Leah Williamson keeps a playlist for every game she plays. She sends the list over to the kit manager who makes sure it’s playing in the changing room when the team arrives, whether it be Arsenal or England. “I love how music makes people feel, and how you can connect with people – most conversations I have with the girls come off the back of music,” Williamson says.
“I like it because when you think back to key moments, you always remember the music that was playing.” On the night of the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 final, the list included Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul”, Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much”, and Céline Dion’s cover of “River Deep, Mountain High”. It’s an eclectic mix spanning ages, genres, continents – less so than the ones she makes for herself, because this one has to please 23 people. But the key to this whole playlist, the one track it could not be without, is “Does Your Mother Know”, by ABBA.
“It’s become a massive song for us,” she grins. “We played it before one of the warm-up games and Ella Toone, for whatever reason, went a bit crazy for it. She went out and scored, and then afterwards she was like, ‘Can we have that before every game?’ I went, ‘Yeah! You continue to score, I’ll play what you want’.”
Toone went on to land the first goal in England’s 2–1 victory over Germany, bringing home the first major trophy for England since the men’s team won the World Cup in 1966. A sold-out crowd of nearly 90,000 were at the final at Wembley, with a further 17.5 million watching on the BBC, which doesn’t count the crowds spilling out of pub doors, all eyes glued to their screens. Among the countless tweets that Williamson saw after the final were hundreds of pictures of little girls too small to know the magnitude of what just happened: one, in a pink princess dress, stood at the TV screen transfixed by Leah Williamson’s face just inches from her own. This was the tweet that got to Williamson. It marked a change.
“I’ve got loads of inspirational people I’ve always looked up to, really strong women, who don’t necessarily play football,” she says. “I didn’t want to be them, and I didn’t want to do what they did. But they still inspired me to be me. And I think that’s the point: that little girl doesn’t have to want to be a footballer, she just has to grow up knowing that she can do what she wants. We’re doing something that still feels like we shouldn’t, almost, until this summer.”
When I was growing up, I thought that women’s football was less of a thing than men’s simply due to a kind of standard, ambient sexism; the same non-specific rule at school that meant we played netball while the boys played football. It wasn’t until this summer that I found out why that is; that just as women once weren’t allowed to vote, or allowed to have their own bank accounts, women were also banned from playing professional football for 50 years. My outrage is still fresh when I arrive at Williamson’s mum’s house in Milton Keynes, not far from where she grew up.
“You’re going to leave here all fired up, aren’t you?” she laughs. Her seven-year-old spaniel, Bella, sleeps beside us on the sofa and occasionally punctuates my indignation with big, full-bodied sighs. But it was all news to me: the women’s football games played by munitions factory workers during the First World War to raise both spirits and funds for charity, often wounded soldiers. Almost every factory had a team, but it was Dick, Kerr Ladies FC in Preston, Lancashire that drew the largest crowds: 53,000 packed into the stadium, with another 15,000 straining at the gates for a Boxing Day match at Goodison Park. And then, less than a year later, what the Dick, Kerr Ladies themselves put down to jealousy over the bigger crowds: the Football Association’s 1921 ban that was to last for five decades, the decree that said women’s bodies just weren’t up to football. “When the men came back it might have gone completely dull again,” Leah shrugs. “But the point is we’ll never know. The fans that are now just rediscovering women’s football – that’s the injustice to me. Just like we were never given the option to play at school, they’ve never been given an option to be a fan.” Though the ban on women’s professional football was lifted in 1971, you couldn’t see a match on television until Channel 4 provided coverage in 1989, and even then it was only once a year for the FA Cup final. For Williamson, missing that one televised game was not an option – she ditched plans for Sunday roasts in favour of watching the game. But women’s football was invisible unless you knew it was there.
“I know I talk about all of this like it’s nothing,” she says. “But I know it’s outrageous. I don’t know exactly when I learned about the ban, but I’ve always known it was a thing. My mum played football. When she was growing up, she had to cut her hair to pretend to be a boy, and she could play until someone would rat on her and she’d have to stop.” It sounds Victorian, archaic. It was 1981. “As I’ve gotten older, and met the women who were banned from playing, and heard more of those kinds of stories, it outrages me. Because it’s like, ‘You’re allowed to play now, so why talk about it?’ Yeah, but I’m 50 years behind everybody else in football, let alone in society, as a woman.”
