“For me it was like a dream, I was still so young, I just wanted to play football and I loved it.” For Lotta Schelin the love of football has always run deep, her Damallsvenskan debut as a teen, a dream for the attacker who stayed with her hometown team Göteborg FC (then Landvetter IF) for close to a decade.
“It just felt weird, in some way because in the beginning it went so fast, but I just love to play football and play with all these great players. I stayed there for eight years so, you can see I really had a good time and I wanted to do something with that team and develop women’s football in Göteborg. I just loved playing there.”
Eight years is a long time for any footballer to stay faithful to their club but still growing as a player in a team that was improving every season, Schelin was in no rush to leave until the time felt right, “Every year I felt that we were developing and we made a lot of progress around the team and with the team, we got some new players and every year I felt that I could get better in that team. And of course, it’s my hometown so I have all my friends and family there so it worked out really great but I always had in my head that I wanted something more and I just waited for the right opportunity to go.”
Bienvenue à Lyon
By 2008 the time was right for the rangy forward, as the pieces fell into place and stepped into the unknown, leaving Sweden and the Damallsvenskan for France’s Division 1 Féminine side Olympique Lyonnais, “I had been thinking for a while that I wanted to do something else but at that point we didn’t have any players playing Europe or another country. For me I thought the US would be great as they had a good league and suddenly France came up and it was a perfect situation for me at the perfect time in my development.”
Well loved by the Lyon fans for her eight-year service with the Fenottes, Schelin admits that the love is mutual, her time with the French giants littered with silverware and accolades, “First, when you stay somewhere for eight years it says it all. Great opportunity to be able to play with all these great players in a team that was always there, fighting for the all the titles, trying to be the best. It was amazing and it was a long time but of course during that time we won a lot and over that time I feel that we got really close to the supporters and we had a lot of supporters who started to follow Lyon during those years so I have a big heart for Lyon and their supporters.”
After eight long years in France, Schelin had already made it known that the 2015-16 would be her last with Lyon as their claimed a tenth successive title, the woman from Göteborg a crucial part of the set-up. With the league title already wrapped up, Schelin’s last game was the Champions League final in Reggio Emelia, over 550km from Lyon’s Gerland home, the loyal Swede battled with her team on the pitch for 120 long minutes before confidently dispatching Lyon’s second penalty in the shoot-out.
Already on the back foot after Ada Hegerberg’s miss, Schelin’s last touch of the ball was to get her team rolling from the spot, her penalty enough to turn the tide, another Champions League win, the perfect send off, “The final was like a dream, I can’t say anything else, it was just like a dream. To be able to play the last game and it’s a final, you get to participate and do something for the team and the club it was like a dream, a lot of emotions.”
Home calls
With the German Frauen-Bundesliga as of yet, undiscovered by Schelin as well as the current NWSL in America, the experienced forward admitted that it was time to return to the country that owns her heart, “I felt that my eight years in Lyon was perfect, I had such a great time there but I was really longing for Sweden and my family and friends. I didn’t really want another adventure at the point, I just wanted to go home, to give back to the league in Sweden and get close to my family. So it wasn’t just about football.”
Regarded as one of the top leagues in Europe, Schelin’s move to FC Rosengård was far from a demotion, “But when you look at it in Sweden we have a great league with great teams like Rosengård who play in the Champions League. I still joined a team with Marta and other top players so I didn’t feel like I was stepping down or anything, I just wanted to get close to my family whilst still playing in a good team.”
In the seven UEFA Women’s Champions League finals since the rebranding from the UEFA Women’s Cup, a Damallsvenskan team has only featured once. The short-lived galactico side of Tyresö in 2013-14. Before then you have to go back to the once great Umeå IK who appeared in the 2001-02, 2006-07 and 2007-08 UEFA Women’s Cup finals, but in all instances the Swedish side have failed to lift the trophy.
In the UWCL era only teams from Germany (Turbine Potsdam, FFC Frankfurt and VfL Wolfsburg) as well as Schelin’s former Lyon have been able to lift the most converted piece of silverware in Europe. With such a high standard of football in Sweden there are clear logistical reasons as to why teams struggle in the latter stages of the competition, “We have all the possibilities to produce a Champions League winner it’s just hard to compete with clubs like Lyon, Paris, Munich and you name it. Of course, German teams have been producing a good standard for so many years so that’s another thing but the other ones like Chelsea and Manchester City, they have these great clubs behind them. They have so much muscle, you know? And that changes a lot when you look at Sweden because we’re all independent women’s teams and we don’t have that kind of money.”
