BEFORE ICELANDIC men won football matches, Icelandic women won football matches. The women’s national team became the first from Iceland to qualify for a major tournament when they secured a place at the 2009 European Championship in Finland. Their male counterparts would not repeat the feat for another seven years.
Iceland won eight of ten qualifiers ahead of the tournament, yet still finished as runners-up to a formidable France side. A two-legged play-off against the Republic of Ireland beckoned. Iceland had been in the same position four years earlier. Euro 2005 was tantalisingly close until a disastrous 2-7 defeat to Norway in Reykjavík shattered the dream before the second leg. There were no such issues against Ireland. A 1-1 draw in Dublin set the stage for a finale in Reykjavík, where the Icelanders cruised to a 3-0 victory that made history. Margrét Lára Viðarsdóttir, Iceland’s all-time leading goalscorer, finished that campaign with 12 goals, more than any other player in the entire qualification process.
Stelpurnar okkar (‘our girls’) were eliminated at the group stage in Finland after narrow defeats to Germany and Norway but carried their momentum through to qualification for the following competition, held in Sweden in 2013. Defeat to group winners Norway in the final round of fixtures forced Iceland back into the play-offs, where they dispatched Ukraine 6-4 on aggregate.
In Sweden they progressed from a fiendish group that pitted them against Germany and Norway, the eventual finalists. A 4-0 defeat to the hosts in the quarter-final was no disgrace, and Iceland qualified for a third consecutive tournament in 2017. It was the first time they had qualified automatically without having to win a play-off, but performances on the big stage were meek, and Iceland exited after finishing below Austria, France and Switzerland. Yet the sight of Iceland in the draw for a major tournament no longer causes a raised eyebrow. Indeed, throughout the last decade, the women’s national team has consistently sat inside the top 20 in the FIFA rankings, reflecting their status among the established elite. For context, Iceland rank above Argentina, Portugal and Belgium.
Iceland have not yet made their debut at a World Cup, as so many UEFA nations compete for so few spots. But they have come close at the last three times of asking. As in qualifying for Euro 2009, Iceland won eight of ten matches ahead of the 2011 World Cup, only to finish behind France with just one team going through to the play-offs. It was a similar story four years later when Iceland finished as runners-up to Switzerland. Yet the cruellest result was still to come. They finished behind Germany in qualification for the 2019 World Cup and would have gone through to the play-offs as one of the best second-placed teams, were it not for a quirky rule that stipulated results against the bottom team in each group – the Faroe Islands in Iceland’s case – did not count in the calculation.
This has all taken place in the context of a thriving domestic league, in which ten teams compete for a place in the Women’s Champions League. Though there are a handful of foreign players from Azerbaijan to Mexico, the domestic league provides a strong platform for local players. At Euro 2017, 15 of the Iceland squad played for Icelandic clubs, with most of the other players scattered across the Scandinavian leagues.
Guðbjörg Gunnarsdóttir – goalkeeper for Iceland and Djurgårdens IF in Sweden – believes the success of the women’s national team is a product of a progressive society.
‘We had the first female president in the world and we had the first gay prime minister, who was also a woman. It’s an Icelandic thing. In other parts of society women have been given bigger roles for a long time.’
She sits beside the satisfying order of a tactics whiteboard in a tranquil hotel in La Manga, where a Tetris landscape of whitewashed apartments interrupts the view of the Mediterranean blue. It is late January and the Iceland women’s squad have escaped to the temperate Spanish winter. Outside, in the marble-clad corridor, faceless mannequins model polo shirts to visiting golfers.
‘It’s not like the guys are kings and we’re not,’ Guðbjörg says. ‘We feel very respected and that comes from the whole society.’
It is an easy case to make. Iceland is, demonstrably, the best place in the world to be a woman. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report measures the differences between men and women in politics, education, health and economics in 144 countries. Iceland had the best overall score in 2017 – for the ninth consecutive year.
An autumnal Friday in 1975 was a defining moment for the emancipation of Icelandic women. On 24 October an estimated 90 per cent of women took the day off. Having grown weary of unequal wages, women did not go to work or do housework. Twenty-five thousand people gathered in Reykjavík to deliver speeches. That was almost a quarter of the city’s population. It is also remembered as the day Iceland ran out of sausages, as there were no workers to process the meat in the factory. The babble and shriek of playing children wafted into households because male radio presenters were forced to look after their children in the studio.
