Reykjavík Grapevine - 31.07.2015, Qupperneq 24

The International
Midfielder
For the Iceland national women’s
team, the dream of playing in the
European Championships is already
a reality. Fanndís Friðriksdóttir is a
current member of the squad, cur-
rently ranked 20th in the world,
which in 2009 became the first Ice-
landic football team to progress from
the qualifying stage into the finals of
an international tournament.
“We almost made it through the
playoffs for the World Cup,” says
Fanndís. “We were really close! But
we got to the finals of the European
Championship in the last two tour-
naments. In 2013 we got pretty far—
the quarter finals. And we’ll compete
again this September.”
Fanndís has been playing since
she was six years old, originally
for her home team in the West-
man Islands. After moving to Haf-
narfjörður aged 14, she started play-
ing for Breiðablik, and things went
from there. “I never really planned
to play professionally,” she says, “it
just kind of came to me. There was
an agent from Norway
who contacted me,
and the national team
coach at the time also
told me it would be
possible. I’d love to do
it full time here in Ice-
land, but there’s not
really enough money,
so I’m in school as
well—a lot of players
go abroad to play full
time.”
Fanndís made her full interna-
tional debut in 2009, and has taken
part in both of the team’s forays into
the UEFA European Championships.
She puts the recent increased atten-
tion on the women’s game down to a
wider cultural shift.
“Women are getting more atten-
tion in every way,” she says. “Bigger
jobs, and everything like that. And
now people are realising that wom-
en’s football is a good sport to watch.
You could see that with the Women’s
World Cup that just ended now. A lot
of reporters covered it, a lot of people
watched it—people
could see that the
standard is high,
it’s good football.
It’s not only about
the men!”
The Wom-
en’s Team
Captain
The captain of the Icelandic women’s
team is Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir,
who has been playing in the national
side since she was 16 years old. Now a
professional player for FC Rosengård
in Sweden, Sara became the captain
in 2014, and has scored 16 goals for
the national team alongside her 57
club goals.
“Women’s football has been de-
veloping and getting better every
single year,” says Sara. “We have
more good teams and more solid
leagues all over in women’s football.
The quality is getting better and bet-
ter all the time. It’s a really positive
time.”
The recent Women’s World Cup
was something of a breakthrough
for women’s football, on several
fronts. The games caught the pub-
lic imagination, appeared as global
trending Twitter topics, and got
unprecedented media attention—in
the USA, the final was Fox’s most-
watched football match ever, with an
estimated 25.4 million viewers. It’s a
big improvement, and a step towards
the approximate billion people who
watched the men’s final in 2014.
“It’s nothing new to us women
players that people focus on the
men’s game, so we’re kind of over
that!” says Sara. “But as women’s
football continually improves, the
big tournaments are getting more
and more popular. With the Euros,
the World Cup and the Champions
League… the women’s game today is
getting more attention than ever.”
And with both the men’s and
women’s national teams far outstrip-
ping the expectations for a nation of
320,000, Sara thinks there’s more to
come from both. “Our nation is very
impressive in sports, given its size,”
she says. “It’s amazing what Lars
Lagerbäck has done with the men’s
team. It’s good for the whole country.
And the women’s team have already
been to the Euros twice. I think it’s
fascinating how far Iceland has come
as a sporting nation, and how far we
can go.”
24 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 11 — 2015
“Women’s football is
continually improv-
ing, so the big tourna-
ments are getting
more popular. The
women’s game today
is getting more atten-
tion than ever.”