Sundhage has seen and done it all before, both as a player and a coach.
As a prolific striker, she was the top scorer as Sweden won the first women’s Euros in 1984, she became the first woman to score a goal at Wembley when her country beat England 2-0 in 1989, and she retired as her country’s leading goalscorer with 71.
As a coach over 30 years, she twice won Olympic gold with the United States as well as being the beaten finalist in the 2011 Women’s World Cup, while she led Sweden to the semi-finals at Euro 2013 and their first Olympic medal with silver in 2016.
But at the age of 64, she decided to not only move from Brazil and start learning German, but also take charge of a side who are still relative novices in international tournaments.
“I want to lead by example,” she says. “That means I do things that I’ve never done before.
“I can’t take anything for granted. You don’t know [what is going to happen] the next day, the next week, and I’m very happy the fact that I’m still coaching because back then [when I first started out], we had few teams, few countries that developed women’s football.”
A key witness to the way women’s football has developed over the last few decades, she says “the speed of play and organisation” has changed so much, as well as the modern tools she has at her disposal now to aid her coaching.
“Everything is developing so fast. So let’s say I step away from the game just for two years, if I come back I will be old, so you have to keep up with everything, so it’s easy to look forward to the next day.”