A theatre manager called Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was among the throng. Five years later she became the first democratically elected female president in the world. Incidentally, one of her rivals in the 1980 election was Albert Guðmundsson, the first professional footballer from Iceland. Vigdís held office for 16 years and normalised the sight of women in positions of power. Speaking to the BBC in 2017, she recalled an anecdote about an Icelandic boy who saw Ronald Reagan as the president of the United States on television. ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ he exclaimed, ‘Can a man be a president?’
The KSÍ is aware of its place within this tradition and has sought to remove institutionalised inequality in football. In early 2018, shortly before the Iceland women’s squad convened at La Manga, the KSÍ announced that it would pay equal bonuses to the men’s and women’s teams. Guðbjörg and her team-mates appreciate the gesture. But, as an economics graduate, she understands that the disparity begins far higher than the KSÍ.
‘Of course we get less money,’ she says with rueful conviction. ‘There’s an astronomical difference in what UEFA pays if the guys get to the World Cup versus if we get to the World Cup. If we get to the same competition as the guys, the KSÍ gets 3 per cent of what it gets from the guys doing the same. So the KSÍ has to pay us from its own pocket.’
The Iceland captain Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir played for Wolfsburg against Lyon in the final of the 2018 Women’s Champions League. As in the men’s game, it is the biggest prize in club football. According to the BBC, UEFA paid the winner of the 2017 women’s version £219,920, while the winners of the men’s version received £13.5 million.
‘I think it’s crazy that there’s such a difference,’ Guðbjörg says. ‘I understand that it’s about popularity, sponsorship and the media. But at the same time, women’s football is something that can really sell. It’s a product, as we saw at the 2017 Euros in Holland. When Holland won it was crazy. They were like superstars.’
Guðbjörg talks fluidly, pausing once to remember a word that has become instinctive in Swedish but rusty in English. She accepts that big, non-Icelandic clubs want to maximise the return on their investment at first-team level. She is wary of tokenism but laments a reluctance to invest in grassroots women’s football.
‘[Professional and grassroots football] are two very different things and we should think of them differently,’ she says. ‘We hear a lot of things like, “Why should we put money into the women’s game when we don’t get anything back?” as if it’s just about the cost. I think that’s so wrong and sad.’
What is the solution? ‘I think you could delete the problem if you marketed the product better. Why should a father with one son and one daughter only go to a men’s game at the weekend? Why wouldn’t you want your daughter to see girls playing and have role models, as you want your son to have role models? I think the biggest thing is to get into the heads of the parents. It’s so brutal if a daughter can’t go with her parents to a women’s game but the son can always go with his dad to watch a men’s game. It’s a habit.’
That habit is eroding in Iceland. In August 2018, over 9,000 supporters crammed into Laugardalsvöllur to watch the women’s national team play Germany. That is like the England women’s team playing to a sell-out crowd at Wembley Stadium.
‘The KSÍ has much better marketing around the team and so many more people watch the games,’ says Guðbjörg. ‘When I started in 2004 there was almost nobody. There was one small advertisement that said, “There’s a game on tomorrow.” Nobody really cared. Now everyone is there. We feel the pressure and the KSÍ doesn’t have to make the same effort to attract people. They come because they want to and this is all through marketing.’
Fewer empty seats are not the only thing that has changed. When Guðbjörg made her debut in 2004, the women’s team was effectively only 12 years old. Though originally formed in 1981, the parlous finances of the KSÍ meant the team was disbanded six years later. They did not play again until 1992. Guðbjörg describes the transformation since she started as ‘like black and white’. There are more training camps and more staff; a full squad travels to away matches, rather than the paltry 16 players that the budget once allowed. The dark-blue tracksuit Guðbjörg wears is a personal symbol of rapid professionalisation.
‘A lot of things changed between the European Championships in 2009 and 2013. We were such amateurs in 2009. It was our first time at a tournament and we were just so happy to be there. We just thought, “Oh, we get all these clothes!” We didn’t even understand that we could get money for being there.
