The best young forwards in Nordic women’s football 2023/24 – data analysis

The Nordic region is a fascinating market that has produced players such as Pernille Harder, Stina Blackenstenius and Caroline Hansen.

More recently, players such as Maiko Hamano, who moved from Hammarby to Chelsea, Matilda Vinberg from Hammarby to Tottenham and Oona Sevenius, who moved from HJK to AC Milan and currently plies her trade for surprise package Como.

In this data analysis, we have used data and statistics to highlight some of the leading young attacking players currently playing in this part of the world and look at who could develop into something more in the future.

Criteria

To qualify for our data set, you had to be currently playing in the Nordic region; weve focused on Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland for this piece.

Then, you must have been U23 at the end of your last season, and you must have played at least half of the minutes for your side in the past or current season, with all of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland playing a calendar year season (i.e. January-December) as opposed to Denmark who plays a European football season (i.e. August-June.)

This left us with 129 players to analyse. As such, we will outline four interesting players that intrigued us as we looked through the data.

Anna Jøsendal (Norway)  Rosenborg/Hammarby  Left Winger

One of the first players that stood out in our data set was new Hammarby signing Anna Jøsendal. She played last season for Rosenborg in Toppserien, where they finished the 2023 campaign in second place. Now, lets get into what made Jøsendal stand out so significantly.

The first thing we did was identify some of the key leaders in our data set regarding chance creation. To do this, we looked at key passes, where Jøsendal leads the way with an average of 1.1 per 90, 0.07 ahead of the next best, Lotta Lindstrom.

Then, we took a deeper look into the numbers and looked at how integral the players were to each others teams in terms of key passes. We did this by comparing the total number of key passes completed by each player with the percentage of their teams key passes completed.

What did this prove? Well, first