When Kathrine Kühl was five, growing up in the small Danish town of Hillerød, she joined a girls’ football team. Hillerød has a tiny population of just over 36,000 but unlike many of the players around her at Arsenal, Kühl never had to play with boys because girls’ football was available to her.
“I was really lucky that they had a girls’ team at almost every age range,” says the 20-year-old Denmark midfielder. “So, I just started playing. It was my parents who found the little club for me because I wanted to do a sport and then they were like: ‘Oh there’s something called football. Do you want to try?’”
Kühl joined Arsenal in January from Nordsjælland, the club that recruited her from Hillerød Fodbold in 2018. She is part of the generation that has benefited from women’s and girls’ football being accessible and normal. “It kind of caught me quite early on and I found out that I was good with the ball,” Kühl says.
“I remember one of my first experiences was that we played a tournament with the school every year. We were really young, I think I was five at that point, and everyone was telling my parents: ‘You can really see that Kathrine is good with the ball.’
“At that age your mind is everywhere else. Someone was dancing on the pitch and some others were just running around and couldn’t kick the ball in the right direction, but it just came naturally to me and I felt really good on the pitch.”
It is natural, too, that Kühl likes to work with girls at grassroots level. Her latest step in doing so is through Uefa’s WePlayStrong campaign, which has partnered with Visa to give grassroots teams in the UK the chance to win a training session with Kühl or the England international Jess Carter.
“Looking back to when I was young and playing with all the girls at my age, it was a real privilege that we were so many girls who could play, but I feel like we can still get so many more girls and women into football,” Kühl says. “Because the sport is growing. When I’m on the pitch and I’m performing my best it’s when I feel like I’m the little girl from my home town just playing around having fun, not thinking about too much other stuff.”
When Arsenal showed an interest in the Dane, she was lucky enough to be at a club well aware that a part of their job was to prepare their fledgling star for a bigger move. “It was just an amazing environment to be a part of,” she says.
“They [Nordsjælland] took good care of me. There were always many staff around to help. I had individual plans to get me ready for a move to Arsenal, mentally, physically and technically. We pushed on every aspect of the game there, because the development of players is such a big part of the club.
“When I knew I would maybe try something new, when I finished school, I had more time and they offered me a full-time contract which meant that I could just be at the club and play football and I didn’t have to work beside it, which was really nice. Then I had an individual plan throughout the week, individual technical sessions, but also with the physical coach where we were doing high-speed runs and stuff, because I knew that the English league, for example, is really tough physically, so I was trying to prepare for that.”
That extra time helped Kühl prepare mentally, too. “I was in school every day, going directly to training and you don’t really have time to focus on the mental stuff and doing tasks at home because you do so much else. So to have a little bit more time to focus on that really made a big difference. It gave me time to understand what my values are and how I perform at my best.”
Stepping out on to the pitch for Arsenal was still a shock to the system. “I’m really happy with how I prepared for that move, but there’s no doubt that the English Women’s Super League is so different from the Danish League,” Kühl says. “It’s on a much higher level, so I still need to get used to it. I knew that the tempo was high, I had the experience of it with the national team. But the tempo was so much higher in the first game and just the quality of the players in Arsenal in the league are top. To train with these people every day, it develops me so much compared to FCN and where it was more working on the individual side.”
Kühl played more minutes than she perhaps would have expected to in her first season at Arsenal because injuries left the squad threadbare and meant everyone had to pitch in, regardless of how ready and settled they were. “It taught me so much and inspired me so much to be a part of that team last season because even though we had so many injuries and so many obstacles on our way, we still kept fighting,” she says. “It was so cool to see how every single person stood up and performed their very best every single day, and people who hadn’t played a lot were stepping up when they had the chance and it was really cool to see.”
Kühl excelled at the World Cup with Denmark, finishing in the top 10 for distance covered, dribbles and tackles over 90 minutes. The start to Arsenal’s season has been tough though, with the team exiting the Champions League in qualifying after defeat by Paris FC on penalties, undoing the work of battling to third last season.
“It’s really disappointing and I think the schedule after the World Cup has been crazy, people coming in from the final and having to play such an important game almost a week after,” Kühl says. “That’s really, really tough and something that I hope in the future could be changed.
“Of course, you always want to play European football. Last year, they were some of the best games we had, played on the biggest stage with many people watching, so it’s really sad that we’re not going to experience that this year. Now, it gives us the opportunity to have full focus on the league and in the cups we’re playing. Arsenal is a club who goes for the trophies so that’s just what we’re going to keep on doing.”
