At the end of its 11-minute, 51-second documentary, the captain of the Iceland women’s national team, Sarah Björk Gunnarsdottir, says the above line. The documentary was produced by Puma in partnership with Copa 90 and follows her journey from training during pregnancy to a return to professional football.
“I just want to try not to sacrifice my career for the sake of a family,” she says, the first line of her documentary.
“I want to show people that I can do both. I’m Sarah Björk Gunnarsdottir. I have a baby in November and I want to play for my country at Euro in June.”
Cut to Sunday, July 10. The Manchester City Academy ground hosts Iceland’s first match of Euro 2022. Seeing Björk singing the national anthem with his teammates, wearing the captain’s armband, is a nod to Viking literature.
The 31-year-old’s journey over the past year has been one of the biggest stories in the making of the women’s Euro 2022. One journey can be realized through her documentary, Do Both, which has access to Björk’s training. The thoughts of her, and those of her family, friends, and co-workers, during and after pregnancy.
“If anyone’s going to do this, it’s going to be him because he’s so competitive and focused,” says Sarah’s brother Arn Ingi Gunnarsson.
136 cap. 6x Icelandic Footballer of the Year. Sarah Björk Gunnarsdottir has it all.
Over the past year, she has faced her biggest challenge to date – attempting to play for Euros less than 8 months after having a baby. This is his journey.@sarabjork18 @pumafootball pic.twitter.com/PpN6IWKMZS
— COPA90 (@Copa90) 17 May 2022
“She was a lot more competitive than me, I’m two years old and I was a little older too but she never left behind.”
There has been no shortage of competition as Sarah’s boyfriend and a professional footballer himself, Ernie Wilhelmsson, tells in the film.
“I’m worried she’ll be back very soon…. Like making some statement that you can come back in a month,” he says.
Björk had planned to leave for Lyon by January 2022, only two months after his due date, to join his club for the second half of the season and to hang things up well before Euros in the summer. Can you
Her former national partner, who had made similar trips and trained during her pregnancy, recommended Mark Johnson.
“The better shape she’s going to give birth in, the faster she can recover,” Johnson says on the film.
“But you don’t know. That’s the point. It’s all unknown what’s going to happen during birth and how his body will recover after birth. It’s just that everyone is different.”
Björk also talks about the fact that after a certain amount of time (20-21 weeks) her body could not keep pace with the determination she had in mind for training. Even the doctor told him that it was going to get worse for him in terms of training.
“I was like week 20, I can’t stop training anymore because I was running like this… I couldn’t walk.”
The training routine naturally lightened up and the frustration began to subside for the 31-year-old, who was not feeling as refreshed as she wanted. It will take some time for Björk to return to normalcy after giving birth to her son Ragnar on November 16, 2021.
Talking about returning to training in January, she said, “Initially, I couldn’t even pass a long ball because there was so much pressure on the waist and pelvis.”
“But then in the next training it got better and better and it really amazes me how quickly my body has adapted.”
The Iceland international returned to Lyon on the pitch in March with a 45-minute outing against Dijon. It will take him less than a month to return to the blue jersey as Iceland played Belarus and the Czech Republic in the 2023 World Cup qualifiers.
Björk isn’t the only mother who has made it to the national team for the summer. In fact, Iceland has more mothers than any other team in the Euro (five), sharing more than 400 international caps between them. Dagny Bringersdottir, Sif Atladottir, Sandra Sigurddottir and Alyssa Withersdottir also made it to Thorstein Halldorsen’s final list. England,
In a recent interview with the BBC, Björk mentioned how conversations with her colleagues returning to professional football after giving birth helped her.
“When you have a role model to play and at a good level, in the national team even after being a kid and coming back, it’s done a lot for me,” he said.
“We all go through our own experience, but knowing that they did it was inspiring to me and it still is, and it should be inspiring to all other women.” Björk’s former national teammate Margaret Lara Visersdottir, who played 124 games for the senior team scoring 79 goals, called the Icelandic captain a role model.
“She’ll show everyone that it’s possible. The girls have been playing football at the highest level for a long period of time until the age of thirty-five, six. We want to do both. You don’t have to choose.”
Can every mother ‘do both’?
In 2017, the world football players’ union, FIFPRO, revealed that in a horrifying statistic, only two percent of active international players were mothers and that the major reason for leaving the sport was the lack of maternity policies to support them and their families. .
Ever since FIFA introduced legislation regarding maternity leave in 2020, things have definitely improved. The rules mean that clubs pay at least two-thirds of the players’ salaries, and recoup them when they return to football.
As soon as Björk first announced her pregnancy in April of last year, an offer of support was pouring in from Lyonne. The club made a public statement, expressing that they want to “ensure that his return to the club takes place under the best possible circumstances.”
Earlier many were not offered the same. Former Iceland international, Gudbjörg Gunnarsdottir and his girlfriend Mia Jalkerud were asked by Swedish club Jrgardens IF Ftbol to look for opportunities elsewhere after Jalkerud took maternity leave during pregnancy. Goodbjorg also explained why she kept her three-year IVF a secret from her coach and teammates, because of the sport’s inherent stigma of mothers not being good players.
“I felt like the club thinks you’re not going to keep football number one,” she told the BBC World Service in an interview in 2020.
“Of course, football is second, and I think that’s very unfair because if you look at men’s football, it’s a positive thing if a male soccer player has kids because then they see him as a family man. Let’s see in form. It’s only negative for women because you’re not playing and then you have to take care of kids, you gain weight, they don’t know about your form. If you were back really early So you are asked, ‘Are you a good mother?’.” Björk hopes that her journey, a well-documented one, will inspire her to serve as a ‘universal truth’ for women and mothers.
He addressed his views in a press release by Puma.
“I know that not everyone is able to walk the same path, and I hope that documentary can serve as a universal truth that, as women and mothers, you must choose between family and your career. Not required. You can do both.”
One cannot argue with the Iceland skipper who is currently leading her country at Women’s Euro 2022.