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    Ada Hegerberg Wants to See How Good She Can Be

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    Ada Hegerberg apologizes in advance for the forthcoming cliché. She knows it sounds trite, exactly what she would be expected to say, given all that she has been through. It is what everyone says, after all.It is, though, the only way to describe how it has felt, these last five months or so, finding herself not in a treatment room or confined to the gym as part of her recovery from a serious knee injury, but out on a soccer field once more. There is just no other way of putting it: She feels, she says, like a kid again.In part, it is the little electric thrill, the pulse of pure, unalloyed delight that comes from feeling the grass beneath her feet, being surrounded by teammates, being able to do what she has always done again. She was deprived of it for almost two years; she is determined to “take joy” from its restoration.But it is not just that. The thrill is related to the rediscovery of possibility, too. At 26, Hegerberg again feels like she is at the start of something, blissfully unaware of limitations or horizons or destinations.“I don’t know what the end looks like,” she said. “I might be a completely different player to who I used to be. And I see that in a positive way.” That is the joy of youth: not knowing what you might yet become.Hegerberg returned to Lyon, and the Champions League, in October.Denis Balibouse/ReutersIn an ideal world, of course, Hegerberg would not have had that chance. It goes without saying that she would not have chosen to lose the better part of two seasons of her career to injury, and certainly not to lose the two seasons that she did.In January 2020, Hegerberg was more than just the finest female soccer player on the planet; she was the breakout star of the women’s game, set to become the sport’s dominant, animating force — at least in Europe — for the next decade or so. The previous year, she had been all but untouchable.In December 2018, Hegerberg had been named as the inaugural winner of the women’s Ballon d’Or. Six months later, she had scored a lightning, devastating hat-trick in the Champions League final, delivering her club, Olympique Lyon, a fourth consecutive European crown. By October 2019, she had secured another piece of history, breaking the record for the most goals scored in the competition.And then, when a scan confirmed she had ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee during a training session in January 2020, she faded from view. She was absent as the season went on hiatus in the aftermath of the pandemic. She was absent as Lyon won a fifth straight Champions League title.“I want to create more records,” Hegerberg said. “I want to be back scoring 40 or 50 goals a season.”Pedro Nunes/ReutersThat proved to be just the start. In September 2020, she sustained a stress fracture in her left tibia, putting an end to whatever hopes she harbored of a relatively quick return. Soon after, Lyon confirmed that she would not play at all until the fall of 2021, at the very earliest. In the end, 20 months would elapse before Hegerberg played again.For most athletes, that would have felt like a lifetime. In women’s soccer, it seems like an eternity. The game is evolving at such speed and at such scale in Europe that, by the time Hegerberg returned to the field in a Champions League game against the Swedish team Hacken in October, it had changed almost beyond recognition.Lyon was no longer Europe’s pre-eminent superpower; that tag now belonged to Barcelona, the team that had broken its stranglehold on the Champions League a few months earlier. Lyon had been deposed as French champion for the first time since 2006, by Paris St.-Germain, and it had even lost its reputation as the sport’s most glamorous destination: Sam Kerr, Tobin Heath and Pernille Harder had all been drawn to England, rather than France, by the television-generated wealth flooding into the game.After a while, Hegerberg even lost her standing as the continent’s standout player, too. Suddenly, that title belonged to Alexia Putellas, the Barcelona captain and reigning Ballon d’Or winner, with a raft of her teammates in her wake. Vivianne Miedema, Arsenal’s relentless forward, even seemed to have dislodged Hegerberg as the game’s most clinical finisher.There were elements of that growth she found welcome: the expansion of the Champions League group phase, a broadcast deal with the streaming service Dazn that has, to Hegerberg, “given the players the platform we deserve.” Others she did not, like being forced to watch from the outside as the totems and truisms of the game shifted, seeming to leave her behind.Still, though, she betrays no sense of bitterness. That is the nature of soccer: It is, as she puts it, “fresh,” in a state of almost constant renewal. “Life goes on,” she said. “I am fully aware I was away for a long time. People forget about you.”Patience, Hegerberg would admit, is not something that comes naturally to her. She is, by her own admission, a “very organized” person, the kind who might take a dim view of some minor inconvenience like a last-minute change of plans. Her recovery, though, has taught her its virtues; she has tried, as much as she can, not to sweat the small stuff. “Ask my agent,” she said. “He’s almost proud of me.”It is as much a practical choice as a philosophical one. Injury, and the arduous, frustrating recovery that followed, changed Hegerberg’s perspective on her career — hence the greater determination to “take joy” from it — but it is telling that she describes fretting over trivialities as a “waste of calories.” A worry is just energy that could be put to better use elsewhere. She has become more patient because she does not want to waste any time.