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Curious case of Ada Hegerberg's World Cup absence does nothing for the women's game

Norway will be without Champions League winner Ada Hegerberg at the World Cup - REUTERS
Norway will be without Champions League winner Ada Hegerberg at the World Cup - REUTERS

These are golden days for Ada Hegerberg. First she scores a hat-trick in a Champions League final, then a TV crew tiptoes into her Oslo home to tell her that she has just been voted BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year. One wonders, in her case, if there is such a condition as a flattery overdose. After all, for the star striker of Lyon’s all-conquering women’s team – one with two league defeats since 2010, and a goal difference over that span of plus-957 – life only seems to flow in one direction. It already feels an aeon since a wise-guy French DJ, unsure what to ask the inaugural winner of the female Ballon d’Or, settled for: “Can you twerk?”

It stands to reason that Hegerberg, fortified by another prodigious season for her club, should now be seeking to replicate such feats for her country. And yet when Norway troop out for their first World Cup game in Reims in 15 days’ time, they will do so without her. A tournament organised under the slogan “Dare to Shine” will take place without the most luminous talent of all. Hegerberg is choosing to stay away from France, not as an isolated protest but to sustain her indefinite hiatus from international football.

The most urgent question, naturally, is why. But it is one with a complex answer. On the surface, it looks almost perverse for a 23-year-old to be passing up the chance to showcase her gifts on an unprecedented global platform. She is adamant, though, that she will not be swayed.

“The management knows my views, and I will not elaborate on this in the media,” she said, in confirming her original decision. “I have felt pride in playing for the national team, but as the situation is, I have no motivation to continue.”

Broadly speaking, Hegerberg’s stance is rooted in a plea for greater equality between the men’s and women’s games. So far, so uncontroversial. But what makes her case doubly curious is the fact that Norway is perhaps the most progressive country in the world on this front. In a gesture that drew worldwide acclaim, it resolved in 2017 that its male and female players would receive the same money, almost £600,000 per year per team, for representing their nation. To enable parity, the men agreed to give up a pot of £53,000 in marketing payments.

Ada Hegerberg with the Ballon d'Or trophy - Credit: Reuters
Hegerberg won the Ballon d'Or last year Credit: Reuters

At one level, it feels problematic to suggest that the Norwegian women should express any kind of permanent gratitude for the concept of equal pay, which should ultimately be a sine qua non. But Hegerberg is yet to flesh out, in any specific terms, what in addition she wants. To take a step as dramatic as renouncing her national jersey in perpetuity, she must surely have a compelling case for change. The trouble is that whenever she is called upon to make it, Hegerberg reaches for oblique universalities that merely heighten the sense of intrigue.

“I think sometimes we need to come away and think, ‘Are we going as fast as we should be?’ Are we doing things right? Is this all talk?’” she said this week. These sentiments, while entirely laudable in themselves, do not truly address the strangeness of her situation. What exactly are Hegerberg’s grievances? And what can the Norwegian federation do to put them right, to restore its greatest asset to the fold? If she chose, Hegerberg could expand on her all her criticisms in a single statement. Instead, she is turning the stand-off into an elaborate guessing game.

So far as one can tell, Hegerberg’s objections relate to what she perceives as Norway’s failure of team culture. She has alluded to a lack of takhoyde, literally “headroom”, implying that she feels stifled within the national set-up, and not at liberty to express herself. In one interview with Aftenposten, she claimed that she returned from spells of international duty feeling like a worse player than before. She performed anonymously at the 2017 European Championships in Holland, and there were murmurs of team-mates becoming unhappy at her behaviour. “It’s better,” she concluded, “that I step aside.”

Evidently, there is no love lost between Hegerberg and Martin Sjogren, Norway’s coach. “You need to focus on the players who want to be part of a team,” he said, making her sound more like a tiresome agitator than the most feted female player on the planet. How much does this row arise from Hegerberg’s own intransigence? Any effort to find out quickly descends into a he-says, she-says tit-for-tat. Hegerberg insists that she has made her position abundantly clear, while Sjogren explains how the two parties have held multiple meetings to find common ground, all to no avail. Likewise, Lise Klaveness, Norway’s director of football, says she is none the wiser about what more she can offer.

It is sad that it should have to come to this. If Lionel Messi were missing a World Cup, there would be a global outcry. But Hegerberg looks likely, in the prime of her career, to be a forgotten bystander at the grandest event in the history of women’s football. Is it the unintended consequence of a petty dispute, or is Hegerberg waging a larger fight here, highlighting a lack of opportunity? “To all little girls around the world, believe in yourself,” she said at last year’s Ballon d’Or ceremony. Now she needs to spell out to those same little girls why they will not be seeing her on French fields this summer. For this is one impasse doing far more harm to the game than good.

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