Wales No.1 goalkeeper Olivia Clark has gone from working at McDonald’s to the European Championship.Clark admits to a “random” football journey that has taken her from defunct clubs to Champions League action in the Netherlands.

But probably the strangest part of the story is that Clark actually began her international journey with Wales when she was still serving fast food customers in Lincoln.

“I was front of house at McDonald’s, on the tills and taking orders,” said Clark, whose next task is to stop Manchester City star Vivianne Miedema and company when Wales meet the Netherlands in their Euro 2025 opener on Saturday. “I was still doing that when I first got into the Wales set-up.

“I said to them, ‘I’ve got to go now to go to international camp’ and they were like, ‘What?’. It was all very random, but then my whole career’s been like that.”

Clark began her football career at local club Lincoln Ladies and switched from her striker role after “our goalkeeper fell ill one day”. While she would remain in situ, the team did not as Lincoln Ladies relocated to Nottingham and rebranded.

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Clark thought her sporting future might lie in cricket – she had played for Lincolnshire and the Yorkshire Diamonds development team – but was persuaded to train at seventh-tier Boston and progressed up the pyramid via Nettleham, Huddersfield and Coventry United. By then, her Wales career was up and running.

“I was on Twitter scrolling one day and saw the FAW holding a trial for Under-17s,” said Clark, now 23 and with 30 senior caps to her name ahead of Wales’ major tournament bow in Lucerne. “I said to my dad, ‘Mum’s Welsh, do you think I could play for Wales?’. He said, ‘Of course’, so he drove me four-and-a-half hours to Merthyr and I was soon invited to senior camp.

“It’s been such an honour to play for Wales because it connects my family.”

Clark’s club career has taken her from Coventry – the Championship team were liquidated while she was there – to Bristol City, FC Twente in the Netherlands and back to the Women’s Super League at Leicester.

At Twente in the first half of this season she came up against Celtic, Chelsea and Real Madrid in the Champions League, getting a sneak preview of the talent coming through the Dutch ranks.

Clark said: “It was a good level of football, full of young players and an up and coming league. It was a dream to play in the Champions League, but the opportunity to come back to the WSL with Leicester was too good to turn down.

“Most of the top Dutch players are elsewhere such as the WSL or the German league, but their young players are technical, physical and very tactically intelligent.

“I think our first game will be quite physical and people will see us as underdogs. But I think we can surprise a lot of people in this tournament.”

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