Arsenal’s Jonas Eidevall: ‘We could find many excuses to stop but we kept going’

Jonas Eidevall is perhaps one of very few managers who can say they took a step up by leaving a coaching role in the men’s game for one with a women’s club. When the Swede was in charge of the semi-professional men’s team Lunds BK, who he helped into the third tier, he was juggling the job with full-time work in a bank.

“It was good money but I had no life and I was also very limited in the time that I could spend preparing for the next training session or the next game,” the Arsenal Women manager says. It is testament to the strength and ambitions of the women’s team Malmö (now Rosengård) that he found a place there to coach professionally, initially as an assistant before two spells managing the club.

Last summer Eidevall took his next big step, when chosen to replace Joe Montemurro at Arsenal. They were the non-Swedish team he supported as a boy. Why?

“Why does anyone start to follow a club? It happens for the simplest of reasons: I liked Anders Limpar as a player, I liked the crest, I liked the way I felt when I saw the team playing and from then on it was a love that grew.”

In his first season in north London, the 39-year-old has been searching for the smallest changes that will have the biggest impact.

“You can’t change too much, because players need to handle the information and be able to act on it,” he says. “But even if you just change the smallest of details, that can make a huge difference to the outcome. Football is a dynamic system, so the butterfly effect is in play all the time. If you change a small detail and that leads to a different feeling on the pitch, then that leads to a better self-confidence, which means you take one step towards a situation instead of one step back. Then, all of a sudden, you