The Super league.
The Danish Speedway League began in 1986 as a superstructure on the Danish Speedway Tournament for teams, where the first division until then, had been the superior row.
The objective for the league was to collect the best Danish riders, also among the professionals together with selected foreign riders to offer high class speedway to a paying audience, and with this attract coverage from printed press, thus creating a sponsor basis, that would make it economic attractive for the riders to participate.
The basis for the league was the 1. division’s top eight teams from 1985.
Up to 2000 the meetings were run in the same 4-teams format as the rest of the Danish Tournament
Despite the good intentions and the initial good reception from the audience the interest diminished.
Only few of the clubs got an acceptable economy out of their efforts. The reasons were multiple, but most of the clubs had, despite the professional touch, still amateurish leadership, of which some had greater ambitions than their money could afford.
Kjeld Lund from Outrup Speedway Club took with his enormous knowledge of international speedway tournaments initiative to gather the interested clubs to a debate on the possibilities of continuing with league speedway on a high sporty level withe lesser clubs and possibly with some clubs from abroad.
The clubs could sign in freely, provided the had the economic power to afford it.
Thus the Danish Open Speedway League saw daylight in 2001 with 4 Danish teams plus a tam from Gothenburg i Swede and a team from Güstrow in Germany. At the same time the heat format got changed to 2-teams pair speedway, which is internationally common.
