EXCLUSIVE: Former Canada international Kylla Sjoman on ADHD, WSL early days and The Expired Athlete | OneFootball

Photo: Kieran McManus for The FA

October is ADHD Awareness Month in the UK, and this year’s tagline is “The Many Faces of ADHD”.

Perhaps some might not expect a professional footballer – who has played all over the world, and represented her country – to have been diagnosed with ADHD.

But neurodivergence is increasingly a topic that’s discussed in elite sport – most notably with England international Lucy Bronze describing her autism as her superpower.

And one of the Women’s Super League’s first-ever players has been chronicling some of her experiences on a fascinating blog with an intriguing title – The Expired Athlete.

Former Canada international Kylla Sjoman started writing as a way to deal with her feelings after retirement, and has gone on to mull over subjects ranging from injury to anxiety. Her ADHD diagnosis, she says in an exclusive chat with SheKicks.net, makes sense in retrospect – and has not come as a surprise to her close friends.

“After retirement, I was feeling all the feels and going from a very structured life where it was wake up in the morning, figure out what you’re going to eat, go train, eat again, go train again, so I’m burning off this energy, and I’m so structured in my day-to-day, to then going into a world where it’s the pandemic, I’m working remotely, and I was [thinking], ‘In order for me to be successful, I need to perform, and I’m not as good at this online work world as I was at football, so I need to  throw all my energy into it.’

Kylla (right) battles with Arsenal’s Danielle Carter. Photo: The FA via Getty Images

“I had no structure, I had no routine. All I was doing was staring at a laptop and trying to get work done. but then an absolute analysis paralysis where I just would be looking at a computer and I could not focus. I was struggling, then I would beat myself up and I would feel really [bad] about myself in the fact that I couldn’t focus, and I felt stupid, I felt dumb – I was really, really struggling.

“But then internally, I was like, ‘But I don’t think I’m dumb,’ but I was struggling so much with work – and then I started reflecting more and more on it.”

“How does your brain not think a million things at once?”

She says having a neurotypical partner helped give her some clarity.

“She can just look at me and she can see a million different things are going through my brain at once. And I was like, ‘Well, what are you thinking?’

“She’s like, ‘Nothing!’, and I was like, ‘What do you mean nothing?! How does your brain not think a million things at once?'”

Social media pointed her towards looking at symptoms for ADHD.

“I was ticking every single box, and so then I was like, ‘Okay, I think this is something I need to look into.'”

She explains that she had previously linked a lot of her challenges and depression to traumatic events that she had experienced, and even when she worked on that in therapy, she struggled with pursuing new goals and staying focused. The dramatic drop in her wellbeing after retirement, reflecting on the highs and lows of her career, and the strains in her personal relationships were a big part of why she wanted to discover if her brain was simply working differently to everyone else’s.

Having a diagnosis made her realise how much football had helped her to manage her ADHD by giving her a structure – but it had also masked it, as she mimicked the way others around her were behaving. Now in her daily life she takes care to get enough sleep, to eat well, and to exercise – but also give herself a bit of grace and understanding. 

“I love challenging myself,” she says. “I loved daily training and very technical skills, maybe even more than a game, because I love the repetition. I love honing on a task and completing it.

“But I also think that maybe a little bit of creativity and seeing things outside the box and being a little bit more open – that also comes from the brain of an ADHD person that’s darting around. It really allowed me to feel the whole game, I guess, in different ways and experience it.”

Kylla Sjoman: I wanted that cultural experience

Kylla is still working in football, as the equality, diversity and inclusion officer for Northumberland FA, ensuring that everyone has a pathway in the sport. She has previously worked in the non-profit sector and promoted social inclusion, so returning to her sport in this role made sense.

Her career in England began a little further south, in Yorkshire, when she signed for the famous Doncaster Belles at the start of the Women’s Super League project in 2011. She had just graduated from college in the United States, and knew England international Jodie Taylor from her time out there. It was Taylor who put her in touch with Belles, who promptly signed her without even watching her play.

Kylla celebrates scoring for Doncaster Rovers Belles in 2011. Photo: The FA via Getty Images

She spent that first season living in a Doncaster hotel with two other new signings, Maria Karlsson and Aine O’Gorman, picking up a small fee per match played and supplementing her income with coaching on the side.