“I could have said that five Champions Leagues and a Ballon d’Or was enough,” she said. “But I want to create more records. I want to be back scoring 40 or 50 goals a season. They’re mad numbers, and it will take time, but I know I can.” She is driven, she said, not by proving a point to a game that moved on without her, but “proving things to myself.”“It is about self-respect,” she added. “I want to get ahead of my limits. That is what I want to do as an athlete: explode all limits that exist.”“I don’t know what the end looks like,” Hegerberg said. “I might be a completely different player to who I used to be. And I see that in a positive way.”Denis Balibouse/ReutersHer first target, of course, is restoring Lyon to the pinnacle: reclaiming both its French and European championships. The club faces Juventus, the Italian champion, in the Champions League quarterfinals this week. “We won it five times in a row,” Hegerberg said, giving away a brief, solitary flash of exasperation. “It was something historical, something that maybe nobody will ever do again. Maybe people forgot that.”After that, her targets may include returning to the international fold; she has not played for Norway since 2017, in protest over the disregard the country’s authorities had for the women’s game. Martin Sjogren, the national team coach, said in February that a “closer dialogue” with Hegerberg meant that playing for her country again “feels possible.” She may yet return in time to feature in this summer’s European Championship.Whether she will ever be the Ada Hegerberg she was, she does not yet know, of course. She is still waiting, patient and impatient, to find out. The prospect that she will be different, though, does not fill her with dread. Perhaps her second edition will be even better. That, after all, is why she feels like a kid again: because her world, once more, is full of possibility. More

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      French Soccer Wrestles Surge in Stadium Violence

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      The return of supporters to stadiums in France has been accompanied by a series of games postponed or marred by trouble in the stands.Only 3 minutes 54 seconds into the match, Dimitri Payet jogged gingerly toward the corner flag at the Stade Gerland. The game between his team, Marseille, and the host, Lyon, was young and still formless. There had been no goals. There had barely been time for a chance. Everybody, fans and players alike, was still settling in.In the stands above him, Wilfried Serriere, 32, a food delivery driver, looked down and saw a half-liter bottle of water at his feet. It was full. Payet was placing the ball for a corner. His back was turned. In images captured by the stadium’s security cameras and later played in a courtroom, Serriere can be seen picking up the bottle, lowering his hood, and throwing it.A beat later, Payet fell to the grass, clutching his face. The bottle had caught him flush on the cheek.Dimitri Payet has been hit twice this season by objects thrown from the stands.Benoit Tessier/ReutersPayet’s teammates rushed to his aid. Anthony Lopes, Lyon’s goalkeeper, gestured at his own fans, pleading for calm. Later, Serriere told a court that he did “not know what went on in my head: euphoria, I don’t know.” He accepted he had thrown the bottle that struck Payet, but he could not explain why.The rest of France has spent the opening months of the soccer season asking itself the same question. A wave of violence has washed over Ligue 1, the country’s top division, since fans returned to its stadiums in August after a yearlong absence caused by the coronavirus pandemic.Two games, both involving Marseille, have been suspended — and eventually postponed — after Payet was struck by an object thrown from the stands. In Lyon, the players were taken off the field quickly. In the previous incident, at Nice, there was an angry confrontation on the field between Marseille’s players and hundreds of opposition fans. That confrontation also had consequences: A Nice fan was given a 12-month suspended sentence for kicking Payet, and a Marseille coach was barred for the rest of the season for punching a field invader.Those, though, were only the two most high-profile incidents. Fans have invaded the field during games at Lens and Angers. There have been pitched battles between rival groups of ultras before and after games in several cities. Missiles have been thrown at Montpellier and Metz and the Parc des Princes, home of Paris St.