The Big Interview: Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir

The Belgium head coach discusses her 32-year coaching journey, how it all started, how she's preparing for a first major tournament and the lessons she's learned along the way...

Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir is set for her first major tournament as a head coach with Belgium

Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir still remembers the day it happened, when a bad foot injury sustained as a budding teenage footballer put her on a collision course with a coaching career which would lead her to where she is today, a week out from coaching at a first major tournament.

As she sits down to talk during Belgium’s pre-camp for Euro 2025 in Switzerland, Gunnarsdóttir is in a reflective mood as she recalls events from over three decades ago, when she was growing up back home in Iceland.

“It was a turning point in my life,” she admits. “I broke my foot, and I was at home doing nothing for weeks. Someone got me a gift, it was a video cassette of technical exercises from the Netherlands, the Johann Cruyff Dutch Football School.

“I immediately saw so many things in it I had missed out on. My first feeling was I felt bitter because I’d missed out on so much, but I learned everything on that video and decided I wanted to develop myself really fast and somewhere along that journey I had the idea to teach it to kids, because I still felt bitter I hadn’t learned any of it from my coaches.”

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Through the 1990s, a teenager Gunnarsdóttir honed her skills as a coach alongside a fledgling playing career, joining Valur in 1993 before heading to rivals Stjarnan in 1995, before heading back to Valur in 1997, but she wouldn’t play beyond 1998.

While at Valur, Gunnarsdóttir joined the club’s youth team as an assistant and played a key role in building one of the best youth systems in Iceland, subsequently being named the countries Youth Team Coach of the Year in 1999.

“It was really nice growing up and coaching in Iceland,” Gunnarsdóttir recalls. “In Iceland, it was a free country, you were never scared to be out in the evening, to walk to see friends or play football until 11pm without your parents checking on you.

“Crime statistics were really low, so I just remember my whole youth was outside playing football, growing up so freely was amazing.”

Gunnarsdóttir’s success soon saw her become the head coach of Valur’s senior team where four league titles in four seasons saw her become part of the national team set up as an assistant for the senior team and head coach of the Under 21s.

At Valur, she took them on an unprecedented run to the quarter-finals of the European Cup, swaying international stars such as Germany’s Viola Odebrecht and Scotland’s Julie Fleeting to the shores of one of the world’s most northern islands.

In 2009, Gunnarsdóttir moved abroad for the first time to coach Swedish side Kristianstads DFF, a move which would kick off a 14-year association with the club and put an aspiring young coach firmly on the European map.