How a danish girl from Ikast changed women’s football forever

It is 2020. While much of the world is still grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, history is being made in London. Chelsea sign Danish forward Pernille Harder from Wolfsburg for a reported fee of around £300,000 - a figure unprecedented in women’s football at the time.

"Even if you are just little girl from s small town in Midtjylland, who loves football, you still can become one of the best players in the world," Harder said in a short documentary charting her transfer. It was September 2020 and the world was still in the grip of the pandemic, which made travelling from Germany where she had been playing for Wolfsburg, to her new home in London anything but straightforward.

Despite the complications, Harder and Chelsea, whose shirt she would wear for the next three seasons, were making history. The reason lay in the transfer fee the London club agreed to pay Wolfsburg. According to The Guardian, it was in the region of £300,000 -  a sum unprecedented in women’s football at the time.

The transfer signalled that Europe’s top clubs were willing to invest significant sums. And that the women’s game was professionalising at pace. 

That such a fee was paid for Harder made perfect sense. At the time, she was unquestionably one of the best players in the world. She had won four consecutive domestic doubles with Wolfsburg, lifting both the Bundesliga title and the German Cup, and finished as the league’s top scorer in 2017/18 and again in 2019/20. She was crowned UEFA Women’s Player of the Year in 2018 and, just days earlier, had collected the award for Germany’s Player of the Year. On top of that, she has also been crowned Denmark’s Player of the Year several times.

Good investment

In 113 appearances for Wolfsburg, Harder scored 103 goals, including 25 in the Women’s Champions League from just 28 outings, a record that underlined her status as one of Europe’s most clinical forwards.

The investment paid off for Chelsea, too. Although Harder did not deliver the Champions League trophy the club so desperately craved, she scored 24 goals in 48 league appearances across three seasons.

With the Blues, she lifted three league titles, three FA Cups and a League Cup. She also helped guide Chelsea to the Women’s Champions League final, where they lost to Barcelona.

Her chapter at Chelsea came to an end in 2023, when she joined Bayern Munich together with her long-time partner and former Blues captain Magdalena Eriksson. The move has proved just as fruitful. She has lifted two Bundesliga titles with the Bavarian powerhouse and is firmly on track for a third.

Although the transfer record in women’s football has been broken several times since 2020, Harder’s move to Chelsea remains a landmark moment. It was the first clear signal that the women’s game was changing — growing in stature and investment, with transfer fees slowly beginning to edge closer to figures seen in the men’s game.

Pernille, as she often describes herself, just an ordinary girl from Denmark, has shown millions of young footballers that anything is possible.