Arriving at Arsenal’s coaching floor in Hertfordshire felt like crossing a jurisdictional boundary. As my taxi turned proper off the primary highway and pulled up on the safety gates down the lane, we handed a wall bearing an unlimited “Welcome” signal. However the Sobha Realty Coaching Centre shouldn’t be a territory simply entered. A miscommunication meant the safety guard wasn’t instructed I used to be coming; he thanked me for my persistence as I waited whereas my declare – that I used to be interviewing Leah Williamson, the 28-year-old Arsenal vice-captain and England captain – was verified. “I perceive,” I mentioned. “You will need to have all types of individuals attempting to get in.” From everywhere in the world, I used to be instructed. He turned to face me, and mentioned solemnly, “We as soon as had a bunch come from China.”
As soon as Fortress Arsenal was penetrated, I entered one other actuality – one which was distinctly crimson and white. As a result of Arsenal is not only a membership. It’s a universe, a realm that has the pageantry of Disney World and the slight eeriness of Duloc, the fairy-tale kingdom from Shrek. Its world-building is thorough: nothing goes unbranded. When provided water, I used to be given an Arsenal-emblazoned bottle. The membership’s Labrador and mascot of types, Win, wandered the corridors trying barely much less perky than the plush toy model of her out there on the membership’s web site for £25. I had arrived early and whereas I waited for Williamson to complete one other interview, I sat in a room resplendent with Arsenal lanyards, footballing schedules and a duplicate of the soccer journal Champions Journal – its cowl star the Arsenal males’s defender William Saliba. “I can pop the TV on for you,” one man graciously provided. “Although the one channel we have now is Sky Sports activities Information.”
I used to be ultimately led to Williamson, who was sitting in a quiet nook of the canteen, sporting a blue Arsenal tracksuit and consuming from a steel reusable Arsenal cup. Citadel Arsenal features as a lot as a defensive construction to maintain undesirable folks out because it does a sanctuary for many who belong inside its partitions. Whereas Arsenal is a thriving business and international enterprise, Arsenal Women are, at their coronary heart, a profoundly native enterprise. Arsenal within the Neighborhood, the wing of the membership chargeable for founding the ladies’s workforce, is celebrating its fortieth anniversary; final month, Islington Council awarded the workforce the Freedom of the Borough – the very best civic honour it will possibly bestow on an organisation or a person – in recognition of their distinctive achievements.
Within the years for the reason that women’ facet was established in 1987, the ladies’s recreation has remodeled – the 2023 Ladies’s World Cup last was watched by a peak viewers of 12 million viewers on BBC One. Domestically, Arsenal Women have been on the forefront of professionalising and popularising the game. The membership holds the highest 4 attendances within the Ladies’s Tremendous League (WSL), with the newest document damaged in February final yr when 60,160 folks attended a recreation towards Manchester United. Through the 2024-25 season, Arsenal Women performed 9 of their matches on the Emirates, the 60,000-seat stadium additionally house to the lads’s workforce. The remaining have been at Meadow Park, the 4,500-capacity floor the place the ladies have traditionally performed. This gave them a median attendance of round 30,000 per match. Unsurprisingly this was the very best within the WSL, however terribly so: thrice as many as attended Chelsea, the second most watched workforce, and 27,000 extra so than the least watched, West Ham. This season, they’re taking part in all their house WSL matches on the Emirates.
“We began with a really small neighborhood of 200 or 300 spectators [at Meadow Park],” Williamson mirrored, her blue eyes holding a gradual gaze. “We don’t need to lose that. However the calls for of the sport are additionally growing. You need to preserve that connection, nevertheless it’s not all the time potential any extra… If the sport stayed small, you wouldn’t see the standard we have now now, and also you wouldn’t have the gamers, as a result of folks couldn’t afford to be a footballer.”
The game’s upwards trajectory is encapsulated within the profession of Renée Slegers, whom I spoke with when the membership was being awarded the Freedom of the Borough, alongside Arsenal’s director of ladies’s soccer, Clare Wheatley, and its CEO, Richard Garlick. Slegers performed for the membership when she was 17, and now, aged 36, is head coach. The game was virtually vaporous in her youth. “I had nothing to dream about again then,” she instructed me. An extended-term skilled profession within the sport was inconceivable, and so to play it was restricted to “the right here and now”.
