Magda The Blue Believer (Magdalena Eriksson interview)

Chelsea’s captain talks through the strangest title of her career – delivered by Emma Hayes over a Zoom call, which she hopes never to repeat – and the three years that took her from Linkoping to being an emphatic favourite in England. Leaving Sweden was, she says, the scariest thing she has ever done, and the confidence it built is something she believes cannot be faked. She describes herself as the extreme case among players who want to know everything about an opponent, and a captain who is direct on the pitch and deliberately a listener off it, expressing the team’s opinions rather than her own. Sweden’s World Cup bronze, and the 30,000 people who met the squad in Gothenburg, remains the most she has ever felt appreciated. She also discusses her political science and feminist theory studies, and her decade-old Spotify playlist.