - an old military base off the coast of the UK that someone moved to and claimed as a country. But there’s no organization behind it, no real representative, so we didn’t admit them. We receive some strange applications!

[ Are you also ‘recruiting’ members and encouraging groups to become part of CONIFA or is it all organic interest? ]

In the very beginning, yes 100%. We were hunting for members and for potential hosts for our events. Today we have grown so much and we've reached a level where people actually want to be a part of CONIFA.

There is huge interest to have CONIFA tournaments, especially when it's extremely cheap to host and the return of investment is immediate (especially compared to a FIFA tournament or something like that!). If you look at our last World Cup (or planned World Cup, actually,) we had 6 different locations to choose from, which was amazing.

[ Can you touch on the goals of the members themselves, would CONIFA, for example, consider it a good thing or a success if a CONIFA member became part of FIFA? (or UEFA, CAF, AFC, etc) ]

We have very big, very professional organizations inside CONIFA but we also have so called ‘newcomers’ that still have a lot to do, that’s the reality. Of course all of our members have different objectives and goals. Some of our members have a very clear ambition to become a FIFA member and they use CONIFA as a springboard to prepare themselves. That’s fine for us. In the early days we tried to work to help Tuvalu become a FIFA member because they fit all the criteria for FIFA membership. They’ve applied and I think they’ve been working for 25 years now to become a FIFA member but they are too small, no one cares about them and FIFA, well, they’re not ‘hungry’ anymore.

[ How is CONIFA funded? What kind of costs does CONIFA incur? ]

In the first 3 or 4 years of operations (2013-2016), I funded everything myself. It was a really, really tough time. One year, I could only afford to eat once a day. I have 3 children and I had to tell them sorry, there will be no Christmas presents because I spent it all on CONIFA. It was a really tough ride, especially as a father raising 3 children.

We have an annual membership fee and it's very cheap - €500 per year. Today, it covers our basic fixed costs - things like the website and keeping everything up and running. Our costs are low enough though that we’d survive even if you cut the membership in half.

For events (like the World Cup), the host covers everything on the ground and the members pay their own flights to participate - so there’s no travel or organization costs for CONIFA for this.

[ How about the team at CONIFA itself, how is it structured? Is everyone a volunteer? ]

There are heroes all over the world that actually contribute a lot to CONIFA - when we have international media at our events, they think we have a big headquarters and hundreds of people employed because there is so much happening all around the world! But it’s a nonprofit, 100% volunteer run organization.

There is no one getting paid or anything which is a challenge, of course, because you need to survive, you need to have food on the table. So sometimes people have more time or less time to contribute. In the beginning it was an extreme workload on me and Sasha but now we’ve reached a critical mass and have, for example, a really good European committee. Now, North and South America and Asia are growing and looking really good.

Still, it takes time to find the right people. We actually had a short period of time when I managed to sign a sponsorship deal so we had some money in the organization and suddenly the wrong people with the wrong objectives came on board. So from one perspective to keep our values, our mission and vision, it's good to be poor!

[ How can people support and/or get involved with CONIFA or CONIFA’s members? ]

This is actually a blessing - I receive emails from people all around the world that want to apply for individual memberships and want to help, to contribute.

My vision is to create some kind of a CONIFA fan zone or something like that. But we haven't had the time or resources to create a community (for these people) yet.

We could do so much actually, if we had basic funding in some way. But for that we need to have some kind of financial grants from e.g. the United Nations or European Union. We’ve contributed a lot with no resources at all - if we can get resources and use them in a good way, we can change the world.

[ From an outside perspective, CONIFA sounds like something with a lot of potential for public funding given its emphasis on sports and culture - how has your experience with grants been? ]

This is a challenge for us. We spent almost a year and a lot of money, even hiring external consultants to help us apply for EU funding. They denied us.

The challenge is we are operating in one of the most conservative industries in the world. Football is extremely conservative. And we have a monopoly situation - so the grant systems and how people look at it are not aligned. We don’t fit into their system. So it’s easier to say no, because then there’s no risk - and people don’t want to take risks because they want to keep their jobs. It’s frustrating.

We’ve been to Brussels and did some lobbying. Everyone we met said ‘wow! This is amazing’ but that’s it. You get a clap on the head, like ‘good work’ but there’s always something, a small clause somewhere that makes it impossible.