‘I think it changed across Europe. The marketing of Sweden 2013 was much better than Finland 2009. The game was getting much, much bigger. The difference between Sweden and Holland 2017 was the same again. The people following us in 2009 were boyfriends, family and close friends. It was 50 people or something. Then, in 2013, there were so many people coming. And in 2017 half the nation came! It felt like everyone who couldn’t afford to watch the guys in France came to Holland to follow us.’
Women footballers have become as ubiquitous as the men in Iceland. They are just as likely to appear emblazoned on a billboard promoting Coca-Cola’s cool commercialism. The women’s national team even altered the course of colloquial language. The phrase spila eins og kerlingar (‘to play like chicks’) was common parlance to deride a poor performance by the men’s team. After 2009 it became a light-hearted, if rather awful, expression of positivity. Playing like the chicks meant winning matches.
‘Unstoppable For Iceland’, the commercial released by Iceland Air to coincide with the 2017 European Championship, knits together the against-all-odds stories of three girls who are on the periphery of football; outsiders peering in. The first girl leans against a peeling goalpost while the boys play at full throttle. ‘Next time you’ll definitely be allowed to play,’ her brother assures her on the windswept walk home. The second girl dusts off her hands after a tracksuit-clad thug administers a shove in the back and follows it up with a callous smirk that makes it clear she is not welcome. The third girl glances enviously as her brother unwraps a pair of Adidas football boots for Christmas. She had been given ballet shoes, glittery and girly. The soundtrack of mournful string instruments fades. ‘Never Let Adversity Prevail’ – a message with deep roots in the Icelandic psyche – appears on the screen as a rousing drumbeat reaches a crescendo. Footage of the three girls is spliced with the women’s national team in a pre-match huddle.
The video depicts a reality that has faded into the mists of time – in Iceland, at least. Access to football is open, even if for Guðbjörg ‘indoor’ training could only begin once dressage jumps were removed from the gravelly equestrian hall that provided primitive shelter from the elements. Just like Icelandic boys, girls now train in modern facilities with qualified coaches.
A brief scene in ‘Unstoppable For Iceland’ shows two youth teams, each on a podium as they celebrate victory in a tournament. One is a girls’ team, one a boys’ team. On first glance they are identical. A replay reveals that the boys hold aloft a big-ears trophy while the girls have a small vase. As Guðbjörg explains, there is an anecdote behind the scene.
‘It’s easy to fix problems because it’s such a small country. If someone writes something on Facebook the media are on it. I remember reading an interesting Facebook status from a mother who had a son and a daughter who were both extremely good at football. The boy was the best player at a tournament and he won a really big cup. The next weekend the girl was the best player, but she got a really small prize.
‘The mother wrote: “What is this? Who is deciding this?” Everyone went totally crazy and asked who had arranged the cups. There was also a TV programme filming the guys’ tournament but not the girls’. It was enough for the mother to write that status. An angry housewife writes a status, the media sees it, and it’s a big article. Then it’s at the table of the education and sports minister.
‘If something like this happens everyone gets so angry, so it’s fixed. It can be an issue so much faster in a small country, and I think we’re quite pushy here. In bigger countries all this takes time and nobody dares to say anything.’
The women’s game keeps its feet firmly planted in the real world. Most of the players on the training camp in La Manga are semi-professional. We are sat in the team meeting room. On the other side of a wicker partition that is stretched like a concertina, half a dozen players hunch over textbooks. Some are studying for university exams. Others are still at school.
Guðbjörg views their graft through her present situation. Her 30th birthday – a jarring milestone for all footballers – delivered a reminder of the transitory nature of a professional career and prompted a job hunt that led to part-time work at an economic consultancy in Stockholm.
‘Guys would never have to do anything else on the side,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know if they would want to. Personally, I think that can be bad for the guys. They’re empty when their careers are over because they haven’t done anything else for such a long time. It makes the transition hard. You can see that more male players than female struggle with alcohol and drugs after their careers, because women are more used to having to work, or give birth. We have to fight a little bit more for our existence.’
Freyr Alexandersson – the head coach of the women’s national team from 2013 to 2018 – has an olive complexion more native to La Manga than Iceland. He spent the majority of his career as a sturdy centre-half in the Icelandic Second Division. Now in his mid-thirties, he still carries himself with the coiled poise of someone who always wins the second ball.
He reclines with a thick black coffee while his players squirrel away at their studies on the other side of the concertina partition.