-Germain.In all, nine games in Ligue 1 have been afflicted this season by what the newspaper Dauphiné Libéré has described as an “epidemic” of violence, one so rampant that France’s soccer authorities have come to regard it as an existential threat. Vincent Labrune, the president of the French league, has called it nothing less than “a question of survival for our sport.”If that sounds hyperbolic, it is at least rooted in realism. There is a fear the violence could have financial ramifications; Roxana Maracineanu, the country’s sports minister, has said French soccer cannot “collectively afford” to fail to deliver the content the league’s broadcasters have paid for. But there is also concern that it could make France an inhospitable place for players to work, too.An incident involving Payet during a game at Nice in August led to on-field confrontations that drew in players, coaches, fans and security staff members.Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt Serriere’s sentencing, Axel Daurat, a lawyer representing Payet and Marseille, testified that the player had suffered “significant” psychological impact as a result of being attacked twice in three months. “The fear will be there every time he puts the ball down for a corner,” Daurat said.But while the potential consequences are clear, there has been less progress on the causes. Labrune has suggested that the increase in disorder is best read as a reflection of the state of post-pandemic French society: “Anxious, worried, fractured, argumentative and — I have to say — a little crazy.”And yet that explanation does not quite withstand scrutiny. France is hardly alone in feeling a certain civic fractiousness as it emerges, haltingly and uncertainly, into an uncomfortable new reality. Most of Europe’s other major leagues, greeting that same reality, have not seen anything like the upsurge in violence Ligue 1 has faced.“It feels a little bit like cod psychology to say that it is to do with a tension in society manifesting in the stadium,” said Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe. More likely, he said, is that the violence illustrates a structural, institutional failing.“It is like the clubs have lost a little bit of expertise,” he said. “In the incident between Lens and Lille, there was no buffer zone between the home and away fans. I have not seen that at a game in 20 years, maybe more. The clubs put a lot of emphasis on the Covid protocols for returning to the stadiums. Perhaps there was not enough focus on security.”Evain argued that may be connected to the loss of experienced stewards and security staff members during the pandemic, and he drew a parallel between the French experience and the scenes at Wembley Stadium in London in July, when thousands of ticketless fans stormed the gates when England played Italy in the Euro 2020 final. A sharply critical report this month documented how policing failures had left stadium security employees in an impossible — and potentially deadly — situation that day. “You cannot ask someone who is underpaid, undertrained and in poor working conditions to risk their health to stop someone going on the field,” Evain said.Nicolas Hourcade, a sociologist at the École Centrale de Lyon who specializes in fan movements, suggested that lack of expertise has been compounded by the financial difficulties faced by French teams. France, alone among Europe’s major leagues, chose not to conclude its pandemic-interrupted 2019-20 season, and its teams are still reeling from the subsequent collapse of the league’s broadcast deal.“It is possible the clubs did not invest enough in security,” he said, “which would explain why the measures were sometimes insufficient.”But while that provides a possible explanation for why French soccer has provided such fertile ground for the violence, it does not offer insight into the root of it. Maracineanu, the sports minister, has laid blame at the door of France’s ultra groups, urging their leaders to “control your troops.” But it is not quite so simple.At Serriere’s hearing, it emerged that he had been a Lyon fan for 15 years — though news reports noted he attended court in a Bayern Munich jersey — but was not a member of any organized group. He was not, in other words, an ultra.“There have been incidents involving ultra groups,” said Pierre Barthélemy, a lawyer who has acted on behalf of the ultra movement. He cited two, specifically, including the field invasion at Lens, which he said had been triggered by the presence of “Belgian hooligans” among the visiting Lille fans, and an incident at a game in Montpellier that the ultras were boycotting.Smoke from a flare in Montpellier. Fans also have thrown bottles, smoke bombs and punches this season.Eric Gaillard/Reuters“When the game was suspended at Nice, it was because the authorities had let people throw missiles on the field for 40 or 50 minutes,” Barthélemy said. “These are not organized incidents. They are spontaneous, and most are not coming from the ultras.”That, however, only makes them harder to police. France has some of the most draconian punishments for crowd disorder in Europe, Evain said, including the ability to close grandstands or even entire stadiums.He fears the current outbreak will be met by a “populist” response: increased calls for monitoring of fans in stadiums, and the greeting of any incident, even an individual action, with a collective punishment. At least one club owner has confided privately that he would agree to play behind closed doors if the issues continued.But perhaps more significant, the atomized nature of the incidents in France makes them harder to understand. “Violence caused by ultras and incidents caused by other fans are not related,” said Hourcade, the sociologist.Violence may be an organizational failure, he said. Or perhaps long-running grievances between ultra groups are resurfacing after lying dormant during the pandemic.But threading through it all is the sense that the stadium has become a place where lines can be crossed and taboos broken, and 3:54 into a game, when the trill of the whistle has barely faded and the game has barely begun, a fan can look at a bottle and, without ever knowing why, pick it up and hurl it at a player, and land another blow on the image French soccer presents to the world. More