[ CONIFA just hosted the Women’s World Cup this summer, can you tell me more about this and CONIFA’s increased focus on women’s football? ]

The first Women’s World Cup was in 2022 in Tibet. From the very beginning, our ambition was to launch women’s football, because without women’s football, we cover just 50% of the world, and women have equal rights to play football just like anyone else.

Especially inside our communities, it's extremely important, because we give women an opportunity to expand themselves and be proud of being women, because in some of our members the cultural view of women is different compared to the Nordics and Scandinavia.

The first tournament was a very small tournament - we had difficulties with visas being denied, things like that - but it was a strong signal to our members that CONIFA is serious and we are going to put our energy into women’s football.

We just had our second World Cup in Bodø in northern Norway. We doubled the number of teams participating and it was extremely professional and organized. We had really good TV production with full graphics, commentators, everything.

It's about educating our members that the women are here to stay, and they deserve to play football. When do you have an organization that shows that, okay, we are heading into this direction, we are going to prioritize this. Then they also believe that and do the same.

We are already negotiating the next one, and our ambition is to expand the tournament even more.

We have so many different possible paths, because when you are growing and expanding, there are always ideas. We have been looking into beach soccer, into futsal, 7 and 5-a-side football, youth football everything. Once again, it's a resource thing. We could do everything, but we don't have the resources at the moment.

[ Can you share more about the planning and coordination required to put on an event like the CONIFA World Cup? ]

We have regulations when it comes to tournaments - rules and frameworks to define the standards we expect. We collaborate with different potential hosts and negotiate the conditions. Of course, we’ve been operating for more than 10 years so have gathered some experience and know-how to help the host create a successful tournament.

Our last (men’s) World Cup was actually back in 2018 in London. We had a European Championship in 2019 in Artsakh and a couple of weeks after that it was a full scale war in that region between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

After that we’ve been extremely unlucky.

The (planned) 2020 World Cup in North Macedonia. I had actually signed a sponsorship deal so we had some money and organized everything internally. We collaborated with the Macedonian Health Ministry and were forced to cancel the tournament because of the COVID situation in the country. 5 years later we’re still in a legal process to claim money back from the Hotel Continental in Skopje, who refuses to refund the pre-paid accommodation (200 000 euro)(!), at the moment, they´ve stolen our money - money that could be spent to support our members to grow and develop.

Then in 2021, we had planned a European Championships again, this time in Nice. Everything was fine until 3 weeks before the tournament - the local organization just disappeared! They collapsed and everything fell apart which was extremely tough for us. We are in the trust business, too - our members need to trust the organization, the external stakeholders need to trust the organization to be stable. When we have a cancellation or postpone it drains our trust.

In 2023, the initial plan was to have the European Championships in Northern Cyprus - everything was good until the earthquake in Turkey, which changed the focus of Turkey and Northern Cyprus. Instead we had qualification tournaments in Europe and Asia for the World Cup in 2024.

The plan was to have the tournament in Kurdistan this summer but, the war between Israel and Hamas and the conflicts in the surrounding areas like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran made it impossible for the teams to arrive. The Kurdistan FA first postponed the tournament but in the end, it’s cancelled. We are working on a new location for the World Cup next year.

Since 2020, the world has been crazy, it’s been nuts. Everywhere the borders are more closed than ever before. The world is more polarized and it’s extremely challenging, especially when you are the underdog and have to prove that you are serious.

Still, we are creating miracles and it looks really, really promising. Now, finally after really tough years, we have a good, positive feeling inside CONIFA at the moment.

[ What are you most excited about for the future of CONIFA? ]

I’m really looking forward to what's happening in North and South America. It looks really promising.

We also need to expand and build a stronger organization. Because we are volunteer run, suddenly someone gets a new job and can’t commit enough time or disappears, which is a challenge! My long-term goal is that we should have, in some way, at least 2 or 3 people employed in each continent. That would be a game changer for us. (As a global organization) You need to act local and be present all around the world.

And it's really important for sustainability inside the organization too. Of course, for me as president and as founder, it's easier to allocate 40 hours a week, even if I have a full time job, am head coach of a football team, and have a lot of other duties. But I can't request or demand that from other people! And this isn’t sustainable (in the long term) for me either. So we need to find some kind of basic funding in the next 5 or 6 years.

One of my dreams is to create an esport platform where everyone can play CONIFA tournaments online with our members and also give cultural content where people can educate themselves more about the situations of the Rohingya people, the Tibetan people, the Sápmi people, etc. So for amusement and education, that would be a fantastic thing to connect and engage fans.