damallsvenskan · History

FC Rosengård, counting the titles it won as Malmö FF and as LdB FC Malmö, has been champion of the Damallsvenskan 13 times, more than any other club. Umeå IK follows with seven and Älvsjö AIK with five. The Damallsvenskan is the top division of women’s football in Sweden. It was founded in 1988 and has been known as OBOS Damallsvenskan since 2018, when the Norwegian housing company OBOS became its title sponsor.

Origins and the play-off years

Sweden had crowned a national women’s champion since 1973, but until 1988 the top level was Division 1, played in regional groups. The single national league launched in 1988 brought the strongest clubs in the country into one competition for the first time. In its first five editions the table alone did not decide the title: from 1988 to 1992 the top four teams after the regular season played semi-finals and a final. Öxabäck IF won the first edition in 1988, Jitex BK took the 1989 title and Malmö FF won in 1990 and 1991. Gideonsbergs IF closed the play-off era as champion in 1992. Lena Videkull, top scorer in 1988 with 24 goals for Öxabäck and again in 1990 and 1991 with Malmö FF, went on to win that award five times, more than any other player.

Älvsjö and Umeå

After Malmö FF’s titles in 1993 and 1994, the Stockholm club Älvsjö AIK won five championships in a row between 1995 and 1999. The following decade belonged to Umeå IK, from the north of the country. Umeå won the league in 2000, 2001 and 2002, and four more times in succession from 2005 to 2008; the 2003 and 2004 titles went to Djurgården/Älvsjö. In 2002 Hanna Ljungberg scored 39 goals for Umeå, the highest total by any player in a single league campaign. Umeå also took a Swedish club to the top of Europe: it won the 2003 UEFA Women’s Cup against Fortuna Hjørring of Denmark and retained the trophy in 2004 with an 8-0 aggregate win over Frankfurt.

Malmö, Tyresö and Linköping

Linköpings FC won its first title in 2009, with Umeå second. LdB FC Malmö were champions in 2010 and 2011, finishing ahead of Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC both times. The 2012 title went to Tyresö FF, a club from the outskirts of Stockholm that had signed foreign internationals such as Brazil’s Marta and Spain’s Verónica Boquete. Tyresö finished second the following year and, in its first Champions League campaign, reached the 2014 final in Lisbon: Marta and Boquete put the Swedish side ahead, but Wolfsburg won 4-3. Malmö regained the title in 2013 and, renamed FC Rosengård, retained it in 2014 and 2015. Linköping answered with the championships of 2016 and 2017.

Promotion, expansion and new champions

Since 2013 the Damallsvenskan has been linked to the Elitettan, the second tier: the bottom two clubs go down and the top two in the Elitettan come up. In 2018 Piteå IF, from northern Sweden, won its first championship. Rosengård took the title back in 2019, and in 2020 Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC, founded in 1970 as Landvetters IF, became champion for the first time. Weeks after that title the club announced it would withdraw its first team, reversing the decision two days later; on 28 January 2021 it became the women’s section of BK Häcken. Rosengård won the league in 2021 and in 2022, the year the competition grew from 12 to 14 teams.

Stockholm crowds and Häcken

In 2021 Hammarby IF and AIK drew 18,537 spectators, the largest attendance for a Damallsvenskan match; Hammarby won 4-1. Hammarby became champion in 2023, finishing ahead of Häcken, who had also been runners-up in 2021 and 2022. Rosengård claimed its 13th title in 2024, again with Häcken in second place. In 2025 BK Häcken won the league, its second title when the 2020 championship is included, with Hammarby as runner-up. Häcken forward Felicia Schröder finished that campaign as top scorer with 30 goals.