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      Barcelona Femení and the Pursuit of Perfection

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      Barcelona Femení is the champion of Spain and Europe, and perhaps the most dominant club team in the world. The team’s coach and his players expect it to be better.BARCELONA, Spain — These are the bare statistics of Barcelona Femení’s season so far. The team has played nine games in the league. It has won nine games in the league. It has won them, in fact, by such a margin that the word “won” does not quite capture it. Barcelona’s first game ended, 5-0. So did its second. In its third and fourth games, it scored eight.That was only the start. The next week, it beat Alavés by 9-1. Late last month, it faced Real Sociedad, the one team still vaguely, theoretically, in its slipstream at the summit of La Liga Fémenina. That finished 8-1. In the middle of all that, it found time to deconstruct Arsenal, the otherwise unbeaten leader of Britain’s Women’s Super League, too.Including its two appointments in the Champions League, Barcelona has played 11 games this season. It has conceded three goals — one each to Alavés, Real Sociedad and Arsenal — and it has scored a scarcely believable 60. Its coach, Jonatan Giráldez, has weighed all of that evidence before drawing his conclusion: Barcelona really should have scored more goals.The natural assumption might be that he is, if not joking, then perhaps exaggerating for effect, but Giráldez is quite serious. In his mind, it is a simple equation: You just have to place the numbers in proper context. “We have generated more than 200 chances,” Giráldez said. “So if you look at it like that, we have not scored very many.”Barcelona’s ledger this season: played 11, won 11, scored 60, allowed 3.Eric Alonso/Getty ImagesThis is a manager’s job, of course: to demand constant improvement from players, to refuse them the luxury of resting on their laurels, to eschew the very idea of being satisfied. “That’s what coaches are like,” said Marta Torrejón, the experienced Barcelona defender, “always wanting more.”Giráldez’s reasoning, though, is rather more pragmatic. He was promoted to head coach last summer after the unexpected departure of his predecessor, Lluís Cortés, only weeks after the club had won not just the Spanish league and its domestic cup but also its first Champions League title, crushing Chelsea, 4-0, in the final.Giráldez, 29, was given the job ahead of a cluster of other applicants — at least 20 coaches from around the world speculatively sent in their résumés — essentially as a continuity candidate, someone who knew “our ideas and our identity,” as the club’s sporting director, Markel Zubizarreta, put it.To Giráldez, the job is a considerable privilege and a constant pressure. Barcelona, now the foremost team in women’s soccer, has standards to maintain and expectations to meet. He does not ask for more from his players out of rote instinct; he does it because he knows that what appears to be a slight fissure at this stage of the season could prove a fatal fault line later on.“We have conceded two goals from set pieces this season,” Giráldez said. (The third, scored by Real Sociedad’s Sanni Franssi, came from a counterattack.) “One from a corner, one from a free kick. When you win a game, 8-1, that goes unnoticed, but we have to improve that, because when we play in the final rounds of the Champions League, against Lyon or Paris St.-Germain or Wolfsburg, that action could send us home.“If we have 25 chances in a game, the goalkeeper saves 13, and 12 go wide. In a more balanced game, we would not have so many chances, so we have to make sure we take more of them. We have to work out why we did not score more goals: We got nine against Alavés, but I had the sensation that we could have scored 15. Why didn’t we?”Barcelona’s 29-year-old, first-year coach, Jonatan Giráldez.Ritzau Scanpix/Via ReutersIt is important, he quickly adds, to recognize that it is very hard to score eight goals in a game, to appreciate and to celebrate that. And then demand even better.