The 2024 Swedish Championship reflects similar extreme right-wing martial arts tournaments held elsewhere in Europe over the years. This also demonstrates the success of the active club model in spreading to the continent. There are dozens of fighting clubs throughout Europe, including more than 50 in France in the UK, and they are under new scrutiny after the February 2025 ITV documentary links members to terrorism and violence. Active clubs in Europe are also increasingly connecting on national borders – Sved's active club members attended the Fascist parade in Paris on May 10 with Dutch and French comrades and conducted outdoor training with active club members from Germany and active club members from Germany.

Although many of Sweden’s active club participants are elderly veterans of other extremist groups, they have achieved significant success in recruiting younger participants, some of whom are up to 15 years of age. Over the past year, Swedish authorities have begun to link active club members to attacks and hate crimes.

Jonathan Leman of Expo.Se, a Swedish civil society group that tracks far-right radical and organised, attributes the formation of active clubs in Sweden to Oskar Engels, a former member of the NRM who left the group in 2020. Crime occasionally intersects with neo-Nazism, especially on the support of major Stockholm clubs, Djurgården and Hammarby.

Recently, active clubs in the United States have combined with other extreme extremists such as Patriot Front and Hammerskins to have their own hybrid art of martial arts in Southern California, Texas and elsewhere.

Blazakis said the State Department’s listing on NRM is noteworthy because it is the first large-scale neo-Nazi movement that U.S. authorities were able to link with criminal acts with terrorist motives. According to media reports, efforts to approve the British state action banned by the British Ministry of Home Affairs, which was found guilty of more members of the crime of terrorism than ISIS, not ISIS.

"The Nordic Resistance is organized and has a high level of criminal behavior relative to active clubs, which reminds people of a rise above the sport," Blazakis said.

"It's very dangerous when you have people who are engaged in crimes turning to terrorism," Blazakis said. "They are moving in the direction of ideology and in most cases you tend to see groups moving in the opposite direction."

Expo.Se's Leman, who tracks the evolution of active clubs in Sweden and its interactions with emerging Swedes, said the September 2024 tournament was hosted by Tvåsaxe, which has invited to close the NRM conference in the past two years.

"TVåsaxe is part of the NRM network. They want to maintain good relations with all groups in the environment," Leman said. NRM's relationship with Sweden's rival far-right groups was cooler, Leman said. But after the changes in leadership and terrorist entity listings in 2023, the organization changed its stance and attracted sympathy and solidarity from other far-right organizations.