‘Back home they’re high profile,’ he says, throwing a nonchalant thumb over his shoulder in their direction. ‘Everybody knows them and we want it to be like that. Expectation makes us better. I wouldn’t coach the women’s team if there were no expectations and nobody cared.’
Freyr’s words carry the conviction of ambition. In August 2018 he became the assistant coach to Erik Hamrén, the Swede who replaced Heimir Hallgrímsson as coach of the men’s team. Freyr stepped down from the women’s team the following month. It would come as little surprise if he were to succeed Hamrén, as Heimir succeeded Lars Lagerbäck in 2016.
His focus has oscillated between men’s and women’s football.
‘A few years ago I thought I coached men and women in the same way,’ he says. ‘In recent years I’ve thought about it and I think I change myself a little bit. The approach is not that different but you need to be more specific about tactical principles in the women’s game. Overall if you have 23 top-quality men and 23 top-quality women, most of the men will have a higher football IQ. That’s a fact. I think it comes down to men watching football more, sometimes too much. So I go into a little bit more detail with the women’s teams.
‘How I approach them at the training ground is not that different. I coach at the highest level in the women’s game so I just approach them as professional footballers. Sometimes the women’s team have felt like I pushed them a little too much, but they got used to it and started to like it. Now they wouldn’t have it any other way.’
Like most employees of the KSÍ, Freyr has juggled several jobs. While he coached the women’s team he ran sessions for the men and worked as an opposition scout for the men’s team in the months preceding the 2018 World Cup. He sees the men and women as two cuts of the same cloth.
‘They’re both strong-mentality groups with good humour and they’re proud to be in the national team. They act in the same way as a group. It’s the same banter, more or less. The only difference is that the guys would not be studying out there. They would be playing Nintendo Switch or something. That’s the reality they live in.
‘I think the guys really respect the women. They’re so proud of them, and vice versa. The guys talk to me and they follow the women’s team closely. They know every player and all the results.’
There are bonds between the two teams that extend beyond the kroner in their bonus package. They stay in the same hotel in Reykjavík when the fixture schedule permits. Hannes Halldórsson and Guðbjörg – the goalkeepers’ union – trade tips on gloves and treatment for dislocated shoulders. It is hard to imagine Manuel Neuer or David de Gea exchanging advice with their counterparts in the women’s team.
While Freyr refines players at the top of their game, equally impressive coaches work to extend the reach of girls’ football.
In his former role as the head of youth development at the KSÍ, Þorlákur Árnason was responsible for girls’ and boys’ football. In April 2018, he opened a blog entry by explaining that he had led a talent-identification programme for girls and boys between the ages of 13 and 15.
‘I discovered how big a difference there is between the two genders at this age,’ he wrote. ‘Girls reach puberty approximately two years ahead of boys. But are we really acknowledging that fact and using that information to train girls all over the world?’
In Iceland, the average girl experiences the most growth at 11.58 years of age, while the average boy will not have their spurt until 13.85 years old. Þorlákur repeatedly refers to the ‘golden age’, the period in which children learn fastest and are most receptive to coaching because beanpole growth has not yet unsettled their coordination. He contends that girls start playing football too late.
‘Because their golden age is between eight and ten years old, girls need to start when they are five or six in order to develop certain skills before they enter the period in which their coordination and control of movement is at its best. Give this some thought: starting at seven or eight means girls will be beginners when they hit the period in which they can learn the most! Boys are rarely beginners when they reach this period because they start earlier and develop later. On average, boys have played football for five years when they hit their “golden age”, while girls have one or two years of football experience when they hit theirs.
‘So let’s start the revolution,’ he concludes. ‘Get the girls on the football field earlier. Not because I am telling you, but because science is telling you.’
The parallel solution, as Þorlákur sees it, is to ensure girls aged between eight and ten have excellent coaches. The ubiquity of women’s football eases the task in Iceland. It is not viewed as a poor relation to the men’s game, and coaches – particularly perceptive coaches actively seek to improve girls during their footballing ‘golden age’ – tend to train both boys and girls.
The former head of youth at Breiðablik, Daði Rafnsson, coached Jiangsu Suning’s women’s team in China before returning to Iceland to work on a PhD in mental strength in sport. Before that, in 2009, he asked to coach the girls’ under-ten team at Breiðablik.