“You can win, 8-0, and still have a lot of things to improve,” Giráldez said. “My job is to detect what we have done badly and modify it. It is about improving every detail.”Those details are not easy to find at Barcelona, not these days. In the eight years since Torrejón joined the club, it has changed almost beyond recognition. “It is like a different place,” she said. “From zero to 100.”When Torrejón arrived, training sessions still took place in the evening, because the players either attended college or went to work during the day. Already a fixture on Spain’s national team back then, she had joined on the promise that Barcelona would turn professional. There was talk of significant investment, attracting a sponsor, building a winning team.When the move came, in 2015, it felt “like luxury,” Torrejón said: arriving at Barcelona’s training complex in the morning, having breakfast together as a team, enjoying access to the club’s medical services and its conditioning staff and its state-of-the-art facilities. Still, though, “thinking about winning the Champions League was impossible,” she said.Alexia Putellas, already honored as Europe’s player of the year, is a finalist for the Ballon d’Or.Tt News Agency/Via ReutersAsisat Oshoala scored one goal and set up another in a 4-0 win over Arsenal in the Champions League in October.Enric Fontcuberta/EPA, via ShutterstockBarcelona did not choose, unlike many of its peers, to use the financial clout of its parent club to accelerate its growth. “For 10 million euros,” or about $11.5 million, “you could buy a team of the best players in the world,” Zubizarreta said. “There are teams out there that are projects based on doing that. Lyon has done it. Chelsea has done it. Manchester City has an English core but they have done it, too.”Barcelona, he said, wanted to do it differently. “The best thing we can do is be ourselves,” Zubizarreta said. Instead of upgrading its squad with a patchwork of superstars, it decided to allow the players it had to flourish, to build a team that was “distinctively Barcelona.”Progress was halting. “It is very hard to climb the ladder organically,” Torrejón said. There was a Champions League semifinal appearance in 2017, but for three years in succession the team finished second in the league to Atlético Madrid. In that, perhaps, lay the only conceptual difference between the club’s men’s and women’s divisions. “The men’s team not winning trophies to invest in the future would not, maybe, be the best-received news,” Zubizarreta said.The reward seemed to come in 2019. Barcelona finished second in the league, again, but qualified for its first Champions League final. It met Lyon, the sport’s equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, in Budapest, and was swept away in the first half.“It was a mirror,” Zubizarreta said. “We could see how far we had to go.”As soon as he returned from Hungary, he sought out the club’s conditioning experts. There was no shortage of talent, but he knew that Barcelona’s players had to be fitter, faster and stronger to compete with the very best clubs in Europe.What followed, according to Giráldez, an assistant coach at the time, was a “brutal” change in the way Barcelona trained. “We could improve quickly at the start,” he said. But the further up the curve the players got, the harder they had to work even for the smallest gains.That approach became so embedded in the club that it has endured even what might have appeared to be its apogee: the treble acquired under Cortés last season, capped by a destruction of Chelsea in the Champions League final that echoed Barcelona’s own experience against Lyon two years previously.And so, even now, Giráldez can watch his team, champions of everything, scoring five and six and eight and nine against its opponents, with its goal difference — in the league alone — of plus 52, and ask for more. And not only can his players understand his gentle chiding and detailed tape sessions, but they can also appreciate them.“The secret is that we are competing with ourselves,” Torrejón said. “You compete with your rival for points or for qualification, but with yourself to be better every day, for your place in the team. That is the biggest struggle: with yourself. The coach might always want more, but we do as a team. We are never satisfied.“Why be happy with scoring four when you should have scored eight?” More

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      USWNT's Catarina Macario Is Just Getting Started

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      She learned soccer in Brazil and developed in the United States. Now a pro in France, the 21-year-old forward is proving she belongs alongside the world’s best players.The first steps of Catarina Macario’s path toward professional soccer are easy to pick out, even in the grainy videotapes of her playing the sport as a girl. She doesn’t scissor over the ball so much as dance over it. She darts past defenders or lobs the ball over them. She leaves goalkeepers flat-footed.Even before she had entered her teens, Macario had mastered the two skills every Brazilian striker learns early: how to put the ball in the net and how to race toward the nearest camera to celebrate.And yet Macario was different. Soccer is ubiquitous in Brazil, so it was only natural that she gravitated to the game played on its beaches, fields and streets. But as a young girl growing up in São Luís, a coastal city in Brazil’s northeast, and Brasília, the capital, she used to wonder if becoming a professional was even viable.In a country where 47 percent of the population identifies as mixed race, Macario was a triple outlier: a girl with dark skin who played soccer. Discrimination and a lack of opportunities were common. So were insults. She was called a monkey. A lesbian. Just for wanting to play.“Sadly, I was often the only girl at that time,” said Macario, whose first forays in the sport were games with classmates in a futsal league and on boys’ teams. “It was very much so shamed upon to be a girl and playing soccer.”She added: “I knew I loved soccer and I wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I would question whether it would even be possible just because of that.”Less than a decade later, Macario, 21, has carved out a place for herself alongside the top players in the world.Macario signed with Lyon in January. It is battling P.S.G. for the French title.Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn January, she turned pro, announcing she would forgo her senior year at Stanford University — where she scored 63 goals in 68 games — to sign with the world’s most dominant professional team, Olympique Lyonnais Féminin. Weeks later, her switch in citizenship complete, she made her debut for the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s national team (and scored in her second game). On Tuesday, she was expected to be named to the United States roster for an important pre-Olympic tournament.If Macario’s rise continues, and if she can beat out a who’s who of more experienced players — Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Tobin Heath, Christen Press, Lynn Williams — for a place in the American attack, she could be headed to the Olympics by July, and to a World Cup by 2023.“I think she is the future of what the U.S. women’s national team wants to be,” Macario’s former coach at Stanford, Paul Ratcliffe, said in a phone interview. “I envision they could build a team around her, that’s how highly I think of her as a player.”Sometimes, she can hardly believe how far she has come, and how fast.“To me, I’m essentially just this little kid that’s going to play with the best players in the world,” Macario said in a video call this spring from her apartment in Lyon, France. “It’s a little intimidating, but at the same time, that’s the challenge — that’s why I chose to be here.”On the ball, Macario is eye-catchingly quick, powerful enough to create space, deft enough to leave defenders grasping at the ones she has vacated. After Macario’s first goal for the U.S. national team, Megan Rapinoe called her a “different kind of player.” Others have placed her on an higher plane: comparing her to Brazil’s six-time world player of the year, Marta.Even in her childhood, Macario stood out. She says she can’t recall the number of lamps she and her older brother broke while playing soccer in their apartment in Brazil, but she remembers the hours she dedicated to extra training with her father before practices to nurture her talent. It was what she used to answer the discrimination, the obstacles and the people who told her a girl didn’t have a place in soccer, and show them she deserved one “based on what I did on the field.”“Maybe,” she added, “I’m even better than you.”When she turned 12, though, a rule barred her from continuing to play with boys in Brasília, where her family was living. Without any competitive girls’ teams as an option, the family took a leap of faith, Macario said, and decided to allow her to move to the United States with her father and brother to secure a better future.When the family arrived in San Diego, they didn’t speak English, and were grappling with the separation from Macario’s mother, who remained in Brazil, where she worked as a doctor. The long-distance relationship continued for seven years. Her mother still lives in Brazil, with plans to travel to France.“The one thing that was keeping us together, in a way, was the fact that I was playing soccer and that I was getting better,” Macario said.A brilliant youth career attracted the attention of top college teams, but there was a constant pressure, she said, to keep going, to make the family’s sacrifices worth it.Macario was a record-setting scorer and two-time national champion at Stanford.Randy Vazquez/Bay Area News Group, via Associated PressHer steep rise from college star to full-time professional was swift after she became an American citizen last October. Hours earlier, she had been called up to her first training camp with the senior national team. But to be eligible to play, she first needed the approval of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. When it arrived in January, the U.S. women’s coach, Vlatko Andonovski, wasted no time bringing her into the fold.“Of course, as an immigrant to the U.S.A. myself, I understand how special it is to get that U.S. passport, so I’m really happy for her,” said Andonovski, a native of North Macedonia.Andonovski was in a select group of people from whom Macario sought guidance as she weighed the choice of a career in Europe or in the National Women’s Soccer League in the United States, where many of her national teammates play. The decision to go to Lyon was Macario’s, but Andonovski told her he supported whichever path she chose as long as her play continued at a high level. “Most important,” he said, “what she is getting in France is training with world-class players every day.”Moving to Europe is a nontraditional path for most American college players, though increasingly an option for national team stars. While her decision to go and to take on learning yet another language was difficult, Macario said her choice of playing for the United States over her birth country, Brazil, which had pursued her for years, was a simple one.“I left Brazil for a reason, and that was because my parents wanted a better life for my brother and I,” she said of moving to the United States. “For me, it’s home. It’s where I became who I am today.”