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Lise Klaveness cut a lonely figure in April 2023 as she walked across the cavernous Lisbon Congress Centre, where Aleksander Ceferin had just been re-elected for a third term as Uefa president.
Seven seats were on offer on the confederation’s executive committee, but she registered the second-lowest number of votes of the 11 candidates. This was not unexpected. Twelve months previously, Klaveness had addressed the Fifa congress in Doha in terms which the delegates, including all of the Uefa FA presidents, were not accustomed to hearing.
“The World Cup was awarded by Fifa in unacceptable ways with unacceptable consequences,” she told them in a speech that made headlines the world over. Those words – and the courage it took for a gay woman to use them in front of an overwhelmingly male audience, in a country where homosexuality remains criminalised – made her a hero to human rights campaigners and many football fans. It also made her a pariah within football’s establishment, at least at the time.
It is nearly two years since we spoke in Lisbon. She had told me she would fight on and fulfil the mandate she, the first woman to be elected president of the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF) in its 120-year history, had been given by Norway’s “football parliament” in March 2022.
“Two years already? My God.” A lot has changed for Klaveness. She is still more than an irritant. Last December, when Fifa held a virtual Congress to confirm its choice of hosts for the 2030 and 2034 men’s World Cups, the Norwegian and the Swiss FAs were the only two of Fifa’s 211 member associations to express concern about the bidding process. The NFF said it was “not fully aligning with the principles and objectives of Fifa’s governance reforms of 2016”.
Though Norway won’t boycott their 2026 World Cup qualifier against Israel on 25 March, the NFF was the only western FA to “call for an immediate halt to the disproportionate attacks on innocent civilians in Gaza” and ask Fifa to launch its own investigation into the IDF’s intervention. In this, Klaveness chimed with public opinion at home; but she is also facing criticism there, where the NFF board’s endorsement of VAR against the wishes of fans and, for now, a majority of the country’s 32 professional clubs, will lead to a decisive vote at the beginning of March. “I’m a passionate but also rules-based person,” Klaveness says. “If the people who want VAR out win by one vote, VAR will go away”.
Whatever happens, however, Klaveness herself will not. She is as driven as she ever was. “I know myself,” she says. “I’ve been a lawyer, working 24 hours a day. I would love to be that person in the movies who can just relax with the kids; and when I’m with them, I try to be that, just calm, listen to the wind blowing ... but I’m not one of these people”.
First, there is the prospect of finally getting that seat on the Uefa ExCo when European FAs gather in Belgrade for their Congress on 3 April. It is different this time. She is standing for one of the two designated women’s positions on the ExCo. Two years ago, “going for a non-gendered position was a decent attempt at achieving real change”, she remembers; and she didn’t wish to compete against former Wales international Laura McAllister (24 caps to Klaveness’s 73 for Norway). This time, “there is now a second woman’s position on offer and my view was that not going for it this time would be counterproductive”.
So, come early April, Klaveness will be the only candidate for that seat and she will have joined the establishment – but to do what? It’s a theme she comes back to often in our conversation: there is no point in “crashing” a small federation by courting fashionable, contrarian opinions, seeking to be “popular there and then”.
“I focus on what I do and what I’m passionate about,” she says. “The cases we’ve been involved in [Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel] are very real. We have the appetite to take some risks, as we think it is necessary to have a discussion around the things we have engaged in”. However, there is a “but”. “In a bigger system, you have to respect your colleagues and try to be patient as well. It’s not easy, and I’ve learnt a lot. I have done a lot of mistakes. That is also part of my life philosophy. You’ll never know what the limits for change can be, also for yourself.”
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She feels less lonely now than she did after “that speech” in Doha (“There had been no precedent for it and I knew I was very unpopular in the building”), and speaks affectionately of England’s FA president, Debbie Hewitt, who sat down next to her on the bus bringing the Fifa delegates back to their hotel.
“In those vulnerable moments, and there have been many since, you try to find someone you can appreciate. She was the first one,” she says. Things have changed, though. Other FA presidents have reached out to her, something she puts down to the “consistency” of Norway’s approach. “It’s very important not to yell at anyone,” she insists. “There’s always got to be this balance. This is how we work, and now they know where we come from. It’s not like we threw a grenade. It can be seen as something useful. It’s good governance.”
Klaveness has also set herself clear limits on what she can and what she cannot say. “I will always live and die for the mandate. As NFF president, I will never speak about what drives me as a person, about abortion rights in the United States or the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, even if I think a lot about it. I don’t want football leaders who come to Norway to start talking about whale killing or childcare. The only way we can project something positive is by focusing very much on the responsibility of football.”
To some, this will sound as if the passionate advocate of human rights who spoke in Doha has toned her message down. What she says next does not suggest so, however. “If Fifa followed their own statutes – I’m not saying it’s formally a breach – and the reforms Gianni [Infantino] put in place after his election in 2016, I think it would be very, very good. But they didn’t. They were not really implemented in my opinion.”
Though she won’t put it in those terms, Klaveness has become a focal point for those who are dissatisfied with the way Fifa and the continental confederations are running the game, even within the 211 member associations which compose football’s governing body, and even if everyone else is keeping their voice down. Some would hope she went one step further and considered running for office when Infantino stands for re-election again, but “I’ve never thought about that”, she says. “I’ll never think that way. I am a spontaneous person, and my ambition truly is to do things better.” That will have to do for the time being.
