She grew up in Sunndalsøra, a small town in western Norway, and came through a Norwegian women's program that was among the most dominant in the world during the 1990s. As the midfielder who made that offense function, Riise was known for a passing range and a reading of the game that opponents described as arriving several moves before their own. She did not impose herself on a match through physicality. She imposed herself through precision, finding angles and timing that made the players around her more dangerous than they would have been without her. Norway won the World Cup in 1995 and Olympic gold in 2000, and she was central to both.

The coaching career she built after retiring followed the same pattern as the playing one: she moved into spaces that had not been designed with her in mind and performed well enough that the design became irrelevant. She has held roles with the Norwegian women's national team and in club soccer, and the England appointment extended that trajectory into territory the sport had rarely seen. She is from a small town in western Norway. She ended up shaping how one of the world's most prominent men's national teams prepared for competition. The distance between those two facts is the career.