“It’s a little intimidating,” Macario said of competing at the highest levels of women’s soccer, “but at the same time, that’s the challenge.”Gregg Newton/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAnd while the most surprising part of her trajectory — from youth scoring sensation in Southern California to national champion at Stanford to the women’s national team to Lyon — may be the speed with which it took place, she says she knows she still has quite a bit to learn.“I’m not up to that level yet,” she said of training against international teammates like Lyon defender Nikita Parris or alongside forwards she has long admired, like Lloyd. “During practices, they’re so intense. It almost makes the games easy.”Now she shares the field with them and others, and she expects to continue to do so for years to come. Looking forward, she said, her goals are simple.“Win everything,” she said, laughing. More

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      The Women's Team Won a Title. Weeks Later, Owners Shut It Down.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Rising Tide Sinks One BoatA top women’s soccer team won its first league title last season. But as richer rivals pour money into the women’s game, Kopparbergs decided to fold rather than fight.A Champions League defeat against Manchester City turned out to be the final match for Kopparbergs/Gothenburg F.C.Credit…Jason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersFeb. 24, 2021, 12:05 a.m. ETAs far as Elin Rubensson knew, the call was about plans for the coming year, nothing more. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, she and her colleagues at Kopparbergs/Gothenburg F.C. were summoned for a remote team meeting. They dialed in expecting to hear details of the club’s ambitions for the new season.Things, after all, were looking good. A month earlier, Kopparbergs had been crowned Sweden’s women’s soccer champion for the first time; it had been only a couple of weeks since the team had played Manchester City, the English powerhouse, in the knockout rounds of the Women’s Champions League.Though Rubensson had not played at all in the 2020 league campaign — she opted out while expecting her first child — and had missed the celebrations of the title victory after testing positive for the coronavirus, she was excited. She had given birth to a son, Frans, just before the holidays. She was thinking about when she might start playing again.And then “a bolt from a clear blue sky.” It was over.On the call, the club’s executives told the players that Kopparbergs — on the back of the greatest season in its history — was being closed down, effective immediately. It would not defend its league title. It would forfeit its place in next season’s competitions. The Manchester City defeat would be its last game as a club.“It was a shock for all of us,” Rubensson said. “We did not expect it. Our son was only a week old, and suddenly I had no club to play for. We didn’t know what was going to happen or what to do.”Elin Rubensson, right, learned in a phone call that she did not have a club anymore.Credit…Adam Ihse/EPA, via ShutterstockOver the last decade or so, the landscape of women’s soccer in Europe has shifted so fundamentally as to be unrecognizable. As the game’s popularity has grown, as the broadcast deals and sponsorship money have poured in and more and more fans have come through the gates, it has attracted the attention of the continent’s history-laden — and cash-soaked — men’s teams.The Champions League has been dominated by the game’s hegemon, Olympique Lyonnais, with only the superheated rise of its national rival, Paris St.-Germain, providing any threat to Lyon’s primacy.The lavish spending of the clubs of the Women’s Super League in England has attracted players such as Tobin Heath, Rose Lavelle, Pernille Harder and Sam Kerr, turning it into what many regard as the strongest domestic women’s competition on the planet. Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Juventus and Bayern Munich have all dedicated a portion of their considerable resources to trying to keep pace. Manchester United fielded its first women’s team in 2018; Real Madrid bought an existing one and rebranded it in its name last year.While that investment is welcome and overdue, it is not without cost. Across the continent, the teams that did so much to sustain and grow women’s soccer before the money arrived, the clubs that constitute so much of its history, have found it all but impossible to compete: England’s Doncaster Belles, Spain’s Rayo Vallecano, Italy’s A.S.D. Torres, even Turbine Potsdam of Germany, a two-time Champions League winner. Glasgow City, champion of Scotland for 13 years in a row, knows it can hold out for only so long now that Rangers and Celtic are showing an interest in the women’s game.It was that same current that forced Kopparbergs’s hand. The club had moved to Gothenburg a couple of decades before — it had previously played “on a bad pitch, close to the airport” in the satellite town of Landvetter, according to its official history — at the invitation of the local authorities, hoping to give the city’s women and girls a place to play and a chance to dream.But though it was backed by one of Sweden’s largest breweries — Kopparberg is one of the world’s largest producers of cider, and it shared a chairman, Peter Bronsman, with the soccer team — the