CHANGE FOR THE BETTER
Lise Klaveness is determined that the football world will...
“She delivered
a scathing monologue”
LISE Klaveness is a rarity in the world of football. Not just as one of the few women who holds a position of leadership in the global game, but she was also brave enough to stand up to FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino.
A few months before the controversial World Cup in Qatar, Klaveness rose to her feet at the FIFA Congress in Doha and delivered a scathing five-minute monologue highlighting all of the many flaws in how the world’s most popular sport is governed, from where the biggest competitions are hosted to the rights of women and gay people.
‘In 2010, the World Cup was awarded by FIFA in unacceptable ways and with unacceptable consequences,’ Klaveness declared in a room of (mostly male) soccer officials. ‘Our members demand change, they are questioning the ethics in our sport and insisting on transparency. We must listen! We cannot ignore the calls for change.’
Klaveness went to the FIFA Congress having been elected the President of the Norwegian federation only a few months earlier. The speech, and her dressing-down of Infantino and his FIFA acolytes, made her a household name in her native country and a figurehead for all of those who want to reform how football is governed.
Norwegian journalist Marius Lien decided to follow Klaveness closely for a whole year — from January to December 2023 — through FIFA and UEFA Congresses, the women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and how she operated in Europe and Norway. His book, which was released to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8, is a fascinating insight into how the football world spins in the Infantino era — and also the challenges of being a woman in a leadership position in the game, as it can feel like she is ploughing a lonely furrow at times.
At the UEFA Congress in Paris last month where 130 general secretaries, presidents and executive committee members of UEFA’s 55 member states attended, Klaveness was one of only 10 women. It seems there is a long way to go before more women get into power in the game.
UEFA will feel they are trying to play their part. They have designated one seat on their 20member executive board that can be contested solely by women — and that will increase to two from next year’s Congress in Belgrade. However, when Klaveness stood for election to the UEFA executive, she did so on a normal seat.
She didn’t win, but garnered enough support among member associations to be confident of election when she will stand again. ‘Lise did that to prove a point,’ Lien explains. ‘She could have stood for the female seat on the executive board, and she would have probably been elected. But she wanted to contest one of the normal seats.
‘And it’s something that she is quite strong on. She believes that if women are satisfied with only one seat on the UEFA board, then we will go another 100 years with no women in leadership roles in the game. It is about changing the mindset, that was the biggest thing I got from the last year with her, but she is doing it in a clever way, by using the mechanics of UEFA and FIFA politics.’
Klaveness was already a trendsetter before she embarked on this journey to reform the game. Following a successful playing career, where she represented Norway 73 times, she qualified as a lawyer and was later a judge, while also becoming the first female football pundit to appear regularly on Norwegian television. And that was her first taste of the sexism that is still prevalent in the game, even in the liberal societies of Scandinavia.
‘Even though I spent my whole life in football, viewers would question my knowledge of the game,’ Klaveness has pointed out. ‘People would comment on my looks. I guess I found motivation in it, that I can say, “I don’t care”.’
Lien says that over the course of the year, what most impressed him about Klaveness was her courage — which was evident in how she stood up and criticised Infantino at the FIFA Congress.
‘Any time she is told that she can’t do anything, that just makes her more determined, we saw that when she was on television and we Criticism: Gianni Infantino see it now,’ Lien said. From being Norway’s first female television pundit, she went on to become the first woman to be technical director of their male and female national teams before eventually rising to the position of federation president.
Her tenure is four years and will come to an end in 2026, so she doesn’t have much time if she wants to even make small improvements in how the global game is governed. As a former player for the women’s national team, the continued growth of women’s football is close to her heart, but as a mother to three children, she is also keen to make football a friendlier place for new mothers.
A post by Arsenal’s social media team this past week showed their manager Jonas Eidevall announce to his team that Amanda Illestedt was expecting her first child. The players, including Katie McCabe, delighted in their teammate’s happy news, but football isn’t always that accommodating when players, or officials, become pregnant. And that is one thing Klaveness wants to reform.
‘It is something that she is very keen about, that football treat mothers better, and I think it is one of the reforms that she is keen to push through,’ Lien said.
Football’s popularity has grown to such an extent that it can be considered the biggest cultural pursuit in the world now, but there are still issues with how it is governed. And the Luis Rubiales controversy that marred Spain’s World Cup win underlined the fact that there needs to be more women in power in the game.
Klaveness may be the role model in that regard. A female leader in men’s football, and one who is also gay, Klaveness may be a rarity but she is serious about change. She wants to reform UEFA and FIFA.
In her speech in Doha, she spoke about her dream of football where ‘boys and girls of all colours, straights and queers, are treated with equal respect and recognitions’. She has also observed that equality should mean the freedom to be treated as just another participant in the game. And male and female players should be treated the same. Perhaps with the groundwork she is doing in the boardrooms and behindthe-scenes of global football, Klaveness won’t soon be considered such an outlier.
“She may be
the role model in that regard”