Liverpool top scorer Beata Olsson on calls to her psychologist and whirlwind WSL season
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Beata Olsson felt boot meet ball and simultaneously the distances travelled to reach it.
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There was the immediate distance between Everton’s six-yard box, from which Olsson scored the decisive strike in a 2-1 FA Cup victory on the stroke of half-time, and Liverpool’s bench, from which the 25-year-old Sweden striker started the match (the fourth successive time in February she had been named as a substitute).
But there was the more important distance — the one separating Liverpool’s summer signing (from the Swedish top-flight club Kristianstad DFF) from the high-ankle sprain in December suffered during a benign set-piece session. “It was so stupid,” Olsson recalls, shaking her head. The injury sent her record-breaking debut season to a skidding halt and Liverpool into the January window with “extra striker” on their list, signing Martha Thomas on loan from Tottenham Hotspur, Norway forward Anna Josendal from Hammarby IF and Switzerland’s Aurelie Csillag.
Olsson, meanwhile, was sent into a spiral: “My first thought was I want to fight. Then I realised they don’t see me competing for that. Next I just wanted minutes, then it was just, I want to train in my position.
“That’s what it came down to. And I couldn’t even do that. Eventually I was like, ‘S***, this sucks’.”
Three times a week, she was calling the psychologist from Sweden she employed years earlier to ensure “there are as few valleys as possible when things go wrong. Because they will.”
“He’d answer and be like, ‘Hey, are we down in the bottom?’. And I’d say, ‘Yeah… we’re down in the bottom’.”
One of the reasons Olsson is sharing this is because it’s easy to miss this part of her: the part that hurts.
The Athletic meets Olsson on a Tuesday afternoon in Liverpool that just so happens to be St Patrick’s Day. The green is out, as is the sun, and so it, consequently, plenty of happy bare British skin. Olsson rejects The Athletic’s offer to take cover inside the coffee shop. She’s lapping it up: the sun, the green, the incoherent chanting as strangers embark on Guinness odysseys. It reminds her of her being at Florida State University (FSU), her front-row seat to the American college bar scene when she wasn’t busy scoring 27 goals in 66 appearances for Brian Pensky’s two-time ACC title-winning and NCAA title-winning Florida State Seminoles between 2021 and 2023, or pursuing a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences.
Two minutes later, we’re schlepping through the memory of 13-year-old Olsson going door to door in Stockholm selling Ultimax socks and Under Armour with her local football team to raise money for tournament fees, of learning how to “not be so embarrassing” when her sister, two years older, forced her out in public. “If I didn’t say hi to someone properly, she’d be like, ‘You have to say hi’.” (She says this last bit in a voice that, admittedly, sounds nothing like her sister.)
“Anyway,” Olsson says, taking a sip of her flat white. “I didn’t expect to be here.”
And here lurks the temptation to misconstrue Olsson’s gregarious disposition as reflective of her journey, a rise from Swedish sock-seller to scoring 10 goals in 16 appearances for Liverpool in the “world’s best league”, wearing the shirt number (11) of former winger and last season’s top goalscorer Olivia Smith, who Liverpool sold for a world-record £1million ($1.3m) in July and with whom Olsson played for six months at FSU as a sort of whimsy.
“At FSU, everyone knew they were going to go professional,” she says. “It’s an exception not to make it.”
What Olsson doesn’t immediately admit is that too often she considered herself that exception. It’s a surreal sentiment for a player who attracted interest from 11 separate clubs in the WSL, WSL2, NWSL and Serie A Women last summer after scoring 11 goals in 17 appearances for Kristianstads, before signing for Liverpool.
“I think that comes from the way people see me, but also how I see myself,” she says. “I’m more than just a footballer. I know that. But I don’t think anything else in life can cause me as much harm as football can. I measure myself in it. Anything I do, I do for football.
“So that (2-1 FA Cup win over Everton) was like I was promoting the hard work for myself. That all the things I did and stuck to finally made a difference.”
And Olsson has done a lot of things. Football might not have been her first love (“My mom forced me to go because she thought it’d be a good way to make friends,” she says) but it quickly became it.
By eight years old, she was enamoured. By 12, a local coach clocked she easily eclipsed her peers. At 16 she left home because her high school didn’t have a girls’ football team and she knew she needed one that did to augment the regional development teams she was playing for as part of the national setup. The move to UF and eventually USF was as rooted in sporting aspirations as those beyond the pitch.
“It’s a goal of mine to have a growing vision for my life,” says Olsson. “I always try to think really far ahead, to see the steps that I take now and think how will they benefit me to be the best. I know that I’m not at my best yet. I’m working towards that. So I have to really think about what is the right step for me right now.”
