Melodifestivalen 2025 Blind Preview
According to the odds, this year's Melodifestivalen is the most straight forward in a long time, perhaps forever. A combination of unconvincing challengers, recent strolls for the favourites and the complete package that is Måns Zelmerlow has the favourite priced at around a 60% chance of taking it before a snippet has been snupped.
Zelmerlow's position is strong due to not only having a huge level of popularity, but also through being a genuinely strong performer and having shown the ability to landslide an international jury vote. The chink in the armour is that his best work by far has come in the eurovision context with ‘Heroes’ being his strongest output by a distance, followed by his 2016 ‘Fire in the Rain’ interval song. Delve into his more recent work and there’s not much that comes to this level. Måns’ is quoted as saying his entry this year is even stronger and whilst I suspect that won’t turn out to be the case, he’s been quite protective of his legacy and surely won’t turn up with less than a 7/10 entry.
Neither is he going to turn up with a strong but unsuitable for Melfest entry which was Loreen's 2017 undoing and one of the examples used to argue for a possible upset. The others are the likes of Robin Bengtsson and Danny Saucedo. Måns is in a higher class bracket than those but they have admittedly underwhelmed hugely and appeared stuck in the 2010s. A ‘Happy That You Found Me’ scenario is probably the most likely way in which Måns fails to win: bringing an entry that would have been great in 2018 but now feels a bit out of place and his songwriting team leaves that door open. Sweden typically choose well from there options but even if Måns is not ‘the best’ you imagine he will still be a threat - potentially in a Anders Bagge way…
The alternatives
John Lundvik has shown the ability to score big with the juries and a lead there is theoretically a way of getting to Måns. Even in that scenario I don't know if he'd be able to hold onto said lead with the "why do you turn down Måns to go for this former winner". Greczula has shot up in the odds with word of a strong entry and these insider pushes are typically onto something. There’s not a great deal to go off with him but I'll put some faith in that for now and he does fit the typical MF push demographic.
Klara Hammarstrom has become a consistent performer at Melfest and is here with a modern melfest power team of writers. Something more serious and slick than previous songs and stagings would be needed but is the obvious candidate if Sweden are in the mood for a female.
Scarlet are preferred in the odds after last year's "breakthrough" and delivering a breath of fresh air Melfest had been needing yet still in a slick Swedish way. It should be remembered that despite all the hype and interest they failed to make the final however. Billed as heat 5s favourite, is there a domestic belief this is the best direction for Sweden. Having both a high bar to live up to, and underperforming with that high bar puts me off a bit. I expect them to do quite well but to win is a stretch.
Elsewhere, there are a whole host of candidates that if they did have something good it wouldn't be a surprise, mainly through seeing the capable, regular songwriters attached. Previous false dark horse Angelino is one of those and Kaliffa could have a good year. Despite my optimism for Hammarstrom, that heat 2 could be where an upset comes, if any of the heat favourites are overturned.
Prediction
I'm not going to predict anyone other than Måns at this moment as he is the clear frontrunner although I'm not interested in backing him for now with the required investment to make a meaningful return + the many other finals going on elsewhere. Given everything we know about Melfest and can guess on the year, a win chance of 60~% isn’t all that far off on closer inspection.
A small, speculative play on Greczula and Hammarstrom is probably the best way to go currently incase Måns is off his game with Lundvik and Scarlet not tipped in these parts.
Måns Zelmerlow
Klara Hammarstrom
Greczula
So a bit of a shorter preview this year and one that doesn't go too far out of line with it being hard to have a very strong opinion yet.
Once again, I'll be covering the contest on full with a preview on each heat herd and any impromptu thoughts over on X.