Recognising that girls’s soccer is a “comparatively untapped market”, championing the women’ workforce is one among Arsenal’s “key strategic pillars”, Wheatley mentioned. “We need to be sure that ladies’s soccer is entrance and centre of the membership.” Each Wheatley and Garlick emphasised how this has cemented Arsenal Women’ repute as a galvanising power within the recreation. But the membership’s fast ascent has introduced institutional problems. As Garlick mentioned, “Every membership can determine the place it needs to be within the total pyramid – and there are some nice golf equipment that exist within the WSL – however we’ve acquired a number of Lionesses in our workforce. So, we’re working with completely different ambitions.”
Many of the different 11 groups that comprise the WSL play at smaller grounds, different golf equipment not having invested as a lot as Arsenal. This has led to an asymmetry within the league in addition to cognitive dissonance for the gamers, who’re anticipated to carry out at elite requirements in environments that generally resemble novice set-ups.
Reflecting on the transition from being “simply feminine footballers to family names”, Williamson spoke of the way it’s each “a power and a weak point, however each participant has to cope with it. It’s safer basically to be on the Emirates; it’s lots safer for us as gamers as our profiles develop.”
“You discover a distinction now,” she continued. “I’d be mendacity if I mentioned I didn’t.” Smaller stadiums make extra well-known gamers susceptible. “You’re extra accessible,” Williamson famous. “It’s a five-metre distinction [between the players and the fans]. So, the dynamic modifications from being in a stadium the place you may hear a boo or a cheer to then a private comment.”
Williamson, who was born in 1997 in Milton Keynes, all the time knew that she needed to play soccer. She joined Scot Youth, a neighborhood boys’ workforce in Bletchley, aged six, taking part in on a “commonplace grassroots Sunday league kind of pitch”. In 2006, aged 9, she joined Arsenal’s Centre of Excellence earlier than making her debut for the membership’s senior workforce in 2014, the day after her seventeenth birthday. Probably the most technically gifted and clever defenders of her era, she has been a first-team common ever since. In June 2018 she performed her first recreation for England and have become the nationwide facet’s established captain in 2022. In her tenure as captain thus far, England have received the Euros twice (2022 and 2025) and have been runners-up to Spain within the 2023 World Cup (although she didn’t play in that match as a result of damage). She holds an accounting qualification, although it’s one thing she has “placed on the back-burner” given how, as she modestly put it, her “soccer took off”.
Williamson’s rise appears seamless, however an athlete is just as robust as their final damage: in 2023 she ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), the band of tissue that connects the thigh to the shin and stabilises the knee. It is among the recreation’s most devastating accidents – remedying it virtually all the time requires surgical intervention and as much as a yr of rehabilitation. Williamson returned to the pitch in January 2024, taking part in for six months earlier than struggling a concussion in coaching. She underwent a minor knee process this August and is following a programme of restoration and coaching, aiming to rejoin her Arsenal teammates in matches later within the season.
The danger of an ACL tear is as much as eight occasions greater for feminine footballers than for his or her male counterparts. On the 2023 Ladies’s World Cup, not less than 25 gamers didn’t play as a result of tears to their ACLs. Little surprise Williamson believed hers was inevitable. “I felt prefer it was my time,” she mentioned. “It acquired me, and it was going to get me in some unspecified time in the future.”
Biology goes some approach to explaining this specific disparity between the lads’s and girls’s video games. Medical analysis means that the hormonal fluctuations which are a part of a girl’s menstrual cycle can have an effect on tissues like muscle groups, tendons and ligaments, resulting in a higher total susceptibility to damage.
However analysis additionally suggests that there’s a mismatch between ladies’s our bodies and a recreation constructed for male physiques, and signifies that soccer’s design flaws exacerbate among the bodily disparities. From a organic perspective, ladies are on common shorter, lighter and slower than their male counterparts. One 2019 Norwegian examine recommended that, to align with such statistical variations, ladies’s pitches ought to be smaller, as ought to the targets. The balls in ladies’s matches must also be smaller and weigh much less; researchers have discovered that girls taking part in with a typical males’s soccer is roughly the equal of their male counterparts taking part in with a basketball. A 2018 examine discovered that repeatedly heading a soccer appeared to hurt ladies’s brains greater than males’s. Different research have recommended that feminine footballers are at higher threat of concussion. Traditionally, designing boots for girls has meant utilizing the lads’s template and making it smaller, ignoring delicate anatomical variations, akin to bone size and arch form. It was solely in June this yr that Adidas launched its first ever soccer boot for girls, the F50 Sparkfusion.
