Last Sunday, Vipers from Kristiansand announced that the club would be declared bankrupt, with debts equivalent to 24 million Swedish kronor. Just over a day later, the turnaround came. The board is resigning and a new ownership group will take over.
It's incredibly nice, of course. Last week was very up and down and chaotic with messages and deadlines being pushed forward, says Carin Strömberg.
She and the other national team players are gathered in Gävle for two national team matches against Spain in Eskilstuna on Thursday and Gävle on Saturday. Next week, national team coach Tomas Axnér will select the squad for the European Championship, which starts in Hungary on November 28.
Considering the European Championship gathering is only three weeks away, Carin Strömberg and Jamina Roberts, who also plays for Vipers, are very happy that the situation has now been resolved in the club.
It's nice to have somewhere to be. What was a bit tricky was if I had to consider moving with three weeks left until the European Championship, says Roberts.
Shock news during the Olympic Games
She is also relieved not to have to uproot her family, partner Emil Berggren and daughter Lou, after two years in Norway.
That would have been the worst in this. Finding a club would have solved itself, but finding something where we all would have thrived...
Carin Strömberg didn't even get to spend five weeks in Kristiansand before she found out about the club's major financial crisis. She had barely recovered from the shock news on August 1, when she received an email from her club Nantes during the Olympic Games, saying that the club had gone bankrupt.
The news came as a shock. She then chose Vipers, despite the club having previously flagged poor finances earlier in the year, just to be able to play at a high level and in the Champions League.
I knew it was unstable, but not that it was on this level (debts of 24 million kronor). Of course, it felt crappy, says Strömberg.
"Too little revenue"
Norwegian media have written about how salaries in Vipers doubled between 2019 and 2023. But Roberts believes that it's not high player salaries that are behind Vipers' crisis.
If you compare our budget with other Champions League teams, I guess we're not the best paid. The problem is that they've had too little revenue. We won the Champions League three years in a row (2021-2023) but they haven't managed to increase revenue, says Roberts.
