She first took to the pitch as a pesky little girl who followed her big sister everywhere. Today she is the top female footballer in the world, crowned with the first women’s Ballon d’Or.
Ada Hegerberg has captivated the football world, a “serial scorer” averaging almost 1.3 goals per match with her French team Olympique Lyonnais.
Hegerberg comes from a footballing family and used to watch her older sister and brother.
“Ada was the type to sabotage Andrine and their brother Silas’s trainings until she was maybe seven or eight years old,” recalls their mother, Gerd Stolsmo, in the family flat in the east of Oslo.
“Then she went to a tournament. And there … she was passed the ball, turned around, made a beeline for the goal, and scored. Again and again and again. Match after match. That was when it became so obvious,” Gerd says.
At the time the football obsessed Hegerbergs were living in Sunndalsora, a sparsely populated town at the end of a fjord on the west coast of Norway.