Gender parity is accounted for in different sports activities: in athletics, ladies throw a lighter discus and leap over decrease hurdles; in volleyball, a decrease internet is used; within the Ladies’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation, a lighter ball is used.
“I don’t assume there’s an issue with our recreation,” Williamson mentioned after I requested her what she thinks of options that the sport ought to be altered to accommodate feminine our bodies. “I’ve by no means thought of it, as a result of [this is the way] I’ve all the time performed.”
It’s a shocking reply, although it highlights the complexity of the subject. Adjusting the sport would include important political implications, and will reinforce misogynistic concepts that girls’s soccer is spinoff – or that acquired chauvinist notions of inferiority on the pitch have been being patronisingly pandered to.
Williamson was fast to acknowledge one other concern: that extra female-orientated scientific knowledge is required. The ladies’s recreation, she mentioned, is “within the analysis part” on condition that “the literature and research previously have been male-focused”. Due to this, the gamers “encourage one another to decide to analysis tasks or give our info in order that in ten or 15 years’ time, hopefully the information is there for the following era”. The mental openness {and professional} pragmatism Williamson revealed is maybe an odd combine: wanting ladies’s soccer to be extra knowledgeable by analysis whereas additionally being inclined to maintain the sport as it’s.
What considerations Williamson most, nevertheless, is the extreme calls for of the business’s schedule. Competing in video games for the WSL, Euros and World Cup ensures a crammed schedule. Some footballers play matches each three days. “We haven’t been introduced up like boys within the academy,” she mentioned. “You’re asking ladies which have probably been part-time trainers for almost all of their lives to now all of a sudden be professionals. That’s harmful… [And when] I take into consideration the path that soccer is now stepping into, we’re on a wonderful line, I’d say, of burnout… The extra profitable you’re, the extra in danger [of injury] you’re. In order that’s the place everyone has to come back collectively to guarantee that participant welfare continues to be on the centre of – and the very first thing thought of in – any determination.”
Juggling these calls for creates a rigidity Williamson appears keenly conscious of. “That’s the steadiness: once you speak in regards to the progress of the sport and the funding, you need it to be sustainable. That’s the intention for everyone. However as a result of we see it as a worthwhile business, we are able to’t simply preserve taking extra money… [or] you received’t have these prime gamers.”
Arsenal have been capable of place themselves because the one of many greatest forces within the ladies’s recreation as a result of, argued Garlick, they’ve efficiently “captured the swell of curiosity” lately. “You possibly can simply take a look at [the game] as a price and say it doesn’t make enterprise sense.” When it comes to the immense income prime golf equipment can amass from their males’s groups, the ladies’s recreation continues to be in a really completely different league. However at Arsenal, says Garlick, “we’ve seen it as an funding moderately than a price”.
For now, Arsenal’s insulated world provides a glimpse of what the ladies’s recreation may grow to be if resourced correctly by all groups within the WSL – a league that goals to be the primary ladies’s soccer division to generate £1bn in income over the following decade. Whereas the membership is on the forefront of creating the sport’s legitimacy, soccer is, in spite of everything, a weakest-link sport – the league is in the end stymied by the shortage of sources throughout different golf equipment.
Ladies’s soccer is rising however in its nascency as a commercialised establishment. As a professionalised business, it’s younger, it’s fragile and its future is unclear. Williamson maybe understands this precarity greater than most. Her profession, punctuated by damage, serves as a reminder that progress in sport is neither linear nor assured. The sport is in a state of transition, from grassroots pitches to stadiums, balancing its localised, community-focused heritage with international ambition. If it will possibly make this transition efficiently, it would be capable of maintain on to the spirit of dedication and resilience it began with within the recreation it would but grow to be.
[Further reading: After Troy Parrott’s goal, Ireland dreams once more]