Time is a concept that comes up again and again with Williamson, an irreplaceable resource that was stolen. Time is history; it is unbound pages of a story that, in the women’s game, have been left blank. When we talk about the disparity between men and women’s football – the pay she describes as “crumbs” compared to the astonishing figures men are paid; the differences in facilities available to the women’s teams, how they are relegated to training at night after the men have left; the shrunken provision of medical care; the fact that, before the pandemic, the women’s teams would fly on Ryanair while the men had a plane chartered for them – it is the stolen history that hurts her the most. It is why all of this is happening. She says football is a game of opinions, and old, conventional opinions are what they’re up against. But the part of her that is training to be an accountant in case all of this fails knows that it comes down to money. If women’s football is less visible than men’s, there are fewer fans. Fewer fans mean less money through the turnstiles. If a logo isn’t going to be seen by millions on a TV screen, why would a sponsor invest any meaningful amount of money in a club? Money calls to money.
For years, female footballers had second jobs to supplement their income. Williamson, 25, who trialled for Arsenal when she was eight and turned fully professional at 18, never had to – she was fired from the one part-time job she did have as a teenager, amounting to exactly one day of hoovering the carpets of a religious book publisher – but older teammates at Arsenal lived through that time, including Alex Scott, who used to wash the men’s kits in the club laundry room. When I ask if there’s a pay comparison between her and her male counterpart, England men’s captain Harry Kane, she says it’s not worth making one. “We’re talking worlds away. Worlds away. Literally incomprehensible,” she says. But, being an accountant-in-training, she lists other, comprehensible numbers. Receipts.
“Arsenal will play a North London derby that is pushing 45,000 tickets already. But then the next week, we’ll go back to Borehamwood which has a 5,000 capacity. Until that can be a consistent thing, that money will never reach us,” she says. “But it is changing in terms of the wages compared to when I started. It used to be that you wouldn’t pay for a player if they moved clubs. Now we’re talking hundreds of thousands of pounds for a transfer. So already you’re seeing a big jump in the time that I’ve been playing.”
What’s changed since the Lionesses’s triumph is that opinion is now irrelevant: the popularity of women’s football is inarguable. “I’m a ‘prove it to deserve it’ person,” she says. “I’m logical and realistic about things that need to be invested in before you see the fruit. The power is now with us when we ask for things. I’m going in with proof.” Since the Euros, Williamson has added more: the North London derby she mentioned went on to record the biggest attendance in the Women’s Super League – 47,000. Arsenal, with Williamson in defence, beat Tottenham 4–0.
Despite the historical hardships of women’s football, there is one thing that does seem to be easier: the game will take you as you are, regardless of religion, culture, or sexuality. Many of Williamson’s teammates are gay, some are in relationships and have children (this is not unusual in women’s sport – among the 25 players the WNBA [US women’s basketball] list as their all-time greatest, nine of them identify as something other than straight). “I don’t want to use the word oppression, because it’s really, really harsh. But we’ve been banned, we’ve been constantly told ‘you can’t do this, you can’t do that’. But the one thing that we can be is whoever we want – whether you are gay, or you aren’t.”
In the Euros, Williamson wore a rainbow captain armband in support of LGBTQ+ rights. She keeps it in a box with her boots, along with every shirt she’s played in. She imagines one day they’ll be stitched together into a blanket.
Men’s football is a different world. The players are less relatable, less accessible than the women; they are untouchable, faraway gods whose followers demand conformity. Right now there is only one openly gay male player in English football – Jake Daniels, a 17-year-old who plays for Blackpool – the first to come out since Justin Fashanu, in 1990, who later died by suicide aged 37.
“It’s a massive, massive thing in the men’s game,” she says. “In men’s football there is still a stereotypical footballer, and that stereotype isn’t gay. I just think it’s so sad. Statistically, there has to be more. But coming out as gay, you are subjecting yourself to abuse on a daily basis on social media, in football grounds – and I know that those people are chastised, those people who are dealt with afterwards, but that doesn’t mean they can’t say it.
“The split second that they say something can affect you forever. So you’re basically making a choice: do I want to live and just be happy in my bubble and be who I am, safely? Or do I want to stand up and be open about it, but then have to be strong enough to repel all of that negativity?
“I think, from within football, they will be supported,” she adds. “But you cannot stop the abuse that you’d get. Some people don’t want to be a figurehead, they just want to live their life as who they are.”
Williamson shows me another playlist – the one she would take on Desert Island Discs. It has Solomon Burke on it. Donny Hathaway. Joan Armatrading. Songs of loneliness, human weakness, complicated love. It’s unexpected, wise, and so is she. She embodies the kind of emotional maturity that makes for a perfect captain: clarity of thought, a determined hope, a distinct lack of jadedness. She knows she has limited time to achieve not only her own goals, but the broader changes the team wants to make for the players who are toddlers now, or not yet born. She knows that while female footballers were robbed of 50 years, her generation was robbed of a further two with the pandemic. She knows that any one of them who wants to bear a child will do so with the knowledge that they will lose a year of a career that might only span 10. She is aware of the brief nature of this kind of life in a way that others might not be. In talking to her, the countdown timer becomes almost audible.
