The Guardian Footballer of the Yr is an award given to a participant who has accomplished one thing exceptional, whether or not by overcoming adversity, serving to others or setting a sporting instance by performing with distinctive honesty.
If the soccer had not labored out, maybe Sofie Junge Pedersen might have run away to the circus. When her after-school youth membership in Aarhus placed on its annual week of performances there was one problem that struck her particularly: the prospect to juggle with fireplace torches and mock knives. “It was fairly severe,” she laughs. “We practised lots beforehand and I assumed it will be enjoyable. I simply wished to be the most effective.” So it proved and there’s no proof that anybody has crushed the time she set, aged 13, for preserving the 2 airborne concurrently.
Perhaps it serves as a metaphor for the way the grownup Pedersen has made her identify. She has a trophy cupboard many can solely dream of, together with 4 Scudetti and a Danish league title. With a good wind at Euro 2025 she might win her a centesimal worldwide cap. However she is all of the extra extraordinary due to the work that has run alongside these feats. Her efforts standing up for the atmosphere and human rights, whereas engaged on a variety of different humanitarian tasks, have few parallels amongst elite sportspeople.
“It actually drives me,” she says early on a sun-dappled morning at Interello, the place Inter’s academy and girls’s gamers prepare. “We’ve a duty to attempt to do not less than somewhat bit for different folks.” It’s a responsibility she takes severely. Token gestures are merely not sufficient for Pedersen and that, finally, is why she has been named the Guardian’s Footballer of the Yr for 2024.
The newest instance might hardly be extra topical. We meet a number of hours earlier than Saudi Arabia’s bid for the 2034 World Cup is handed with out a lot as a vote. The timing could also be coincidental however the symbolism is evident. When Fifa signed a significant sponsorship cope with the Saudi state oil firm, Aramco, in April it was clear to Pedersen that silence was no choice. Together with the Netherlands worldwide Tessel Middag and New Zealand’s Katie Rood, she started a marketing campaign that resulted in an open letter to Fifa describing the association as “a abdomen punch to the ladies’s recreation” and urging them to chop ties with Aramco.
It was signed by 135 feminine gamers and topped a course of that concerned conferences with, amongst others, Amnesty Worldwide and Human Rights Watch. Lina al-Hathloul, a distinguished Saudi human rights activist, was closely consulted. The three footballers wished to get their information proper earlier than attempting to deliver others with them. They instinctively recoiled at each Aramco’s environmental file and the horrific ranges of oppression inflicted by the Saudi state, however their arguments needed to be clear.
As soon as the message had been honed, gamers of their circles have been despatched reality sheets and hyperlinks to a webinar discussing the problems. “Fifa may as properly pour oil on the pitch and set it alight,” learn the letter, which additionally identified the dire conditions confronted by many ladies and LGBTQ+ people in Saudi Arabia. The uptake was, as soon as their colleagues had tuned in, overwhelming.
“It’s an enormous quantity, from 27 completely different international locations,” Pedersen says. “It exhibits it’s vital for us to face up for human rights and struggle towards discrimination of any variety.
“It’s vital that the gamers becoming a member of these initiatives know what is going on. We’ve spent lots of time attempting to supply the proper info so that everybody feels conscious of the state of affairs earlier than signing every little thing. I feel among the issues I’ve been advocating for are new for many individuals, however as soon as they know what’s going on I really feel their engagement.”
Pedersen was already used to assembly a second like this; to making a football-led motion that recognised the game’s have to confront issues of existential gravity. Final 12 months she spearheaded a bunch of 44 gamers taking motion to offset flights across the Ladies’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. They made donations to a variety of local weather resilience, carbon offsetting and adaptation initiatives. Local weather change has preoccupied Pedersen for greater than 15 years and sitting idle is not going to do.
She is grateful that Inter have by no means flown to a recreation in her 12 months and a half there, though it’s not so easy when travelling with Denmark. Taking a flight all the time brings minor reckonings with the self. “I really feel unhealthy,” she says of her feelings when stepping on a aircraft. “However I additionally know unhealthy emotions alone don’t assist something. I pay compensation for all my flights and I feel it’s one thing, though it doesn’t remedy the issue that flights are polluting lots. We wished to ship a message.”
It was Cop15 in 2009, held in Copenhagen, that largely set Pedersen’s course. She was a richly promising 17-year-old midfielder at IK Skovbakken however, that winter, travelled on vacation to Kenya and Tanzania along with her dad and mom. “I really feel privileged that I might go,” she says. “However I additionally bought to see that individuals are not residing in the identical situations as me. We have been speaking to folks there about how they have been scuffling with local weather change and on the similar time following Cop15 at house, in order that’s when the local weather consciousness actually began for me.
“I realised that this can be a significant issue, a disaster. From then on I began to learn extra about it, and to essentially hear when it was on the information, and simply bought very scared. It’s a disaster we’re inflicting. And I can’t stand the truth that we, within the wealthy a part of the world, are answerable for it when it hits susceptible folks and international locations essentially the most. We should be on the entrance of preventing local weather change and serving to these folks. Everybody can be hit by it, and that features soccer.”
