Relegated to the Championship, Burnley announced on Tuesday the signing of 24-year-old Peruvian right-back Oliver Sonne for a period of four and a half years. In addition to his football activity, the native of the Copenhagen region is also a former Gucci model and the nephew of Helena Christensen, famous Danish top model.
The signing of Oliver Sonne for Championship club Burnley has not gone unnoticed. The 24-year-old Peruvian right-back signed a four-and-a-half-year contract on Tuesday with the English club, coming from the Danish club Silkeborg for three million euros.
It's not really his qualities as a player that make people talk about him, but rather the fact that he is also a model off the field and nephew of Helena Christensen, the famous Danish model.
After spending his entire career in Denmark, despite a trial at Olympique de Marseille in 2018, he left the Superliga for the first time in his career. The player born a few kilometers from Copenhagen, the Danish capital, had chosen to represent Peru in 2024, his mother's grandmother, Elsa Schmidt-Muller Milosevich, being from this country. She was born to a Danish fisherman and a Peruvian woman from the Andes, herself the daughter of a Croatian migrant who came to work in the local mines during the 1890s.
Since then, he has played 10 matches in the Peruvian tunic, including the narrow 0-1 defeat against Argentina in a qualifying match for the 2026 World Cup.
Leo Messi opponent and professional model
He said at the time that Lionel Messi was the best player he had played against: “I have to choose Messi. I met him a few weeks ago when we played against Argentina and, yes, it's simply the best. The way he sees the game, he's so technical and you can't take the ball away from him. Even though he's getting older and he doesn't have the same power, his vision of the game. is simply phenomenal.”
When he is not facing the eight-time Ballon d'Or, Oliver Sonne sometimes poses behind the cameras. The Peruvian, who is the nephew of the famous Danish model Helena Christensen, has in fact modeled for Gucci and Armani. “It started on my aunt's birthday. Some of her agents had been watching me for a while when I was younger. When I turned 16 and started growing up, my face and my bodies started to develop, they asked me if I had thought about becoming a model,” he recalled in an interview for BT in 2020.
“I had a few interviews with them and I tried to have photos taken which I sent. From there, everything happened very quickly,” explained the man who was on the cover of Vogue Hommes in September 2017. He also talked about how this earned him a lot of criticism in the world of football but that he is very happy to have been able to work with “very well-known brands around the world”.
