Four-year-old Asseyi had one hero: Zidane

Asseyi's account, given to The Guardian, is simple and specific: she watched Zidane's France lift the World Cup on home soil in 1998 as a four-year-old and decided, there and then, that she wanted to be like him. It's the kind of origin story that sounds almost too neat for a career in football, except it's the one she's telling, and it maps onto a generation of players across Europe who trace their love of the game back to that same tournament.

A World Cup that travelled

Zidane's 1998 wasn't just a French story. His double header against Brazil in the final, and the scenes that followed across the country, turned him into one of the sport's defining global faces for an entire decade. Asseyi growing up with that image in her head, rather than a nearer or more obvious reference point, says something about how far a single tournament can reach. A four-year-old doesn't need to understand tactics to understand that someone on the pitch looks like magic.

From that moment to the WSL

The path from idolising Zidane to playing professionally for West Ham Women wasn't instant, obviously, and the Guardian interview doesn't lay out every stop along the way. But Asseyi is now part of a West Ham side competing in the WSL, which puts her squarely in the professional tier of the English women's game that barely existed in any visible form when she was watching that 1998 final.

That gap matters. The women's game Asseyi plays in now offers routes, contracts and visibility that simply weren't there for a young fan picking a hero in the late 1990s. Her story works as a marker of how much has shifted: the inspiration came from the men's game because that was what was on television, but the career it sparked has ended up somewhere the sport itself has only recently made room for.

Why this one sticks

Plenty of players cite childhood idols in interviews and most of it is filler. Asseyi naming Zidane specifically, and placing it at age four during that exact tournament, gives the quote a precision that the usual answer doesn't have. It's a small detail in a longer profile, but it's the one that travels: a World Cup watched on a screen somewhere, a kid who decided she wanted in, and a West Ham shirt a long way down the line.