The Pathfinder
Sweden. China. Italy. France. The Champions League. The Ballon d’Or.
Before Temwa Chaŵinga was rewriting the NWSL record book, there was a Chaŵinga going first.
Tabitha.
The elder sister.
The captain.
The pathfinder.
Her career is difficult to reduce to one trophy or one record because her defining achievement has been something rarer:
she has proved herself almost everywhere she has gone.
Sweden.
China.
Italy.
France.
The UEFA Women’s Champions League.
And now, with Malawi, the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Tabitha Chaŵinga did not inherit a well-established pathway from Malawi into elite women’s football.
She helped build one.
The first through the door
Tabitha became the first Malawian woman to play professional football in Europe when she moved to Sweden in 2014.
OL Lyonnes, her current club, describes her as the first Malawian player to make that breakthrough.
The move was the beginning of something much larger.
In Sweden, Tabitha established herself as a prolific scorer almost immediately.
She led the scoring charts in the country’s second tier and later became the top scorer in the Damallsvenskan, Sweden’s highest women’s division.
That mattered.
It showed that what had made her exceptional in Malawi could travel.
And she was only getting started.
China: from goalscorer to champion
China became the next major chapter.
Tabitha joined Jiangsu Suning and developed into one of the Chinese Women’s Super League’s outstanding players.
She won multiple Golden Boots.
Multiple Player of the Year awards.
And in 2019, Jiangsu won the Chinese Women’s Super League as part of a trophy-rich season.
Tabitha had gone from being the Malawian girl trying to convince a Swedish club she belonged in Europe to becoming one of the leading foreign players in Asian women’s football.
But the most important test was still ahead.
Could she return to Europe and dominate there too?
The answer was emphatic.
Italy: history with Inter
In 2022, Tabitha joined Inter Milan.
One season later, she had scored 23 goals in 21 games.
She finished as Serie A’s leading scorer and became the first African woman ever to win the Italian top-flight Golden Boot.
Then came another recognition.
She was named the Italian women’s Player of the Year for the 2022–23 season.
By this point, the pattern was impossible to ignore.
Tabitha did not simply adapt to new leagues.
She climbed to the top of them.
Paris: best player in France
The following season took her to Paris Saint-Germain.
Again, a new country.
Again, a new league.
Again, the same result.
Tabitha scored 19 league goals in her first season in France and finished as the D1 Arkema Golden Boot winner.
But goals alone do not capture how dominant the season was.
The French Football Federation named her D1 Arkema Player of the Season.
She also won Player of the Month in February and March 2024, becoming only the fourth player at the time to retain the monthly award in consecutive months.
For one stretch of that season, she was simultaneously among the league’s leading scorers and creators.
The Malawian forward who had first crossed into European football a decade earlier had now been judged the best player in one of Europe’s major leagues.
Then came Europe itself
Paris also gave Tabitha something she had never previously had:
the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
And she did not arrive quietly.
In her first Champions League campaign, she played 12 matches and scored six goals.
She scored on some of the biggest nights of PSG’s European season.
And when UEFA’s season was over, Tabitha was selected for the 2023–24 Women’s Champions League Team of the Season.
She also became the first Malawian to play and score at that level.
Another door opened.
Another Malawian first.
A trophy in Paris
PSG’s season also brought silverware.
Tabitha helped the club win the 2024 Coupe de France, contributing four goals in five matches in the competition.
Then one of the most successful clubs in women’s football came calling.
Lyon
In July 2024, Tabitha signed a three-year deal with Olympique Lyonnais, now OL Lyonnes.
For a player who had spent her career steadily moving upward, it was another extraordinary marker.
Lyon are not simply another European club.
They are one of the defining institutions of the women’s game.
In Tabitha’s first season with Lyon, the club won the French championship.
The player who had once needed an opportunity simply to prove that a Malawian woman could play professional football in Europe was now collecting trophies with one of Europe’s giants.
Ballon d’Or
Then came perhaps the cleanest global recognition of how far the journey had gone.
In 2024, Tabitha Chaŵinga became the first Malawian footballer ever nominated for the Ballon d’Or.
