couple goals at the oslo 2025 homeless world cup
Mika with the trophy and the Swedish Men’s team at the Oslo 2025 Homeless World Cup
Gift a Seat This Christmas
This festive season, we’re celebrating the heart of the Homeless World Cup: the 500 players from the Oslo 2025 Homeless World Cup whose courage, resilience and joy in August of this year, continue to inspire us every single day.
From 13th December until the 24th December, we’re sharing The 12 Stories of Oslo 2025, a journey through uplifting, powerful accounts from the 20th edition of the Homeless World Cup which was held in Norway’s capital city this August.
meet mika and amina
Amina in goal at the Oslo 2025 Homeless World Cup
Being a goalkeeper and specifically a goalkeeper for a team participating at the Homeless World Cup is in many ways quite an individual experience. It’s so distinct that it can be difficult to explain the experience to someone who hasn’t encountered it firsthand. It’s rare, then, to meet two people who have firsthand experience of both, and both at the same time. That’s the case for Sweden mixed and women’s team goalkeepers Mika and Amina.
The couple met at rehab. Mika was slightly further ahead in the program and had obtained some employment there as the next stage. “It’s rehab, but you work there, not treatment …” Mika explains. “The first year, you’re just there for rehab. Then you can stay and get employment.” Mika and Amina have been together for the interceding six years.
Mika came to the Gatans Lag (Homeless World Cup Swedish Member Country) football program slightly ahead of Amina. “I was homeless at the time and living in a kind of shelter, and one of the staff, he played with Gatans Lag, so he asked me to come along,” Mika explains. “I have never played football. Maybe in school,” he qualifies. “He asked me several times: ‘You must come. You must come.’ So I followed him there to practice, and then I played there, on and off, for one and a half years.”
Mika quickly determined goalkeeping rather than outfield was for him. “My first practice, I started in the outfield. Within two minutes I missed a lot of chances and I said to the coach, “No, no, no. I’m going to go play in the goal.”
The local program invited him to be their permanent goalkeeper because they considered him brave in his saves and performances on the pitch. They then invited him to be a part of the Sweden Men’s team and to play in goal at the Oslo 2025 Homeless World Cup.
Mika knew a little about the Homeless World Cup courtesy of some players from his hometown who were selected for the Swedish team that played at the 2024 Seoul Homeless World Cup. He also saw photos and watched some of the matches on the internet. But those advance insights didn’t do the event justice.
“I understood that it was a big, big event. But when I came here, I didn’t know it was this big,” Mika says. He shakes his head. “The parade and all the people and all the dancing and music, and all the events happening here, no, I couldn’t imagine that.”
He also couldn’t anticipate that he’d get to experience it with his partner.
Amina came to the Gatans Lag through rehab, and at Mika’s urging. Her Homeless World Cup call-up came shortly prior to the tournament, the Swedish Women’s team was short of players and missing a goalkeeper. Amina, like Mika, specialises in playing in goal.
A week before the Oslo 2025 Homeless World Cup began the Gatans Lag organiser had sent Mika a text and asked him to call her when he had time. In her message she said she wanted to ask him something: The notice was short, but did he think Amina would be interested in goalkeeping for the Swedish Homeless World Cup Women’s team?
“I said I can ask her, but I don’t know,” Mika said. Amina was just out of rehab and new to the Gatans Lag program and still settling in. He needn’t have worried. “She said yes,” he says, smiling. “So I’m goalie for the Men’s; she is goalie for the women’s team.”
Mika stands behind the goal offering quiet encouragement during Amina’s games. It makes a fairly isolated, high-pressure position slightly less so. But Mika’s isn’t the only support she’s receiving.
“She met a lot of new friends in the Women’s team. Because she hasn’t had so many friends and she’s not shy, but finds it hard to trust other people, especially other women. Now I see her and she’s got new friends, girlfriends.”
The team support for them both has been something else, the two have each other, but they also have the Swedish team forever more in their lives.
“It has been up and down, emotions, it’s a lot: you’re scared, you’re happy, you’re brave, you are sad. Sometimes the emotions, it has been like a roller coaster,” they tell me. “Togetherness, or whatever we’ll call it, with other people, teammates, with all the others and that you’re not alone, because outside you have always been alone.”
Gift a Seat This Christmas
Amina represented Sweden in goal at the Oslo 2025 Homeless World Cup
Words by Fiona Crawford