A profession in soccer couldn’t be additional faraway from Nils Nielsen’s beginnings. “There have been no soccer pitches, there have been rocks, snow, ice, and plenty of seals. I preferred the wild nature, however residing there, I imply, come on, what are you alleged to do?” Nielsen says of the primary 5 years of his life spent throughout the distant island settlement of Napasoq in Greenland.
“I don’t know how one can catch seals and polar bears so what ought to I do in Greenland? So I’m glad I’m not there anymore, however additionally it is a part of me, a part of the best way I’m, that I come from a small place like that.”
His upbringing in a neighborhood of simply 25 households, an hour away from the closest metropolis by boat, the place all people must get on with all people else, proved the significance of connecting with individuals and that will even be invaluable in his new job as Manchester Metropolis’s first director of soccer for his or her girls’s crew. The 51-year-old might be liable for coach and participant growth, and can lead on participant recruitment, from the women’ academy to the seniors, on the Girls’s Tremendous League membership.
Nielsen has a powerful pedigree within the girls’s sport having guided Denmark to the ultimate of European Championship in 2017 and in addition managed Switzerland’s girls’s crew and China’s under-20s. The guitar-playing, sports activities physiology graduate’s day by day focus, till now, has been teaching.
Requested which gamers he has loved working with essentially the most, he replies with three names: Chelsea’s Pernille Tougher, whom he describes as the toughest working participant in coaching; Barcelona and Denmark centre-back Andreas Christensen, whom he coached within the Danish youth males’s groups and labels as an “unimaginable expertise and particular person”; and Switzerland ahead Ramona Bachmann, who he manufacturers the “Messi of ladies’s soccer”.
By coincidence, all three gamers have hung out of their careers at Chelsea, the membership whom Manchester Metropolis should now attempt to topple from the summit of the English sport to attain Nielsen’s long-term goal on the membership of changing into the primary aspect in England. So how precisely does Nielsen imagine Chelsea may be usurped, given the west London membership have received the previous three WSL titles and have dominated a lot of the home silverware since Manchester Metropolis’s solely WSL crown so far, in 2016?
“We now have to imagine in our idea and develop one thing that’s distinctive for us after which we’ve an opportunity to win. If we attempt to copy what they’re doing we’ll by no means beat them,” Nielsen says, in an unique interview with Telegraph Sport. “We now have to imagine and comply with our path. We’ll in fact not get the identical gamers as them however we’ll get gamers of the identical calibre, after which it’s only a query of time. It’s attainable to beat Chelsea. Man Metropolis truly beat them within the league this season so why shouldn’t it’s attainable to beat them twice subsequent 12 months?”