We meet again at Somerset House, her favourite place in the world – a place where she would come as a child to run through the fountains in summer, then buy a cheap T-shirt from the shops on the Strand before carrying her wet clothes home in the bag. “We used to come to London with no purpose and just end up here.” It was free, and her family didn’t have much money. “It felt like a part of London that was ours.” Now she comes to gigs here with her grandma (Williamson buys two tickets, knowing she will want to go with her, and laughs when she remembers her grandma screaming in delight over a performance by Mary J Blige). Today she arrives dressed in white, apologising for being late, focusing on her phone’s clock like she is the panicked rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Above the square they are installing an ice rink over the fountains, another clock ticks.
Seconds, minutes, years. She feels them all. “I’m really afraid of time – of losing time,” she says, as pigeons make kamikaze flights into café tables around us. “New Year’s Eve is a big anxiety kicker, because you’re meant to be in the right place at the right time for one exact moment. And if you’re not, you fucking know about it. I think because of the way I live my life – I just do what I want to do, when I want to – that really, really scares me. It’s the same in football: to look back and think, ‘What if?’ What if you’ve wasted that time? What if you could have done it differently? I just never want to feel like that. My biggest fear is that I’ll look back and think I didn’t do enough with the moments.” She is an ambassador for the Willow Foundation, a charity for terminally ill young adults, giving them the one thing they don’t have: time. They put on Christmases in July, fill gardens with fake snow. She has a superstition that she says is totally irrational but nevertheless true: she won’t look at the clock during a match because every time she does the other team will score. In the final, she glanced at the clock. She doesn’t know why. It showed 72 minutes – Germany scored in the 79th minute. She was furious with herself, ready to carry the whole loss on her own shoulders until Chloe Kelly came off the bench to score the decisive goal in extra time, running around the pitch with her shirt off in an echo of US footballer Brandi Chastain at the 1999 World Cup. That win changed the game for women in America like the Euros have here. “That,” says Williamson, “was like a fairytale.”
Williamson is sentimental – she has not only a desperation to do something with the moments she is given, but to hold onto them. She carries a 35 mm camera with her and keeps the photographs in albums under her bed. “I get feelings off everything, I get feelings off a bloody lamppost,” she laughs. “It’s memories. It’s things that shouldn’t mean anything but just mean the world.” Though she says her footballer persona is “very hard-faced” in a way that may come across as emotionless, feeling is what drives her. “I’m a feeler,” she keeps saying, her hand on her heart. “But the emotion of caring too much can be a detriment sometimes.”
She brings up an infamous penalty she took when she was 18, when UEFA made the unprecedented decision to replay the final 18 seconds of England’s qualifier against Norway for the European Under-19 Championship, five whole days after the match. To watch the footage even now, it is daunting: it is night, the stands are empty. The set-up is longer than the game. She scored the penalty, and her teammates piled into her before remembering they had 16 more seconds to play out. It’s the only match ball she’s ever kept, now deflated in another box somewhere. Comments under the YouTube video praise her nerves of steel. But in the five days leading up to that moment, she felt sick. “It just consumed me. I used to think, I can’t wait to retire so I don’t have to do this, I know I want to do this, but I feel like I can’t. I was wishing away my career because of these nerves. I just went to sleep. I thought, If I go to sleep, I won’t feel it.”
After the game, she couldn’t sleep. She laid on the floor of her hotel bathroom, away from her sleeping roommates, in full kit, her head on the ball, scrolling through her phone, focusing on the kind of ephemeral internet nonsense you would, on a normal day, scroll past. She ignored all the messages from family and friends; she wasn’t yet ready to handle the reality of what she had just gone through. “As I got older, I thought: you can’t just sleep through every day, you need to figure out a way to deal with it.”
She met a psychologist, almost daring her to help her when she felt so helpless. She looks surprised when she says they found tools to help: “Breathing exercises, and making a mental note, like a triangle with my goals for the game, kind of like tick boxes,” she says, picking out three corners in the air. “I went into the European Championships having never played a minute, with all of this extra external pressure, and I just never thought about it – I didn’t feel any of it.” Without that psychological training, she doesn’t think she would have remembered the final at all. Where there could be history, she would have had another blank space.
Like photographs, music can capture a moment. Perhaps this is why she keeps the hundreds of playlists she makes: she is trying to trap time in the only way she can before it slips through her fingers – in memory, in feeling, in a way over which she has power. “Nothing makes me feel the way football or music do. But you choose which song you want to put on… football is out of your control.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Elliot James Kennedy
Styling by Angelo Mitakos
Tailoring by Frankie Farmer @ Karen Avenell
Hair by Mike O’Gorman
Makeup by Mary-Jane Gotidoc
Prop styling by Nuha Mekki
Production by DMB
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