If that was the lightbulb second, the present had been operating since early childhood. Pedersen was a part of an enormous household in Aarhus, raised with three siblings and steeped in an atmosphere the place political dialogue was by no means off the desk. It sounds just like the basic Scandinavian social democratic upbringing, closely influenced by dad and mom who inspired debate. “We pay tax with pleasure” was an early mantra instilled by her mom, a headteacher. Her soccer expertise was clear from an early age, and readily nurtured amid an atmosphere much better catered to ladies’ sport than most within the late Nineties, however different pursuits took maintain concurrently.
“From a really younger age I used to be watching the information, with my dad and mom or alone,” she says. “I used to be actually taken with society, particularly worldwide politics. I feel I used to be conscious fairly shortly that I used to be born in Denmark, one of many richest and most steady international locations on the planet. It’s tough to alter the entire world, even if you happen to actually need to, however from early on I wished to not less than do one thing for somebody.”
No one held again from giving their opinions. “In school you’re instructed to ask questions, to query the authorities. That’s an important a part of our tradition. Questioning the established order is vital for us and possibly it’s one thing that makes folks extra conscious.” She would create tasks about subjects like peace within the Center East or issues in Africa; in highschool there have been heated discussions with classmates, boys particularly, when she talked about voting for a left-leaning political social gathering. “I don’t know if everybody thought that was a good suggestion,” she says, diplomatically.
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Coming by way of on the native membership Skovbakken, Pedersen was a part of a wealthy classic that included her embellished Denmark teammates Pernille Tougher and Nadia Nadim. The latter now performs close by for Milan; three days earlier than this interview she scored towards Pedersen’s facet within the first Milan derby to be held at San Siro. There will need to have been one thing within the water again house. “It was the most effective place I may very well be,” she says.
By her early 20s, spent with Fortuna Hjørring, it was clear she would prosper overseas. They gained Denmark’s high flight in 2014, the captain Pedersen standing out, however experiences away from soccer helped drive her. Even again then, she spoke in interviews about hoping to work for an assist organisation upon retiring. Whereas steering Hjørring to glory she would work as soon as a month as a volunteer with the Danish refugee council: video games and outings have been organised that these much less lucky might get pleasure from with native folks. “It was a watch opener to satisfy folks from locations like Afghanistan and Syria who had fled when very younger,” she says. “That makes a mark, I feel.”
Across the similar time she grew to become concerned with Yopp, a neighborhood mission in Ghana aimed toward empowering ladies and younger girls to play sport. Her membership lent a hand; afterward Juventus, the place she gained a number of editions of Serie A after spells at Rosengård, Levante and Vittsjö, sponsored one in every of its soccer leagues. Pedersen stays closely concerned and has returned a number of instances, additionally working in Zambia on a mission run by Frequent Aim.
It could appear a marvel, given these are removed from the one causes Pedersen helps, that her profession has hardly wavered. However she would slightly it was not seen that means: such intense involvement in world points motivates her, she thinks, to sharpen a winner’s mentality in soccer. Then there’s that theme of duty, to which she returns typically. “There are an estimated 3.5 billion soccer followers on this planet,” she says. “It means lots to so many. As gamers we’re additionally human beings, so I feel we’ve a platform to talk up.”
Can top-level soccer ever totally reconcile its profit-driven starvation for world attain, and any extra laudable intentions to develop into accessible for everybody, with the next environmental affect? Discovering a stability would appear the best of high-wire acts. “We’d like to consider how soccer develops and its impact on the planet,” she says. “Flights have the most important CO2 use within the trade if you happen to calculate it, and I feel we’ve to. I’ve known as on Uefa to make some guidelines, suggesting no crew can journey by aircraft if they’ll make the identical journey by prepare inside a sure variety of hours. We’d like it, as a result of we’ve to restrict these flights. I see golf equipment typically submit on-line once they take the prepare, so they appear to realize it’s factor.”
Uefa prefers to depart such issues to golf equipment’ discretion; it stays to be seen whether or not Pedersen’s suggestion has been famous. The identical goes for the 135-strong illustration to Fifa relating to Aramco, Saudi Arabia and their ever-strengthening, seemingly unilaterally sanctioned, grip on soccer’s future. Does she really feel the letter – primarily the rationale we’re sitting right here in the present day – has been heard by those that have to?
Earlier than that specific query might be answered, a listening press officer cuts in. Time is up: Pedersen should put together for coaching and there can be no area even for a “sure” or “no”. This can be the second to level out that, 5 days earlier than the open letter was despatched, Inter “formalised its dedication to strategic enlargement in Saudi Arabia” with an settlement that includes enhancing its model presence and aiming to “contribute positively to the nation’s future ambitions”. In these environment not less than, the subject has run so far as it might probably. It’s a reminder that, for all the nice footballers can do, few close to the sport’s summit could these days keep away from being inadvertently enmeshed in an internet of wider pursuits.
That conclusion, although, is hardly of a bit with Pedersen’s angle. Earlier within the dialog she is requested if, taking up such gargantuan subject material, it may be laborious to really feel hope. She shakes her head. “For those who don’t have hope, you’ll simply sit again and never do something. It’s tough typically, however we’ve to be constructive in any other case nothing will change. We’ve to maintain hoping and put strain on to alter issues, and to alter ourselves additionally.”
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