Ada Hegerberg seeks to emulate Lionel Messi and win International Cup with Norway

She has incessantly been described because the Lionel Messi of girls’s football as a result of her scoring feats.

Now Ada Hegerberg is having a look to perform what the Argentinian nice in spite of everything completed a couple of months in the past and win a International Cup to sate a in large part unfulfilled world occupation.

A complete of 3 objectives throughout 3 primary world tournaments for Norway doesn’t do justice to some of the biggest scorers within the historical past of the ladies’s sport. Hegerberg, in the end, has netted extra objectives within the Champions League — the absolute best level in girls’s football at membership stage — than any participant, with 59. She changed into the document holder on the age of 24.

With Lyon, she’s a six-time Champions League winner, an eight-time French league winner and a six-time French Cup winner. She has a scoring reasonable of greater than a function in line with sport for Lyon, Eu football’s maximum embellished crew.

Oh, and naturally, she used to be the primary feminine winner of the Ballon d’Or in 2018 at an award rite in Paris marred by way of a French DJ asking Hegerberg to twerk.

But with regards to {hardware} thru feats for her nationwide crew, Hegerberg’s cabinet is naked.

The nearest she got here to a trophy for Norway used to be at her first ever senior world match — the Eu Championship in 2013 — when her crew misplaced within the ultimate to Germany.

Since then, it’s been a somewhat sorry story for a participant who for plenty of has transcended her nationwide crew. She hasn’t ever competed on the Olympics, her handiest International Cup used to be in 2015 when Norway exited within the spherical of 16, and there used to be a group-stage removal on the Eu Championship closing 12 months.

Hegerberg would have performed in additional primary tournaments had she no longer determined to rule herself out of variety for her nationwide crew for 5 years as a result of what she looked as if it would be a normal omit for girls’s football in Norway on the time. The crux of her frustration used to be the asymmetric tempo of development and technique within the girls’s sport. She used to be absent till 2022, when she opted to go back forward of that 12 months’s Eu Championship — coinciding with the coming of Lise Klaveness, her former Stabæk teammate, as president of the Norwegian football federation.

“I used to be in a position to have very truthful discussions with the federation, initially thru Lise,” she mentioned. “I’m very satisfied so that you could come again with the crew and get a brand new tale began.”

A 12 months later, Hegerberg remains to be making an attempt to make up for misplaced time in a Norway uniform — and after a irritating home season, too.

Hegerberg, who spent 21 months out in 2020-21 as a result of an anterior cruciate ligament harm, used to be lacking for any other seven months this season as a result of an unspecified harm that used to be no longer extensively reported.

Naturally, she scored a minute after coming off the bench in her comeback sport, for Lyon at Montpellier, and ended the season with six objectives in 9 video games in all competitions.

Scoring isn’t an issue for this maximum herbal of finishers — even at world stage, she has 43 objectives in 76 video games since making her senior debut for Norway in 2011 on the age of 16.

And nor is creating a stand for what she believes in. Only some months in the past, Hegerberg gave the impression in a video by way of human rights group Amnesty, tough reimbursement for the households of migrant staff who died whilst running on the males’s International Cup in Qatar.

“A particularly huge duty is put on footballers and it’s tricky, however that’s the truth,” she mentioned within the video. “I do know I’ve a place to turn my opinion on it.”

For Hegerberg, it’s the trophies which are lacking with Norway, which has received 4 primary titles however none for the reason that 2000 Sydney Olympics.

For that to modify, it might probably’t all simply be right down to Hegerberg. Her teammates are going to must step up, too.

Like Caroline Graham Hansen, the Barcelona midfielder who has 44 objectives in 98 video games for Norway and in short took a wreck from her nationwide crew after closing 12 months’s Eu Championship.

Norway is in a set with Switzerland, the Philippines and New Zealand. Whilst anticipated to achieve the knockout level, the Norwegians aren’t some of the favorites to win the match that starts later this month.

Hegerberg would possibly have one thing to mention about that.

Reporting by way of The Related Press.

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Ada Hegerberg

Norway

FIFA Girls’s International Cup