Ada Hegerberg beamed with happiness as she towered over a gathering of the world’s greatest footballers, holding her trophy aloft on the balcony at the Grand Palais in Paris.
The ornate art nouveau exhibition centre beside the Champs-Elysees will host fencing and taekwondo at this summer’s Olympic Games – in 2018, it was the venue for a defining moment in women’s football history. Little wonder Lucy Bronze, watching on from the audience, grabbed her phone to take a picture.
Bronze’s Lyon team-mate had just become the first winner of the Ballon d’Or Feminin – like Stanley Matthews, the men’s award’s inaugural winner in 1956, it’s a distinction that inscribed Hegerberg’s immortality. “Young girls all over the world, please believe in yourselves,” the Norwegian said during her televised speech that night.
An inspiration off the field as much as on it, there was little doubting she deserved her award. She pipped Pernille Harder, Dzsenifer Marozsan, Marta and Sam Kerr to top spot, on a night when Luka Modric received the men’s prize.
Hegerberg had netted 53 goals in just 33 games during the previous season for Lyon, an annus mirabilis that yielded 15 goals in the Champions League – still a record for a single campaign, and almost twice as many as any other player that year – as Les Fenottes become European champions for a third successive year. Ten months after winning the Ballon d’Or, in October 2019, she’d score her 52nd Women’s Champions League goal to overtake Anja Mittag as the competition’s all-time leading goalscorer. She was just 24 years old.
Then, in January 2020, her world turned upside down. During training with Lyon, she ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee. She wouldn’t kick a ball in anger for 21 long, excruciating months.
PRACTISING GUT HEALTH
In the four-plus years that have passed since that shattering injury, Hegerberg has played little more than 60 club fixtures. Following her October 2021 return, she struggled to rediscover peak fitness and last season missed another six
