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 numerous seals. I appreciated the wild nature, however dwelling there, I imply, come on, what are you imagined to do?” Nielsen says of the primary 5 years of his life spent inside the distant island settlement of Napasoq in Greenland.
“I don’t know the right way to catch seals and polar bears so what ought to I do in Greenland? So I’m glad I’m not there anymore, however it’s also 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 everyone must get on with everyone else, proved the significance of connecting with folks and that can even be invaluable in his new job as Manchester Metropolis’s first director of soccer for his or her ladies’s workforce. The 51-year-old shall be accountable for coach and participant improvement, 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 ladies’s sport having guided Denmark to the ultimate of European Championship in 2017 and in addition managed Switzerland’s ladies’s workforce 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 “unbelievable expertise and individual”; and Switzerland ahead Ramona Bachmann, who he manufacturers the “Messi of ladies’s soccer”.
By coincidence, all three gamers have frolicked of their careers at Chelsea, the membership whom Manchester Metropolis should now attempt to topple from the summit of the English sport to realize Nielsen’s long-term intention on the membership of turning into the primary facet in England. So how precisely does Nielsen consider Chelsea could be usurped, given the west London membership have gained 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’ve got to consider in our idea and develop one thing that’s distinctive for us after which we now have 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’ve got to consider and comply with our path. We are going to after all 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 potential to beat Chelsea. Man Metropolis truly beat them within the league this season so why shouldn’t or not it’s potential to beat them twice subsequent 12 months?”
