Sarina Wiegman

England women's football manager faces a journey into unknown territory, writes Jessy Parker Humphreys

- Jessy Parker Humphreys

The city of Den Haag, aka The Hague, is filled with affluence, as diplomats and politicians flock to live and work on the northern coastline of the Netherlands.

There are also more working-class neighbourhoods, and back in the 1970s Sarina Wiegman could be found playing football on the street in one of the suburbs. With her hair cut short so that she could pass as a boy, it would have been hard for her to imagine that 50 years later she would be standing under the Wembley arch, lifting her second European Championship title, after finally ending England's 60 years of hurt.

Wiegman's journey to that point took her all around the world. There were 104 international caps for her country as a player, although officially (and cruelly) the tally is 99, as five of those matches came against non-Fifa-affiliated opponents. There was also a spell in the United States, at the University of North Carolina, whose women's football programme can also take credit for the development of Lucy Bronze and Alessia Russo. And, of course, there was the home European Championship win with the Netherlands in 2017, a World Cup final with them in 2019, and then the same again with England.

But, astonishingly, large portions of Wiegman's career and development took place in the exact same area in which she grew up.