Ada Hegerberg is one of the greats. At 28 years old, she’s a six-time Women’s Champions League winner, the competition’s all-time top goal-scorer and was the recipient of the first-ever Ballon d’Or Feminin. You get to those levels by being wonderfully talented and extremely committed to the sport, rather than focusing on any outside noise, but the only way she could’ve avoided talk of Lyon, the eight-time European champions, being written off over the years is by living under a rock.
Such suggestions were perhaps at their strongest in 2021, when Paris Saint-Germain dethroned OL in France for the first time and also knocked their bitter rivals out in the Champions League quarter-finals. But three years on, Lyon are still here and on Saturday, in the final against Barcelona, they are chasing a second European title in the past three seasons. Overall, it would be a record-extending ninth triumph.
All six that Hegerberg has been involved in over the past decade have presented their own unique challenges which Lyon have overcome by adapting and evolving, and that continues today. Having had the financial backing from the club early on to be successful, others have closed the gap, including Saturday’s opponents. Yet, OL remain right at the top of the game.
“That’s what I'm most proud of because every year, it's been like, 'Now they're off, now they're losing it', but here we are still and we're going to be pressing for many, many years,” Hegerberg tells GOAL. “I feel like Lyon has kind of been the big dog, but at the same time, it's becoming like a little village fighting against all these big clubs and their economy coming in, which is also cool in some way. We had an advantage, but we kind of lost that, even though we stayed at the top, and now we're fighting on a different level again. I enjoy it.”
Players don’t need extra motivation to win a European title, but it certainly adds a little fuel to the fire when a group of players who have been there and done it all multiple times over still get overlooked by some. “That's why you need to keep winning,” Hegerberg says, “to keep the record straight.”