‘I thought it was a challenging project,’ he says. ‘There was a vast difference in ability between boys and girls at 16 years old. I thought, “Why?” There isn’t much physical difference, so it must be cultural.
‘I watched what the under-ten boys were doing – drills, keep-ups, difficult shooting practices. They were encouraged to use their left and right feet, they were doing two-v-one situations, wall passes, all this. The under-ten girls were doing nothing like that. They were basically doing games without the balls, without being encouraged to do difficult things.’
Daði introduced more challenging training and, predictably, the group’s technical and tactical aptitude improved.
Looking forwards, the KSÍ must encourage more female coaches to attend UEFA courses. About one in ten Icelandic coaches are women. Although that ratio is better than almost every other country, it lags behind other areas of society in terms of representation.
Although Iceland is the best country in the world to be a woman, and probably one of the best to be a woman who aspires to be a professional footballer, it is not perfect. There is a temptation to romanticise a continuous thread of gender equality in Iceland that stems from the formidable women of the Sagas. That narrative overlooks, among other things, Icelandic governmental policy during and immediately after the Second World War. Women who socialised with occupying soldiers were exiled to rural areas, purportedly for their own good and the good of the nation.
The Icelandic government went as far as to request that the American forces did not station black troops at its airbase near Keflavík. As the historian Valur Ingimundarson writes: ‘It was felt that the nation’s interests would be best served if miscegenation, i.e. relations between black men and Icelandic women, could be avoided.’ This archaic racist policy – offensive to the black men it demonised and to the Icelandic women it demeaned – lasted until the 1960s.
Iceland is not immune to the problems that blight the rest of the world. In January 2018, 462 female athletes signed a statement that condemned gender-based discrimination, harassment and sexual violence. The statement included 62 personal accounts of abuse. Football was not specifically implicated – no individual sport was named – yet it is difficult to conceive that none of the 462 women were footballers.
One sportswoman shared a particularly egregious account of being raped by her coach on the day of a match. ‘It’s a game day,’ she wrote. ‘It’s Sunday morning and there’s nobody else in the gym. I’m alone at a meeting with the coach before we’re all supposed to meet for the game. He rapes me. Not the first time and not the last. I was then scolded by the coach for coming one minute late into the meeting.’
The statement landed on the desk of Lilja Alfreðsdóttir, the Minister of Education, Science and Culture; a position that also covers sport. Her response was swift.
‘The women came forward and we had a meeting the day after, which I chaired. We immediately established a working group with all the key stakeholders. I am extremely grateful to the women who stepped forward because it was not easy. The disadvantage of being in such a small community is that everyone knows everyone. Some of the cases are just horrible.’
The passage of time will reveal whether Iceland eradicates this abuse. With campaigns like the #MeToo movement providing a platform for people to show solidarity, the pincers of condemnation are closing on men who abuse positions of power with impunity.
It would be remiss to close on such a negative note. When faced with one of the most equal, supportive societies in the world, our instinct is to feel for the imperfections. Iceland is not perfect but it is better than most. On 5 September 2018 two articles appeared on The Guardian website. The author of the first article was Hope Solo, the goalkeeper who played 202 times for the United States women’s national team between 2000 and 2016. Her opening paragraph packs a punch:
‘We called ourselves the Ponytail Posse because that’s what the US women’s national team was about. The white girls next door. You want statistics to back that up? Barely more than a dozen female players of colour have represented the United States at the highest level since 1991. Something is broken.’
The second story revealed that players from Crystal Palace Ladies were told they may not be able to represent the club if they failed to raise £250 each for subscription fees, either through sponsorship or out of their own pockets. It sent a negative message about the importance of the women’s team to the club as a whole, which was made starker by the £130,000-per-week contract Palace had handed to Wilfried Zaha – the star of the men’s team – earlier that week. To Zaha’s great credit, he made a significant donation to support the female players.
Those two stories lend perspective. Women’s football in Iceland is healthy from the top down. It will continue to flourish with the dedication and emotional intelligence of coaches like Freyr, Daði and Þorlákur and role models like Guðbjörg.
‘We have to fight a little bit more for our existence,’ Guðbjörg said in La Manga. Women’s football still faces a battle, but Iceland is on the front line.