High hopes, high standards
But anyone who’s watched the Damallsvenskan will be aware of the high standard seen on pitches across Sweden, “We have to stay focused on what we have in Sweden and that’s a good league, it’s equal and there’s always a good spirit in the teams and when you come to Sweden you have to focus on that because we can’t compete with the money others have.”
When pressed, Schelin couldn’t say one way or another if she thinks the Swedish league will see a Champions League winner any time soon, laughing at her own indecision, “So yes and no, I hope we’ll see a winner from Damallsvenskan soon but it’s tough competition but we’re working on it.”
With over 120 appearances for both Lyon and Göteborg and well over 160 for Sweden, it’s almost easy to forget that the rangy attacker has struggled with injuries through her playing years, including a particularly troublesome injury that kept her off of the pitch for over a year right after she got started in the league.
But even as a teenager dealing with being unable to play properly Schelin never wavered, her desire to keep playing enough to drive her day after day and unconditional love for football enough to carry her through, “I just loved football so much, it was and is – or was mostly – my entire life. I really wanted to see what I was capable of doing and I really wanted to experience all the things that I’ve been able to experience. Back then I thought that I could do that and this inner-motivation was too strong to give up, especially when I thought that I hadn’t done it all.
"It’s one thing if you’re working and working and you’re not getting there but I felt that everything around with the doctors wasn’t that great at that moment so I didn’t get the help that I needed and felt that “this is not enough, I had to at least try everything”. Luckily, I had this inner-motivation and this love for football and just thought I that I have to come back, it didn’t even occur to me that I couldn’t.”
A long albeit fruitful year
Rosengård fans will be aware the Schelin continued to be blighted by injuries after the Olympics, the deadly attacker still managing a healthy five goals in six appearances for her new club but now she’s hoping with a full pre-season under her belt she’ll be able to take the league by the horns this year.
After a seemingly endless 2015-16 that had a full D1F campaign, UWCL quarter, semi and grand final as well as a long hot summer in Brazil for the Olympics before the second-half of the Damallsvenskan season, the 32-year-old is hoping she doesn’t have to do that again: “I hope so, the thing was that during the summer, the girls that played abroad we had the possibility to really work hard and have a pre-season during summer. So we got together a couple of times and worked really hard with everything so we were really well prepared and I felt like at the Olympics, we played every minute plus extra time, so seven games plus all that and you feel like you’re your best you in the final.
"That’s amazing, so I really felt physically that I was in really great shape and that was nice to feel, that kind of hard work played off so I’m feeling really excited to work hard through the pre-season because I know it’s going to pay-off. But last year when I came back to Rosengård, first of all I just had some bad luck, got injured and hurt my foot, so it was a little bit of bad luck and a long season because I came from Lyon – hopefully I’m not going to do that again. So it’s going to be good to really have a chance to work through pre-season and get strong.”
One of the most decorated women in the sport, asking Schelin to pick her favourite moment in football might not have been the smartest thing, but for some of her favourite club moments she was sure it came back to the Champions League, “There’s so many of course, it depends if I think about the national team or club teams, of course the Champions League finals were very special; the last one or 2011 because it was the first or 2012 when it was over 50,000, it’s different but it’s really cool experiences."
Happiness
For her time with Sweden, her recent Olympic silver was the jewel in a very impressive crown, the colour of the medal secondary to what she and her teammates achieved together, “And of course, Rio; even against France at the 2011 World Cup when we got a medal, Rio was the biggest. First of all the way we did it and because we played at the Maracanã in Brazil, playing there in that big competition, that was my dream and my goal with the national team and of course you want to win but you still have an Olympic medal in your hands.”
Dolly mixture on the pitch, you never really know what you’re going to get with Sweden, but for the team who’d come agonisingly close to medalling at three of the previous Olympics before Rio – as well as underperforming at their last major tournament, the 2015 Women’s world Cup – working as a team and once again hitting the highs they’re capable of was a very special moment not just for Schelin but the entire squad, “We did what we had to do and we did it well, we used our strength and in the final we also showed that we took another step and played good attacking football too.
"It was just amazing because we felt that in the team, we had so much more than what we produced in the first stage and it’s really amazing that we can stay strong as a team and still believe and it’s not that simple when you have so many people, and the media with a lot of pressure around you but that’s the secret of football; you can’t listen to that, you just have to believe in what you do and we did and we felt that we had something we just wanted it to be expressed on the pitch and finally it was.”
For this reporter it’s hard to fully express how kind and genuine the three-time Champions League winner is in person, well known as being an incredibly humble superstar of the sport, her answer to a routine light-hearted question probably the best way of explaining what Lotta Schelin is like as a person. Her super-power of choice? “A power that makes people happy, can I say that? So many people are unhappy, so if I can just point at someone and they’ll be happy then I’d be happy.”