Nico Knows (Nicoline Sorensen interview)

Denmark’s Elitedivisionen top scorer of 2020 signed for Everton without ever having visited, and eight months on says the club feels like a second family. The heart of the interview is the year before that: a move to Linkoping at eighteen that went badly, four coaches in one season, and a loneliness she had never known and could not name at the time. She rang home for hours every night, went back to Brondby and played the best football of her career. She would do it again, she says, because it taught her that if she is happy off the pitch she is at her best on it. She analyses every defender before facing them, keeps up a running self-assessment in her head, and is studying engineering because she needs somewhere football is not.