The steps have not always been obvious. After graduating from FSU, many NWSL clubs eagerly expected Olsson would enter the draft. Instead, she returned to Stockholm for family health reasons, signing with local club AIK to remain as close as possible to home.
A year later, Olsson moved to Kristianstad, taking a salary reduction and moving further from her family, but it was a move she and her agent Caitlin Garden knew was critical in her career trajectory.
Despite performing positively with both clubs, Olsson remained her biggest critic. Hours were spent on Zoom calls with Garden (based in England) poring over match film on Wyscout, Olsson quick to point out the flaws and areas of improvement and Garden quicker to point out the strengths.
The pair were not the only ones considering Olsson’s Wyscout clips. One WSL2 club presented them to Olsson last summer as they pushed for her signature, only for Olsson to exclaim, “Caitlin has already shown me these.”
While the glut of clubs vying for her signature could be viewed as a sign of Olsson’s potential, the period was “really stressful”. Olsson and Garden set a deadline in the summer for a point at which Olsson wouldn’t take any more calls, providing the time and space to make her decision without noise.
“My initial response was of course I want to go. You can’t reject Liverpool,” says Olsson. But the uncertainty surrounding the club (head coach Gareth Taylor wasn’t hired until three weeks before the season started, while the club had lost Smith and club captain Taylor Hinds to Arsenal) was anathema to someone so conscientious. Eventually, though, Olsson called the board members of Kristianstad herself to explain what a move to Liverpool would mean for her career. “I took the chance because sometimes you have to.”
Chance-taking has been the theme and a requisite at Liverpool. Her debut arrived in Liverpool’s WSL-opening 4-1 defeat by Everton in September, albeit with Olsson coming on as a winger as opposed to her preferred No 9 position. She wasted no time in underlining her attacking threat from a central role. By the first week of December, Olsson boasted seven goals in five matches, becoming the first player in WSL history to score four goals in her first five starts.
For Liverpool, marooned at the bottom of the WSL for most of the first half of the season (they did not win in the league until a 2-0 victory against Tottenham Hotspur in January), Olsson’s goals became lifelines.
All three of Liverpool’s draws owed much to Olsson, who scored and assisted both goals against West Ham United and supplied the lone goals against Chelsea and Brighton & Hove Albion.
“Maybe from the outside, it was even harder to understand what the club went through during the fall,” Olsson says. “Even I couldn’t really understand it. I missed the first weeks with Gareth, but everyone else only had him for three more weeks. It was a lot of adjustment. We always spoke about that, and that we know results right now aren’t defining us and what we’ll actually accomplish.”
Olsson’s exploits didn’t go unnoticed. After Liverpool’s 4-1 League Cup group-stage victory over WSL2 side Sheffield United on November 22 — a match in which Olsson scored her first senior hat-trick — her phone rang. The Sweden national team had a drop-out for the upcoming international break. Olsson, for the first time in her career, was being summoned.
“I have Cornelia (Kapocs) next to me on the team bus,” Olsson recalls. “She knows Swedish and she’s pointing at me whispering, ‘National team! National team!’ to the whole bus. I started crying. When I hung up the phone, the whole bus went wild. It’s one of my favourite days in years, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so loved by a group of people.”
Even so, Olsson still remained her biggest critic. Matches without goals triggered texts to Garden requesting immediate Wyscout Zoom sessions. In the inside pocket of Olsson’s computer case she keeps a letter written to her by Garden on her move to Liverpool, reminding Olsson of the talent that got her there.
Since the FA Cup game, Olsson is back in Liverpool’s starting XI, including in the 2-0 win against Leicester City (in which she scored), the goalless draw with Brighton and the 3-2 win against Everton on Saturday, her assist helping 10th-placed Liverpool move closer to the group of teams above them in the table.
But the injury also represented a timely reminder for Olsson.
“I try to not be so fixated with football,” says Olsson. “No one can live by that.”
Last week she resumed a Master’s degree in sustainable technology from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology, a decision rooted in her childhood passion for nature and an occasional “guilt” about the state of the Earth (when she was 10 years old, she donated €10 — £8.70, $11.50 — to Greenpeace because she wanted to help save polar bears).
Nature has an orienting effect. “Like, this,” Olsson motions to the universe around her, “is Earth.” She shrinks her hands. “Not my little Earth here.”
But football remains the pulse of her life.
“I’m happy I’ve taken my opportunities here,” she says. “But I know if I look at it from the perspective of what I want, how much I want it, how many goals I want to score, I’m not finished with my season yet.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Liverpool, Women's Soccer
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