![Mary Earps](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/sport/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000346290924_16929668155580_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqFNg083D4dwMls34BZ1qmE6RG59k-tizdcoEWRmJ8o-E.jpeg?imwidth=680)
‘I love getting stuck in and embarrassing myself’ – the winning mentality of Mary Earps
The Lioness is ‘a woman who means to be heard’ – and after forcing the sportswear giant Nike into a U-turn, she’s keen to kickstart change
![Mary Earps](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/sport/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000346290924_16929668155580_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqFNg083D4dwMls34BZ1qmE6RG59k-tizdcoEWRmJ8o-E.jpeg?imwidth=680)
If you had found yourself on the sidelines of a West Bridgford Colts game some time in the early noughties, you might have noticed quite a commotion coming from the goal.
Mary Earps never could understand why the girls she played with when she was young “didn’t like talking on the pitch, or shouting”.
“They didn’t want to be heard, they didn’t want to be embarrassed, whereas for me it was part of the game… I was prepared to get stuck in and embarrass myself, for the love of the game and the love of the sport.”
Some 20 years later, little has changed. Whether she is standing in the penalty box screaming at her defenders or standing up for herself on the world stage, this summer, the Lionesses’ heroic goalkeeper has made one thing abundantly clear: she is a woman who means to be heard.
If Marcus Rashford has the power to leave prime ministers quaking in their boots in fear of being battered by another round of “the Marcus effect”, they should really watch out for the Mary effect.
It has been a spectacularly bad week for Nike, which after weeks of batting back calls to sell Earps’s shirt finally U-turned, agreeing to sell “limited quantities” of goalkeeper jerseys from four teams – England, the United States, France and the Netherlands.
It had tried a benignly jolly statement about how it was “excited by the passion” around the women’s tournament, but the outrage eventually proved too much to ignore.
People were already behind Earps (who described the original decision as “hugely disappointing and very hurtful”); by the final of the World Cup last weekend, she had mobilised an army.
“I’ve emailed Nike complaining,” said one acolyte on the goalkeeper’s Tiktok. “My daughter is desperate for your kit! You are a hero to many.” They still haven’t confirmed if they’ll be making the shirt available for all ages and sizes – they might want to think carefully if they don’t want Earps’s Army on their backs.
Goalkeepers haven’t historically been at the top of the list of adored positions in a football team. Strikers are held up as heroes – keepers can end up forever plagued by the one measly ball they failed to save six years ago. Mary, Queen of Stops, as she is now known, may have changed all that for good.
She made a name for herself in the 2022 Euros, partly for her performance on the pitch (she conceded just two goals the entire tournament), partly for that moment after the Lionesses had won the cup, when she led the team into the press room to storm coach Sarina Wiegman’s press conference.
For the new generation of England fans that last summer’s tournament spawned, the video of Earps dancing on the table with defender Lucy Bronze as Wiegman just looked up at them and laughed, was one of the abiding memories of the Euro celebrations.
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Earps seems to have two distinct sides to her. First, there’s the self-confessed “joker”. The warm, funny 30-year-old who doesn’t seem to take herself too seriously, whose social media feeds are filled with videos of her doing dance routines with her teammates or playing tricks on them.
Then there’s the woman who, after this year’s World Cup, will forever be remembered for screaming: “F--- off!” in the direction of a retreating Spanish penalty taker. She astonished people all around the country as she blocked a ball that seemed guaranteed to go in.
I watched the game in Nottingham, where she grew up, in a pub garden just a stone’s throw from the West Bridgford Colts ground. “She’s a Nottingham girl,” says Ellie Perry, who has friends that grew up with Earps. “She had an air of confidence about her even then.”
If the official goalie top doesn’t tickle your fancy, it’s worth noting you can also pick up a T-shirt with a cartoon depicting Mary’s Big Swear. (Earps also has a fashion label called MAE27 – her initials, Mary Alexandra Earps, and the number of her shirt at her current team, Manchester United.)
Earps was born in 1993, the eldest daughter of Julie, a hairdresser, and David, a management consultant. It was, she told a newspaper last year, “an entrepreneurial household”. As a teenager, Earps would buy snacks and drinks in bulk and sell them at school. “Me and my business mind.”
Football was her first love, though she tried her hand at everything from ballet to judo. “And I played the clarinet and the piano. I always wanted to give everything a go.”
The mother of a childhood friend once asked her parents: “Why are you letting her play football? She’s never going to be anything. You’re setting her up for disappointment.” Thankfully for England, they felt differently, coming to every game and ferrying her around to practices.
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These days, her parents are her biggest supporters. “[I’ve] always thought, ‘Well I must have done something right, [to turn] out this incredible girl,” her mum told the BBC. They are level-headed about her success though. When she was nominated for Fifa’s goalkeeper of the year in this World Cup, she texted her mum and dad straight away. “They humbly replied with just ‘well done’. It was a standard Earps family reply, super-chilled.”
Goalkeeping was always where Earps felt strongest on the pitch. In her early days at the Colts (which was set up by a friend’s dad), she went in goal, saved a penalty “and that was it. I loved diving around in the mud.”
“Goalkeeping is a very individual position,” she has said. “I never wanted to do anything else.”
She joined Leicester City’s centre of excellence and England’s youth teams as a teenager. Growing up, Earps juggled playing football with part-time jobs. Like most of the Lionesses, she never banked on football being a long-term career choice, never expecting it would pay enough to constitute a solid living.
While male players are plucked from obscurity at 10 and earn more money than most people could ever dream of by the time they are 18, football still isn’t a lucrative career for many female players. BBC analysis last year showed the average Women’s Super League player earns £47,000 a year. Male players are typically earning 100 times that.
Earps completed a degree in information management and business studies at Loughborough University. Then, at 23, she was offered her first professional contract with Reading, which led to her first England cap in 2017.
But it wasn’t an easy start. She was part of the squad that lost to the USA in the 2019 World Cup semi-finals and, in 2020, she was dropped from the training camp. When manager Phil Neville’s line-up was announced on Instagram, Earps, who by this stage was at Manchester United, sank to the kitchen floor and cried. “It could have been handled better, definitely.”
![Mary Earps poses after winning the Best FIFA Women's Goalkeeper 2022 award](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/sport/2023/08/25/TELEMMGLPICT000327088146_16929857956340_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqO2wBkCq2Mm4bNdLs0EhrY5V8ETuhj39k8K3NGgmfoo0.jpeg?imwidth=350)
A year later, under Wiegman, everything changed. “Sarina came in and my world did a double, triple backflip,” she told GQ magazine.
Since then, she has been an integral part of Wiegman’s game-changing team. At the club where she first donned a pair of gloves, the women in the current first team (at least one of whom remembers Earps from years gone by) are “immensely proud of her”, says coach Steve Clay. “The fact that she started playing with us – for our girls’ team it’s a fantastic time, we’re very proud.”
After last Sunday’s heartbreaking World Cup Final loss against Spain, Earps posted a photo on her Instagram. Alone on the pitch, crouched down, staring at the grass in disbelief, it looked like the kind of painful moment any world-class athlete would recognise all too well.
But the army of fans she had inspired wanted her to know exactly what she had done for them. “I’m 41. You’ve made me want to play football, join a team, be myself,” said one.
“I saw two young lads playing football in the park today,” wrote another on Tiktok. “The one in goal had Earps on his back. When I said ‘good name on your shirt’ he said, ‘she’s the best’.”