"Could do what she wanted to" How Rosa Kafaji became one of Europe's talent talents
The prodigious Swedish talent returns to her home country on Wednesday with new club Arsenal, where the memories of first witnessing her live long with those who worked with her...
“For me, Rosa is someone I as a 40-year-old-plus man looks up to. It’s difficult for me explain what she means for the future of Swedish girls.”
Big words, but the words of Diyar Dawod, a former youth team coach at AIK in Sweden where new Arsenal signing Rosa Kafaji spent the majority of her teenage years, joining the academy in 2015 and leaving in 2021 for BK Häcken, putting her on the road to North London.
They are not the only big words used by Dawod, who has a particularly special bond with the just turned 21-year-old, given he is both a self-confessed Gunners fan and also from Iraq, therefore sharing a heritage with Kafaji who was born in Sweden but whose parents are both from the middle eastern nation.
“Rosa stood out because she wasn’t naturally Swedish,” Dawod says. “Her heritage is Iraq, like mine. She had a different mindset. She played in the schoolyard outside her training sessions. She played outside her front door, she played on the way to school, on the way from school, she just had a football at her feet all the time.”
Born in Solna close to the capital city of Stockholm, Kafaji played for Kallhälls FF and Bele Barkaby FF before joining the AIK academy in 2015 as a mere 11-year-old, where Dawod and eventual first team head coach at the time, Robert Lison Svanström, first set eyes on the prodigious talent.
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“At the time, I was coaching in the youth academy,” recalls Svanström, who was Under 19s head coach before becoming first team head coach in 2018 alongside Caroline Sjöblom.
“I saw Rosa for the first time when she was 13, because a friend of mine was coaching in her youth team, so of course I heard about her and she was something to have an eye on for us in the future.”
That friend was Dawod, who was goalkeeper coach for the Under 19s, but was helping out with Rosa’s age group because they had a talented goalkeeper among the squad who the club wanted Dawod to nurture.
“I remember watching the pitch on the other side and there’s this little girl who could do whatever she wanted to,” he recalls. “Literally, whatever she wanted to. I was just like ‘wow, she’s good’.
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