A man from Sweden has revealed his disappointment after being told he cannot legally change his name to ‘Tottenham’.
David Lind from Kumla was one of three winners of a competition which allowed him to change his name to his favourite English team.
Lind instantly sent his application to the Swedish Tax Agency (the Skatteverket) to legally change his name to the north London side after their run to the Champions League final.
But he was dismayed to receive a letter just a few weeks later telling him it had been declined.
“This is very sad,” the 39-year-old told Nerikes Allehanda. “It looks as if you can be called pretty much everything in Sweden but not Tottenham.
“It is not any more natural to be called Newcastle, Arsenal, Liverpool or Guiseley.
“There are a lot of people with strange names in Sweden.
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“There is even someone called Potato.
“Maybe someone at Skatteverket is an Arsenal fan?”
After an extensive period of research, Lind discovered there were already several people in Sweden bearing the names of those clubs, including Jacob Guiseley Åhman-Dahlin, who has fallen in love with the English National League North (sixth tier) club Guiseley AFC and decided to change his name to reflect that.
But new guidelines introduced by the Skatteverket in 2017 means naming yourself after a club is much harder to do now than in the past.
“If someone is called Arsenal in Sweden they probably got that through before 2017,” Hajrudin Alijagic at Skatteverket told Nerikes Allehanda.
“In the law from 1982 you could be called pretty much anything and there are around 60 people in Sweden called ‘Bajen’ [the nickname for the Swedish club Hammarby].
“When we are faced with an application for a name we are not sure about we consult another institution and they ruled that Tottenham was not constructed in a way that was appropriate for a name in Sweden.”
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