Family ties with Felizia
|Swedish coach Felizia Sandberg with her mum Jennie - a current player for the Swedish team Image: Angelica Ibarra Rodriguez
By Isobel Irvine
The smart, focussed young woman in the blue tracksuit, sitting amidst the yellow-jerseyed players hanging on her every word, is bossing the room. Swedish women’s coach, Felizia Sandberg, may be shy of her 30th birthday but her eleven years of football experience are well worth listening to.
Her 29 years of life experience is a whole different story.
“I grew up in Gothenburg with two parents who were addicts,” she begins. “My dad had used heroin since before I was born. I was seven the first time I saw him smoke heroin and he told me not to tell my mum – and I didn’t because I was afraid she wouldn’t let me see him again.”
With four siblings through her mum and another four through her dad, Felizia was the oldest of both families and, from age four as the younger children arrived, it fell to her to protect them – and also her parents, who couldn’t take care of themselves.
“On my mum’s side, we all have different dads, and each had an addiction, or a criminal history selling drugs,” she continues. “I also saw one of them beating my mother.
“When I was at my dad’s place, it was very chaotic – they were always looking for money, stealing stuff, and I went with them. They would get me to wait outside with the younger children until they came back but would often be gone for hours.
“Sometimes they took me with them to steal things then we would go another place to sell the goods, another place to buy heroin and somewhere else for them to smoke it.
“Growing up we never, ever did the things they promised, like going to see a movie or other normal family fun stuff.”
Her dad, she recalled, was always sleeping – often while driving when she would have to wake him up, afraid for her life. Then she would regularly wake up during the night to check he hadn’t fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand, for fear of the house burning down. Felizia was also witness to his numerous overdoses. Small wonder that she was constantly worried and suffered from anxiety before she’d reached her teens.
“I was very anti-drugs when I was little but then, when I turned 11, I tried some alcohol and by the time I was 12 I wanted to drink all the time – in school and out of school,” she relates. “I drank until I passed out – this wasn’t how my friends lived, just me.”
When she turned 14, however, life took an even more sinister turn when she started to use marijuana. “I wanted to smoke it every day. Then I began to take every drug – cocaine, amphetamine, MDMA, ecstasy…and I was also stealing, because that was normal life in my family.
“I started selling drugs with my dad when I was 15 – we had a business together – then I sold drugs myself, mainly to my dad and his friends. By the time I was 18 I had done every drug, except heroin.
“I wasn’t taking drugs for fun, though, it was just to survive, to be able to get up in the morning,” she explains. “It became like medication for me – the anxiety and worry about my parents disappeared and I felt safe. Also, it was like telling my parents, ‘Now you have to look after your own kids and yourselves. It’s time for me to do my own thing.”
At 18, Felizia had her own apartment. She was buying, using and selling drugs daily, had been to hospital on five occasions for medication to help stop her addiction – without success – and had a boyfriend who was psychotic through drug use.
“One day he walked into the bathroom, smashed a perfume bottle and cut his throat,” she says. “I thought he would die, but he survived because I lived near the hospital.”
Image: Angelica Ibarra Rodriguez
This was to become the first turning point, the moment she decided this way of life had to stop, and reached out to the hospital for help. After being referred to a rehab facility she was introduced to soccer through Gatans Lag – the Swedish organisation using football to support those facing addiction and homelessness.
“They asked me if I wanted to take part but it was so long since I’d played,” she continues. “I’d enjoyed football at school, playing alongside the boys, but it had just been for fun. This seemed more serious, but I thought it was better for me to do some sort of activity, so I joined in.”
Felizia’s love for the sport was duly reignited and things became even more exciting when she was told they would have a team heading for the Homeless World Cup in Poznan, Poland that year [2013], the first time Sweden had fielded a women’s side.
“I was at the rehab facility for three months and went to every training session,” she recalls. “Everyone was so welcoming and encouraging, and I remembered how much I’d loved football when I was younger – the addiction had made me forget all that.”
Still aged 18, Felizia continued to be in contact with her old friends, however, and continued selling drugs – “though I told myself it was just for the money’ – and had drunk alcohol on one occasion.
“I had been told, if I came to the final training sessions I could go to Poznan but, when they found I had had a drink I was kicked out of the rehab facility and was barred from training. Then I lost my apartment, so I was homeless.
“I was sleeping on friends’ couches, I was so disappointed in myself that I had missed my chance to play at Homeless World Cup – and I began using heroin daily. I became lonely, lost contact with my family, and would just sit in a basement or toilets to smoke heroin – just as my father had done when I was little and I’d had to wait for him with my siblings.”
But before long Felizia was missing football, her sober life and her new friends. Those three months had proved how good she could feel until heroin became her best friend. The drug was making her feel no emotion and that was the thing she now craved. After several overdoses and issues with criminal contacts, her life was on a downward spiral and she knew she had to change or die.
Returning to the same rehab facility she started over again, changing her phone number, cutting off all contact with people from her past and keeping away from her father.
“I returned to the football team and everyone was happy to see me,” she smiles. “No one judged me. Then I was selected for the Swedish team to go the Homeless World Cup in Chile 2014.
“There were 100,000 people in the city of Santiago watching us,” she relates, still in awe of the experience, “and though I was nervous, it felt so good going from being a homeless addict to captaining my country at the tournament.”
Directly after returning home, she began to coach and has just celebrated ten years at the helm of the Swedish Women’s team. “Ten years I have been coach and ten years I have been clean,” she announces with pride.
There is however, more to celebrate. Not only is she now mother of a four-year-old-son, Romino, but she’s also responsible for getting both her parents clean – her father for five years and her mother for eighteen months. And the good news doesn’t end there.
|Image: Angelica Ibarra Rodriguez
As Felizia turns her attention towards her team, standing by the training pitch at Hanyang University, one of the more senior players returns her wave.
“That’s my mum, Jennie, who’s here today playing in my team,” she declares. “I’ve been her coach for the last year and a half, since she got clean. She’s fifty now and I could never have imagined she would be competing at a Homeless World Cup – and with me!
“It was a bit strange to begin with. When I shout at her on the pitch I yell ‘Mamma go there’ so many of the players call her ‘Mamma’ on the field too. It’s cool to share this experience with her – and my son can watch his grandmother play on TV too!
“My journey inspired both my parents to turn their lives around and now I have close contact with my whole family.
“I might have a beautiful life now – a home, a car, a paid job in administration with Gatans Lag – but best of all has been getting my family back.”
Help us to keep the ball rolling and donate to the Homeless World Cup
Words: Isobel Irvine
Photos: Angelica Ibarra Rodriguez