Stabæk Women

Caroline Graham Hansen played for Stabæk before moving to Wolfsburg, where she won two league titles and three cup wins. Ada Hegerberg overlapped with her for two of those years, part of a squad that turned Stabæk Women into the team nobody in Norway wanted to draw.

The side did not grow out of a schoolyard team finding its way up the divisions. Stabæk IF, a club built in 1912 around other sports, took over Asker's Toppserien licence and much of its playing staff in October 2008, after Asker ran into money trouble and dropped out of the top flight. Within a year Stabæk were playing Toppserien football themselves, and within two they were champions.

Ingrid Hjelmseth stayed longest of anyone connected with that era, ten years in goal from the club's first top-flight season in 2009 until 2019, long enough to see the title in 2010 and again in 2013, either side of three straight Cup wins from 2011. That run coincided almost exactly with Hansen and Hegerberg's time in Bærum, and when both had moved on the results followed them down: budget cuts hollowed out the squad, and Stabæk dropped out of the Toppserien in 2019 before winning promotion straight back the following year.

Nadderud Stadion, capacity a little under 5,000, has stayed the constant through all of it, home to a team known simply as De Blaa for a colour scheme that has not changed. What has not gone away either is the fixture with Vålerenga, the Oslo derby that still carries more needle than most on the Norwegian calendar, along with the meetings with LSK Kvinner. Both trace back to the same account: a club assembled almost overnight out of another club's collapse, that then had to prove in the league table it belonged there.