Men or women.
The first.
UEFA’s official Ballon d’Or nominee list placed her alongside the elite of the global women’s game.
She ultimately finished 16th in the world.
For Malawi, that was a landmark.
For Tabitha, it was confirmation that the journey from northern Malawi to Sweden, China, Italy and France had produced something bigger than a remarkable career.
She had become a world-level footballer.
And then she brought it home
For years, Tabitha’s club career travelled far beyond what Malawi’s national team had yet achieved.
She had league titles.
Golden Boots.
Player-of-the-Year awards.
Champions League football.
A Ballon d’Or nomination.
But Malawi had never qualified for WAFCON.
And had never reached a senior FIFA World Cup.
That changed in 2026.
Tabitha arrived at Malawi’s first WAFCON not simply as an international star.
She arrived as captain.
Through the semi-final she had played all five matches and scored four goals:
against Nigeria;
against Zambia;
and twice against Algeria.
The Zambia goal was particularly extraordinary.
Malawi were losing 2–0.
They did not necessarily need to equalise.
They needed one goal to change the mathematics of a three-way group-stage tiebreak.
Tabitha scored it.
Malawi lost 2–1.
Malawi still won Group C.
Then came Algeria.
Two goals from the captain. One place in the final.
In Malawi’s first WAFCON semi-final, Tabitha scored twice.
Her younger sister Temwa scored the other.
Algeria 1–3 Malawi.
The Chaŵinga sisters had scored all three goals that took Malawi into the continental final.
And by then, the biggest breakthrough had already been secured.
Malawi were going to the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil.
The woman who had spent her career representing Malawi across the world’s biggest football markets would finally represent Malawi on the biggest international stage of all.
The achievement is repetition
Temwa’s American dominance can be captured beautifully:
2x MVP.
2x Golden Boot.
Tabitha’s story is different.
Her greatness is geographical.
She has won or competed for major individual honours across Sweden, China, Italy and France.
She has been a league top scorer in multiple countries.
She has been named a league’s best player in multiple environments.
She has won domestic trophies in Asia and Europe.
She has played and scored in the Champions League.
She has reached the Ballon d’Or.
And throughout it all, she has continued carrying Malawi with her.
That may be the defining statistic of Tabitha Chaŵinga’s career:
wherever she has gone, the football has translated.
Different language.
Different culture.
Different tactical system.
Different continent.
Same player.
Goals.
The pathfinder
There is another reason Tabitha’s career cannot be understood only through her own medals.
She went first.
Her route helped make Temwa’s route possible.
She helped recommend her younger sister for opportunities in Malawi and Sweden.
The younger sister eventually became a superstar in her own right.
That is part of Tabitha’s legacy too.
She did not simply walk through a door.
She held it open.
Today Temwa has her own records.
Players such as Faith Chinzimu and Rose Kadzere are building careers beyond Malawi.
And the Scorchers are headed to the World Cup.
The pathway is no longer occupied by one woman.
That is perhaps the clearest evidence of what the first journey meant.
Tabitha Chaŵinga’s résumé
✔️ First Malawian woman to play professional football in Europe
✔️ Golden Boot winner in Sweden
✔️ Multiple Chinese Women’s Super League Golden Boots
✔️ Chinese Women’s Super League Player of the Year
✔️ Chinese league champion
✔️ First African woman to win the Serie A Golden Boot
✔️ Italian Women’s Player of the Year
✔️ French league Golden Boot — 19 goals
✔️ French Player of the Season
✔️ 2024 Coupe de France winner
✔️ UEFA Women’s Champions League Team of the Season
✔️ French champion with Lyon
✔️ First Malawian Ballon d’Or nominee
✔️ 16th in the 2024 Ballon d’Or
✔️ Captain of Malawi’s first WAFCON team
✔️ Captain of Malawi’s first senior FIFA World Cup team
The awards matter.
The goals matter.
The firsts matter.
But perhaps the simplest way to describe what Tabitha Chaŵinga has accomplished is this:
Before there was a road, she walked one into existence.
And now an entire generation is coming behind her.
