Nadia Nadim recently won the French League title with PSG and just joined Racing Louisville FC. With nearly 200 club goals, she is no less than a star. At 33, she is showing no signs of stopping and plans to keep going for as long as she can.
For Denmark, she has played 98 games and found the back of the net 38 times. But this woman’s journey to the top has been anything but easy.
Nadia Nadim’s story of tragedy and triumph is an inspiration to many – and it’s currently going viral on social media. She was born on January 2, 1988, in Herat, Afghanistan. She was just 11-years-old when the Taliban murdered her father, who had been a general in the Afghan army, according to The Independent. With her mother and four sisters, she escaped Afghanistan for Pakistan with forged passports, from where the family made its way to Europe.
“The only thing I was thinking of was staying alive, you know, surviving until the next day,” she said.
“We planned to escape to London, where we had a few relatives, and with forged passports we came to Italy through Pakistan,” Nadia Nadim writes on her website.
“From there, me and my entire family went on a truck, thinking we were heading towards London. After a few days, we all turfed of the truck, expecting to see Big Ben. We did not. All we saw was trees. We asked a passer-by and found out that the bus had dropped us in Denmark.”
When Nadim arrived with her family in Denmark, they began living in a refugee camp, and it was here that she discovered her love for football.
In some fields close to where she was staying, Nadim recalls seeing other kids ‘playing around with this round ball’.
“I was like: ‘It looks really cool, I want to do the same,” she says. “Since then, I’ve never left the football and look where it has brought me, to Paris Saint-Germain.”
In 2009, Nadia Nadim made her debut for the Danish national team in Algarve Cup and has since earned a reputation as a prolific goalscorer who has helped her team to several wins. Her fantastic goal in the 2017 European Championship was one of the highlights of her impressive career.
Currently, she’s a medical student at Aarhus University and plans to complete her qualification after she retires from football.
