Ada Hegerberg’s five-year protest shamed football – now we must cherish her talent as well as salute her activism

Norway’s most famous female player made her appearance at the national team squad announcement via a 50-second video message and began: “Long time no see.”

The national team head coach, Martin Sjogren, chose another phrase to welcome back Ada Hegerberg after a close to five-year absence from the national team: “I get one of the world’s best strikers. We can actually say that now I have all the best players available.”

Reports from the Norwegian television channel TV2 that the inaugural Ballon d’Or winner would be returning to Norway Women ignited worldwide interest in what otherwise would have been a routine press conference ahead of the squad’s World Cup qualifiers against Kosovo and Poland. Hegerberg is the all-time top scorer in the Women’s Champions League — her goals-to-game ratio at Lyon, for whom she has won the Champions League five times, is better than one a game — and the international game has been far poorer for her absence.

At her home in Lyon, the ball from the 2019 Champions League final in which she scored a thirty-minute hat-trick rests next to her record collection, and Hegerberg’s face looms from silver-framed magazine covers next to the medals dangling from the walls. She is still just 26, and after winning the Ballon d’Or at 23 gave an acceptance speech in two languages, neither of which are her mother tongue. In the women’s game, Hegerberg is box-office, glittering with stardust on the pitch and pursuing advocacy off it.

Hegerberg has never liked, let alone used, the term “boycott” for the events of 2017-22, but her protest over gender inequality at the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF) led to an absence from the 2019 World Cup and significantly lowered Norway’s medal hopes. Hegerberg often declined to go into detail, given gender inequality is born of a general disrespect towards women, although her 2020 ESPN+ documentary, My Name is Ada Hegerberg, revealed that the women’s team, preparing for World Cup qualifiers, were often relegated to inferior pitches and boots promised arrived late and in the wrong sizes.

Hegerberg claimed one coach tried to hush her when she raised these issues with a director. The striker felt that assurances from national team directors that the women’s team mattered amounted to no more than lip service: in one section, Hegerberg says that the NFF “took a train back to the 1800s and stayed there”. She would say later that she had nightmares. She grew “so tired” of being told that “‘you women complain too much'” that she had to “close my mouth or speak out”.

The sport will look back in shame that the world’s best striker not only felt it necessary to miss a World Cup to make a point about wide-ranging gender inequality but was met with backlash or misunderstanding elsewhere, to the extent that one journalist here asked who of Hegerberg, the playing group or the federation should be expected to apologise. It was actually far kinder in tone than the reception Hegerberg’s absence often inspires, and the documentary is laced with audio from former players and journalists withering in their criticism. “What do you want?” demands one, who accuses her of breaking off from the team and hijacking their World Cup preparations. “Nobody shall stand here and apologise for anything,” said Sjogren on Thursday. “We see the future as us.”

Even so, relationships with other Norway players have not always appeared so harmonious, with TV 2 reporting in 2018 that Hegerberg had removed several of her former Norway teammates from Facebook and Instagram. She declined to comment on this, but Chelsea’s Guro Reiten reportedly said: “We are a little tired of this case because it will always steal some energy from our group.”

The morning press call at 9.30am in Norway began with an in-depth look at the under-23s squad and a book plug, like Hegerberg was the grand prize on a game show or a Glastonbury headliner and all this was just the warm-up, the thirty-minutes of filler before the American Idol results. But that did not curdle the anticipation and, in the end, that 15-minute wait was small fry compared to the absence from the international stage that has sometimes felt interminable. “It feels incredibly good to come home and get back to the team,” Hegerberg said in the message, before signing off.

The NFF were left to answer the far more testing questions: namely, what has changed and how they convinced Hegerberg to return. The press conference announcing her hiatus in 2017 was one to watch through latticed fingers and prompted what Hegerberg described in her documentary as a “media war”. The NFF denied having had prior warning and suggested her decision to step back arrived out the blue when in reality there had been months of warnings. Sjorgen, when asked what the federation had done to motivate Hegerberg, said: “I believe being part of the national team should be enough.”

The NFF’s tone here was far more repentant and Sjogren admitted that they “probably could have done a lot differently”. Lise Klaveness, elected as president of the NFF in March, said that it took “too long” for them to “get in a position to secure Ada”.

Ada Hegerberg last played for Norway in 2017 (Photo: Getty)

Much of the credit goes to Klaveness, the sports lawyer and former Norway international. The first woman to lead the NFF in its 120-year history has been in regular dialogue with Hegerberg and stressed today that clubs — “not just the national teams (but) top football in general” — must “try to create security for players who are in an insecure situation”. There have been new hires and promises to professionalise the support around the squad.

Previously Klaveness was also the NFF’s head of elite football and noted in the past that she sometimes had difficulty discerning what Hegerberg was upset about. In late 2017, Norway granted equal pay for its men and women national team players, but Hegerberg always insisted that the issues went further.

“It’s so simple that the main focus is (…) just good contact, good conversations,” she said. “Are you rebuilding trust in the NFF? For this has been a case that has primarily been about Ada’s feedback to the Norwegian Football Association to the ceiling height (…) when it comes to giving women and girls the space they need to develop. What Ada pointed out were things NFF should improve: advice, performance, culture, top football culture. Ada is a strong voice in this, and strong voices are because Ada has performed at a world-class level. If people experience such a different place and team, they point to something that makes them feel that they have to withdraw in order to develop. Then we must listen and take note.

“Ada had made some very specific feedback. Ada wanted out and has stood by that choice all the way. I have unconditional respect for Ada’s choice to retire. Maybe the NFF should have received (Hegerberg’s decision) in a different way at the time. Everyone has become more and more concrete and eventually Martin and Ada have taken over. This dialogue had become sporty. All the conversations we had and were really about respect, common ambitions to want to be a role model for the girls who come after us. So it really became that: a good feeling. It is a real feeling to now be able to look forward to the European Championship and the World Championship, and board this ship together with the rest of the team. It is very, very nice to hear Ada Stolsmo Hegerberg’s name in the squad. This feels very good. It feels right that she should put on the Norwegian national team jersey again.”

Hegerberg has only recently returned from the ACL injury that sidelined her for 18 months. She and Norway have endured a longer break — she last played for them on July 24, 2017, or 1,704 days ago. That she is now primed to light up the European Championship will frighten the rest of the world and not least England, with whom Norway share a group.

“The mood among the Norway press is positive — this is a big opportunity to get our biggest star and one of the best players in the world back to our national team,” says Endre Lubeck, a former footballer and commentator for TV 2. “Norwegian people have been waiting for this for a long time: this is a big thing in Norway and the Ada situation has been discussed a lot.

“The men’s team haven’t been to a championship since 2000 so our women’s team are the one we can count on. We have missed a striker, and now we have the best in the world. Ada is starting to come back in shape, and I think many Norwegians now just dream about what she and Caroline Graham Hansen can do together up front in attack in England this summer.”

In a statement released on Thursday, Hegerberg said: “I love football, and I want to play football. I took a decision in 2017 that I stood by. But I had lot of time to reflect over the past two years, on many aspects. I was able to have very honest discussions with the Federation, through Lise at first. I am very glad to be able to come back with the team and get a new story started.”

Hegerberg has never regretted her decision to step back from the national team. Activism is no bad thing to be known for but conversations about her relationship with NFF have dominated discussions around Hegerberg and sometimes it has felt like there has been little room to appreciate her footballing ability.

That the NFF have given her sufficient reassurance will allow perhaps the finest striker of her generation to shine even brighter than before.

(Photo: Visionhaus/Getty Images)