Sjoman made the decision to pursue her playing career in Europe because at that time there was no professional league in Canada, and the NWSL was just finding its feet after the collapse of its predecessor, Women’s Professional Soccer. Without a senior international cap for her country at that point, she was unable to take up one of the league’s reserved spots for Canadians, so she got the chance to use the Finnish passport to which she is entitled through her father.

“I wanted that experience of going somewhere completely different from where I was from. I wanted that cultural experience along with the footballing experience, and so that’s what drove me to coming over to Europe.

“England is the epicentre of football in general, so it was really cool to come over to England and then from there travel on as well.”

“You’re grieving the loss of football”

Sjoman went on to play for Herforder SV in Germany, Celtic in Scotland, returning to England to play for Sunderland, and then finishing her career with Slavia Prague. Her playing career was shaped by two anterior cruciate ligament injuries – the first during her spell with Sunderland, which nudged her into seeking support from the charity Sporting Chance. It was a choice she made herself, and she admits that it was not something she spoke about at the time; in sport, often the worry for athletes is that by seeking support with one’s mental health, it looks like weakness or vulnerability.

For Sjoman, though, it helped her to come to a greater understanding of herself outside her identity as a footballer.

“You could have the best game of your life, but if you come off the pitch and your coach is like, ‘You did this bad, this bad, this bad, I’m not playing you next game,’  you then feel bad about that performance, even though you left initially being like, ‘Yeah, I’m buzzing, I feel great,’ and so you look a lot for affirmation from others.

Kylla Sjoman at Sunderland

“I always found when I entered a team, I was very small in my personality and small in myself until I proved myself on the field, so it’s almost like I wasn’t enough as a person unless I proved myself on the pitch.

“When I was injured, I couldn’t play, so I just had to let people accept me for just being me. I tore my ACL quite early in my Sunderland contract. It was four months in. Before that, I was very like, ‘I’ve got to perform, I’ve got to perform’ before building those relationships. But then it was like, ‘Okay, I don’t have this. I now need to focus on myself.’

“The first time that I actually went to therapy was when I tore my ACL for the first time. It was the first time that I was able to go and start looking inwards and work through some of my own trauma and stuff that I had gone through. I started to realise a little and learn a little bit more about myself during that injury and start to take a little bit of my identity away from performance.”

The second ACL injury came during her time at Slavia Prague, and pushed her towards retirement – a stage of her life with which she struggled.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Kylla Sjoman (@ky_sjoman)

“I remember going to therapy and my therapist said, ‘It sounds like you’re grieving the loss of football,’ and it felt like such a weird word to use – grief and grieving in regards to losing a sport. It sounded extreme, but I remember I just broke into tears and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s what it is. I’m grieving the loss of this,’ but also really reflecting a lot on the instability of it, some of the trauma that came from it, the resources and support that I didn’t have.

“I wanted to bring light to that. You had to be quiet throughout your career because when you did say stuff, you were a bit of a troublemaker, you ruffled feathers, you don’t want to get a name within the game – ‘Oh, she’s good, but she’s hard work’ – when you are just trying to make it better for others, but also for myself.”

Sjoman: I want to make sure everyone can be their best selves

Sjoman’s career might not have been a straightforward one, but it helped to shape the way she thinks about her job now.

“There’s a lot of those challenges that I am grateful for now because it did open my eyes to a lot of other avenues and people and it really did grow my social voice in the sense that I want to make sure that everyone has the resources and opportunity to be their best selves,” she explains.

And though she hung up her boots only a short time ago, Sjoman and the rest of the WSL pioneers spent years battling not only on-pitch opponents, but old-fashioned and stereotypical ideas of what a professional footballer should look like.

“I remember coming over and people were like, ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’

“I’m like, ‘I play football.’

“And it was just like, ‘What? You’re a woman footballer?’ People were like, ‘Go back to school’ – so dismissive.

“Now if you say, ‘Oh, I’m a footballer,’ people see it as a career and they see it as an opportunity. What that does for the next generation is massive.”