Jill Roord Opens New Porsche Series: Her Drive
Professional Dutch football player Jill Roord opens a new series by Porsche: Her Drive, where she is put in the passenger seat of a Macan GTS, recounting the moments that shaped her career as she goes. She opens the series with the hardest version of a dilemma every top athlete eventually faces. Success or Happiness. Former professional tennis player Lexie Stevens is behind the wheel, driving her through a conversation built on choices, setbacks, and the courage to chart her own course.
Jill Roord x Porsche: What is Her Drive?
Her Drive is Porsche’s new video series built around one question: what does it actually cost to reach the top? Jill Roord opens it, sitting down with former professional tennis player Lexie Stevens inside a fully electric Porsche Macan GTS, driving through the Dutch countryside as they talk.
The setting isn’t incidental. The Macan GTS is Porsche’s performance-focused SUV, fully electric. Red stitching and red seatbelts run through the black interior, the same red that shows up on the brake calipers outside.
Success abroad, homesickness at home
Jill Roord’s career is one where a handful of players could only dream of. Eight years across Bayern Munich, Arsenal, VfL Wolfsburg and Manchester City; a Women’s World Cup final appearance and a European Championship title with Oranje. On paper, there was nothing to walk away from.
But in the Her Drive conversation, Roord traces that success back to something much smaller: a homesick kid, thrown into the deep end.
“I was really homesick as a child,” she tells Stevens, remembering the moment her talent got her sent abroad as a teenager. Asked whether she felt ready at the time, her answer is blunt. “Not at all.”
Years later, in England, that same feeling resurfaced in a different form. “At some point, you find yourself in England. You’re not entirely happy there anymore, so you head back to Twente. Does that sum you up?” Stevens asks her. Roord doesn’t dress it up.
Yes, I am, after all, a person who just has to be happy. And if, at some point, I feel like: I want to go back home, then I’ll just go for it.
So, that’s exactly what she did. In 2025, she left Manchester City to return to FC Twente, the club where her career began.
Choosing happiness over success
As professional football players, chasing happiness and chasing success can’t always coexist.
For Roord, happiness turned out to be less about medals and more about the ordinary things she’d been missing. “What ultimately makes me happy is having a social life alongside it,” she says, pointing to time with her parents and being around for her brother’s new baby, things that are harder to build from another country.
Off the pitch, Roord has become one of the more visible faces in Dutch women’s football. She runs her own YouTube vlogs with her partner, two-time Olympic and world champion field hockey player Pien Sanders, with the pair appearing together on the cover of LINDA.meiden.
When and where to catch this conversation
You can watch the first episode of Her Drive with Jill Roord below, or on Porsche’s own content platform, Discovered.
Ready for more?
If you want to read more on footballers rethinking what success actually looks like, check out our interview with Kirsten van de Westeringh.
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