PORTLAND, Ore. – Nadia Nadim flies down the right channel and sprints by her defender. She's a blur but for her distinctive multi-colored headband.
A perfect pass from teammate Christine Sinclair falls straight onto Nadim's right foot. Almost effortlessly, the Thorns FC forward continues her run in the box, the ball seemingly tethered to her feet: right foot, left foot, back to her right foot.
Then, in an instant, Nadim strikes the ball again with her right and blasts it past the opposing goalkeeper, who stands flat-footed, her arms by her side, more surprised by the shot's power than by its suddenness.
The entire sequence – the run into space, the skill on the ball, the single fluid strike past a helpless goalkeeper – completes Nadim's preseason hat trick against Oregon State University and would have done Nadim's soccer idol, the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo, proud.
But the goal was also the product of countless hours of practice and repetition.
“When I got into the game, I started watching a lot of football on TV,” Nadim remembers. “I used to watch Ronaldo—the Brazilian guy—and just Brazil in general. We would be like, 'Oh! What did he do there?' And then I used to go out and use hours, days, weeks to learn something.”
Like Paris Saint-Germain striker Zlatan Ibrahimović, who details his life growing up in an immigrant neighborhood in Sweden in his autobiography I Am Zlatan, Nadim too first developed her love of the game and her tenacious drive to imitate her soccer idols among the other immigrant kids as an Afghan refugee at a center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Every day, Nadim would stand at the edge of the refugee center and stare out at the field next door, where a local soccer club trained. She and the other refugee children enviously watched the privileged youngsters in their boots and uniforms, all dreaming of the moment when they too could run out and play.
“We saw those other kids and we were like, 'Oh we need to play this,'" Nadim remembers.
Soon, she and the other refugee kids found a ball and began to kick it around themselves. These were lawless pick-up games played in one direction, all the children madly chasing after the lone ball, but they were also Nadim's first, tentative, steps in her soccer playing career.
“We used to run after the ball for hours and hours and hours. I think that's when I really started to fall in love with the game,” she recalls. “It wasn't even football. We just chased the ball, whoever has the ball. One versus seven or something.”
Nadim distinctly remembers the time that she first began to juggle the ball.
There was a competition in the refugee center between the kids, both boys and girls. At first, Nadim could only do a few juggles, but slowly she worked her way up to the low double digits. She dreamed of beating the camp champion, another kid who had juggled the ball something close to 57 times in a row.
And she did.
“I beat him! 58! I smashed my finger too because I had to jump at the end,” she remembers.
When Nadim finally was spotted by a local coach and placed in a club team, no one—not even the coach—knew exactly what they had in the spunky Afghan teenager.
In her very first match, Nadim started in defense. It was only after she proceeded to score three goals in her defensive debut that her coach decided to move her further up the field.
Nadim can't explain why she gravitated towards goal-scoring, although she has a few guesses.
It may come from her burning desire to prove people wrong.
“It may sound strange to people, but for me as a girl to be able to play has not always been easy. They're like, 'Oh, you're Muslim and you're from Afghanistan, you don't do this. You should learn to cook and prepare [for] life as a wife.' I wanted to show people that [playing professionally is] possible. It doesn't matter who you are. As long as you want to do something, you could do it.
“I kind of like to show people what I'm capable of.”
Or it could just be that Nadim is wired differently than other people.
“At a young age, I knew I had something that other girls didn't have,” she says.
Her upbringing in a European soccer environment taught Nadim to play a smart and tactically adept style of play, but she says that she's come to enjoy the more direct American style of play as well. When she can combine the two styles? That's Nadim's soccer heaven.
And the Dane—by way of Afghanistan—believes that her current Thorns teammates form a special group capable of doing big things this season.
“There are some really great players that have won a lot of tournaments and I have really enjoyed training with these guys,” she says, adding, “I think I'm going to do well and although there's new players, I know we're going to find each other on the field, 100 percent.”