women’s side was always a small-scale enterprise. “It was four friends doing this as a hobby, almost,” said Carl Fhager, a lawyer engaged to oversee the winding down of the club. “It was not a big organization. It did not have many members. In Swedish terms, it was a very small club.”After watching wealthy rivals like Manchester City pour money into women’s soccer, Gothenburg officials said they no longer saw a viable path to success.Credit…Matt McNulty – Manchester City/Manchester City FC, via Getty ImagesThat did not prevent it from enjoying remarkable success. It was able to sign Hope Solo, Christen Press and Yael Averbuch, all United States internationals. Though it had to wait until 2020 for its first championship, it had won the Swedish Cup three times and was a regular participant in the Champions League.It was those forays into Europe — those encounters with the new powers of the women’s game — that convinced Bronsman and his board that their club’s time was passing. A couple of years ago, they had opened discussions with I.F.K. Gothenburg, one of the city’s men’s teams, about folding the club into its operations.The idea was eventually vetoed by I.F.K.’s members — Swedish clubs are member-owned nonprofits, and the idea of one’s taking over another was too alien to be tolerable — but the more it ran into the likes of Manchester City, with its squad packed with international stars and its training facilities shared with the club’s men, the more Kopparbergs felt the writing was on the wall.“It became even clearer in the Champions League,” Fhager said. “The club knew it was not competitive anymore, and the difference in facilities was not fair on the players.” It was the same reasoning that would appear on the statement released by the club on Dec. 29, confirming its closure.By that time, Kopparbergs had contacted Fhager, tasking him with finding a new home for the players: either by identifying a larger club to assume the team wholesale — ideally one in Gothenburg — or finding new homes for as many members of the squad as possible. He contacted not only Gothenburg’s four men’s soccer teams, but its ice hockey clubs, too, anyone who he thought might have an interest in assuming the Kopparbergs players and the team’s place in Sweden’s top tier, the Damallsvenskan.One was particularly responsive. Marcus Jodin, the chief executive of BK Hacken, one of Gothenburg’s biggest men’s teams, had seen the news that Kopparbergs would be shuttered, but had not thought too much of it. “We were really busy,” he said. “We were trying to close a big transfer for the men’s team.”His phone, though, soon started pinging with messages from colleagues and friends. “They said this might be a chance for us,” he said. Hacken had a strategic plan to increase its investment in the women’s game — its women’s team was at the time playing in Sweden’s third tier — as part of an attempt to become a “fully balanced club between men’s and women’s sports.”When Fhager called Hacken on the afternoon of Dec. 29, Jodin was ready to listen. The next day, at a meeting of Hacken’s board, team officials discussed the idea. Though taking over another team was anathema, the appeal was clear.Part of Jodin’s argument was financial. “The economics of women’s soccer are moving really fast,” he said. “If it takes us five to seven years to make it to the top level in the normal way, then where are the economics then? Do we have the time and money to wait that long.”But part of it was moral, too. Without Kopparbergs, Gothenburg would not have an elite women’s team. “The club was founded to give girls in the city a chance to dream,” Jodin said. “And that dream can’t move to Malmo.”BK Hacken, now strengthened by some of the Kopparbergs players, will take the former champions’ place in the new league campaign.Credit…Mattias Ivarsson/BK HackenWith the backing of the board, he set about not just putting the idea to the club’s members, addressing all of their “questions and fears,” but making Hacken ready if they agreed. “We wanted the players to notice a change from Day 1,” Jodin said. “They had been through a nightmare, losing their jobs and income. If we had not been ready for them, we would have failed.”In late January, the merger went to a vote, as all decisions at all Swedish clubs must. Ninety-two percent of Hacken’s fans agreed to it: The club would take on Kopparbergs’s players, its commitments and its place in the league. The team would change its name and its jersey. All that would be left of a quarter-century of history was the nonprofit association number under which Kopparbergs was registered.For those involved, it is a happy ending. “There were only two alternatives,” Jodin said. “Either the club closed, and the players left, or they became part of Hacken.”Fhager said most of the fans he had spoken to were enthusiastic: “The idea of Kopparbergs was to give Gothenburg an elite team that girls can aim for. It still has that.”For Rubensson, “everything feels great.”“The size of the organization and the facilities are the main difference,” she added. “We’ve been very well welcomed. We feel like this will be a very good step for us, at a time when Swedish teams need to improve to be successful in Europe.”For her, as it is for everyone else, this is the future. Kopparbergs, and the teams like it, are the past.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More