Malmö FF’s manager has transformed the club and will be a different test for Maurizio Sarri in Thursday’s Europa League tie

“I had just made my first appearance for the club as a sub and he came over and said ‘I expect more from you. I didn’t sign you to run around and then be tired after five minutes’,” recalls Marcus Antonsson. “First you think ‘woah, hang on’ but then you realise that he is very demanding and that you’re not going to get away with anything.”

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The manager who gave Antonsson a dressing down after his first few minutes as a Malmö FF player is Uwe Rösler, the German who has revitalised the club after being appointed in June 2018 and who is now preparing to face Chelsea in the Europa League on Thursday.

Malmö FF were going nowhere when the former Brentford, Wigan and Leeds manager took over and shook up the club. Having won the Swedish title in 2017 they were mid-table with no signs of climbing the table by the time he arrived. He came with the backing of the former MFF coach Åge Hareide and, according to Swedish paper Aftonbladet, beat Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the current Manchester United manager, to the job.

Rösler took one look at the squad, recognised the talent within it, and then started working on the players’ fitness. The results were remarkable. Malmö FF went undefeated in Rösler’s first 17 games, rose to third in the table and qualified for the Europa League last 32 by finishing above Besiktas in their group. This week Chelsea arrive at a sold-out Stadion.

“The draw could not have been much harder,” concedes Antonsson, “but I guess the hope is that they will underestimate us somewhat. The key is to play a top, top game at home and then take it from there.”

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A feverish atmosphere will await Chelsea but Rösler is concerned of a backlash after the humiliation at the Etihad last Sunday, when Maurizio Sarri’s side lost 6-0.

“Chelsea are like a wounded animal at the moment,” Rösler said this week. “It is an unusual situation for a club like Chelsea but I hope they arrive with all their star players. I hope that our supporters will be able to watch a world class team and that we can show how far we have got. For me, that’s our biggest challenge. It is a fantastic challenge and that’s the same for the players too.”

Rösler, who is a former East German international who played for Manchester City between 1994 and 1998 and whose son, Colin plays for the U19s, had mixed success as a manager in England. He came close to winning promotion to the Championship with Brentford in 2013 but lost in the play-off final and left the club later in the year. At Wigan he beat Manchester City in the FA Cup but departed after 11 months in the job and the club in the Championship relegation zone.

He won only two out of 12 games in charge of Leeds United while he achieved Fleetwood’s highest position ever by coming fourth in League One before being sacked in February 2018 after seven straight defeats.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uwe Rösler takes training before the game against Chelsea, which will be Malmö FF’s first competitive match since mid-December. Photograph: Peter Cziborra/Action Images via Reuters

At Malmö, he has impressed with his tactical flexibility and his ability to change formation depending on the opponents. “The more I think about it, the more I like a back three,” he told fotbollskanalen recently, before adding: “but then I’ve used 4-4-2 with a diamond, a straight 4-4-2, 4-2-3-1 …”

Rösler is happy to take his inspiration from a broad range of coaches and said last year: “I like how Jürgen Klopp’s teams play football as a general rule. I like Pep Guardiola’s beautiful football. I like Mourinho cynicism and, finally, Otto Rehhagel’s management style.”

The key for Malmö, however, has been the improvement in fitness. They have not played a competitive game since beating Besiktas away on 13 December but the German has worked his players hard in the last four weeks, culminating in a brutal training camp in Marbella.

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The key player is without doubt the now 36-year-old Markus Rosenberg, who some people in England may remember from a less than successful spell at West Brom between 2012-14. He leads from the front, never giving the defenders any rest (although there were raised eyebrows in Sweden when David Luiz described him as a “fantastic” player).

For Malmö the game has added poignancy as their chairman Håkan Jeppsson died in early December. Rösler is pensive as he talks about the man who was part of Malmö’s board for 14 years and who oversaw the club’s return to the top of the Swedish game in the past decade. “I still spend a lot of time thinking about Håkan,” Rösler said recently. “I don’t know because I did not know him for a long period of time, but it is refusing to go away.”

The victory against Besiktas the week after the death of Jeppsson in December, which ultimately set up the Chelsea tie, was dedicated to the former chairman and for the first home game since his passing away, players and fans will want to make it a night to remember.