David Jansson has been the head coach of the Swiss Men’s national team since WFC 2012. He thinks that being with the team longer, gives him an advantage. Read more about his thoughts regarding The World Games below.

Jansson in Euro Floorball Tour in Turku. Photo: Salibandyliiga Flickr

David Jansson
Age: 37
Country of birth: Sweden
Team: SUI M

What does The World Games mean to you?
It means a lot. I am a big fan of our sport and if there is any way I can contribute to getting more people to know about the sport then I’ll do it and The World Games is of course a great stage for us to show off our sport. I mean, today sports in general is so much about defence and low scoring games and we can offer something else, we can offer tempo and we can offer a fast pace game. So, I’m really looking forward to it, because I think it’s the next stage for us internationally.

What do you think The World Games can do to floorball?
I think it’s a great way for us to show where we are at. Um, like I said, this sport is so full of creativity in comparison to many others. I just love the fact that on floorball court you are never further away than 3-4 seconds from scoring a goal, even though the opponent has the ball in your own corner you can actually score 3-4 seconds later. And I don’t think too many of the other team based sports games can offer that.

Now that you only have 14 players and the playing time is 3×15 how will it change the game?
It’s going to be interesting. And the rink is also going to be a couple of meters smaller. It will for sure change the way of playing, especially for us since we play with pretty high tempo, defence with a lot of running, a lot of pressing. We might have to change our approach a bit. And at the same time, it might make it possible for us to play the way we want to. But with the ball I don’t think it’s going to be a big difference.

There has been a change of leadership in the other top four national teams. How does it affect your playing style?
It might affect us of course, they might go down other roads than what they have done earlier. We’re taking a lot of pride in focusing on our game, but not being too naive when it comes to the other teams. We care about what they do, so that we can make sure that we are the best we can be. I like the international floorball scene. The four top teams are extremely good and we are obviously catching up to the big guys, so for us it’s going to be very interesting to see what they can do.

Do you think being with the team longer gives you an advantage?
I think it does. It’s good for us. We’ve gotten to know our guys and we don’t get to see them too much because of the way the schedule is in floorball, it’s pretty tight. We’re here (in EFT in Turku) with quite a lot of new guys and we’ve been able to integrate them pretty good into our system already now so, I think we’ll benefit from that for sure.

The World Games will be played in Wroclaw, Poland 20th-30th of July. The Floorball competition will be held over 4 days, from 27th – 30th July, and will involve 6 men´s teams divided into two groups of 3. Group A consists of Finland, Czech Republic and Poland and Group B consists of Sweden, Switzerland and USA.

More information about The World Games can be found here: www.floorball.org/pages/EN/The-World-Games-2017