Lise Klaveness on her Uefa ambitions: ‘We need to make football inclusive for all’

“I was always very fond of the ball and I was definitely a No 10,” Lise Klaveness says as she describes the kind of football she played while winning 73 caps for Norway. “I had played as a No 6 but I didn’t like it. I wanted to play with risk. So the coaches ended up playing me as an offensive midfielder because I had a high appetite for risk.”

The 41-year-old Klaveness is also a lawyer and a judge who, as the president of Norway’s FA, made a blistering speech at Fifa’s congress in Doha last March when she demanded that football leaders support migrant workers in Qatar, protect LGBTQ+ fans at the World Cup and make the game open to all. As a gay woman, happily married to former Norway international Ingrid Fosse Sæthre, Klaveness could have been jailed under Qatari law but, as she points out, she was at little risk personally.

Klaveness is now trying to win a seat on the Uefa executive committee at a time when, as the recent independent report into last year’s near-catastrophic Champions League final showed, the European governing body is in crisis and lacking moral leadership. But she has taken the riskier option by deciding not to contest the quota seat for women. Instead, in the April election, Klaveness will stand against male administrators in a bid to win one of seven open places.

Florence Hardouin, of France, occupies the quota position but Klaveness says: “I would find it demotivating to block another woman. I got a lot of advice that I should go for the female seat, that it’s a lower threshold [and easier to win], but it is crucial for me to walk the walk.”

Klaveness accepts that her chances of a successful election have been drastically reduced by her ethical decision. “It’s very difficult but I will still