Morgane Martins

She holds both French and Portuguese nationality.

Her Portuguese roots come from her grandparents, who are from Fafe in northern Portugal; she says the family still goes regularly on holiday there.

Before signing her first professional contract, she combined elite football with a job as a PE teacher, and has described trying to do both at once as “very complicated” at D1 level.

She has long combined elite football with teaching: while at Issy she was also working as a physical education (EPS) teacher.

She only really started learning Portuguese seriously as an adult: she bought a book to improve, and in national-team camps deliberately avoids sitting just with French-speaking teammates so she’s forced to practice the language.

At Dijon she became one of the two professional players fronting the club’s inclusive football project “Tous au Foot”, running adapted-football sessions for young people with disabilities.