“I was always very fond of the ball and I was definitely a No 10,” Lise Klaveness says as she describes the kind of football she played while winning 73 caps for Norway. “I had played as a No 6 but I didn’t like it. I wanted to play with risk. So the coaches ended up playing me as an offensive midfielder because I had a high appetite for risk.”
The 41-year-old Klaveness is also a lawyer and a judge who, as the president of Norway’s FA, made a blistering speech at Fifa’s congress in Doha last March when she demanded that football leaders support migrant workers in Qatar, protect LGBTQ+ fans at the World Cup and make the game open to all. As a gay woman, happily married to former Norway international Ingrid Fosse Sæthre, Klaveness could have been jailed under Qatari law but, as she points out, she was at little risk personally.
