Arriving at Arsenal’s training ground in Hertfordshire felt like crossing a jurisdictional boundary. As my taxi turned right off the main road and pulled up at the security gates down the lane, we passed a wall bearing an enormous “Welcome” sign. But the Sobha Realty Training Centre is not a territory easily entered. A miscommunication meant the security guard wasn’t told I was coming; he thanked me for my patience as I waited while my claim – that I was interviewing Leah Williamson, the 28-year-old Arsenal vice-captain and England captain – was verified. “I understand,” I said. “You must have all sorts of people trying to get in.” From all over the world, I was told. He turned to face me, and said solemnly, “We once had a group come from China.”
Once Fortress Arsenal was penetrated, I entered another reality – one that was distinctly red and white. Because Arsenal is not just a club. It is 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 offered water, I was given an Arsenal-emblazoned bottle. The club’s Labrador and mascot of sorts, Win, wandered the corridors looking slightly less perky than the plush toy version of her available on the club’s website for £25. I had arrived early and while I waited for Williamson to finish another interview, I sat in a room resplendent with Arsenal lanyards, footballing schedules and a copy of the football magazine Champions Journal – its cover star the Arsenal men’s defender William Saliba. “I can pop the TV on for you,” one man graciously offered. “Though the only channel we have is Sky Sports News.”
I was eventually led to Williamson, who was sitting in a quiet corner of the canteen, wearing a blue Arsenal tracksuit and drinking from a metal reusable Arsenal cup. Citadel Arsenal functions as much as a defensive structure to keep unwanted people out as it does a sanctuary for those who belong within its walls. While Arsenal is a thriving commercial and global business, Arsenal Ladies are, at their heart, a profoundly local enterprise. Arsenal in the Community, the wing of the club responsible for founding the women’s team, is celebrating its 40th anniversary; last month, Islington Council awarded the team the Freedom of the Borough – the highest civic honour it can bestow on an organisation or an individual – in recognition of their unique achievements.
In the years since the ladies’ side was established in 1987, the women’s game has transformed – the 2023 Women’s World Cup final was watched by a peak audience of 12 million viewers on BBC One. Domestically, Arsenal Ladies have been at the forefront of professionalising and popularising the sport. The club holds the top four attendances in the Women’s Super League (WSL), with the most recent record broken in February last year when 60,160 people attended a game against Manchester United. During the 2024-25 season, Arsenal Ladies played nine of their matches at the Emirates, the 60,000-seat stadium also home to the men’s team. The rest were at Meadow Park, the 4,500-capacity ground where the women have historically played. This gave them an average attendance of around 30,000 per match. Unsurprisingly this was the highest in the WSL, but extraordinarily so: three times as many as attended Chelsea, the second most watched team, and 27,000 more so than the least watched, West Ham. This season, they are playing all their home WSL matches at the Emirates.
“We started with a very small community of 200 or 300 spectators [at Meadow Park],” Williamson reflected, her blue eyes holding a steady gaze. “We don’t want to lose that. But the demands of the game are also increasing. You want to keep that connection, but it’s not always possible any more… If the game stayed small, you wouldn’t see the quality we have now, and you wouldn’t have the players, because people couldn’t afford to be a footballer.”
The sport’s upwards trajectory is encapsulated in the career of Renée Slegers, whom I spoke with when the club was being awarded the Freedom of the Borough, alongside Arsenal’s director of women’s football, Clare Wheatley, and its CEO, Richard Garlick. Slegers played for the club when she was 17, and now, aged 36, is head coach. The sport was almost vaporous in her youth. “I had nothing to dream about back then,” she told me. A long-term professional career in the sport was inconceivable, and so to play it was limited to “the here and now”.
Recognising that women’s football is a “relatively untapped market”, championing the ladies’ team is one of Arsenal’s “key strategic pillars”, Wheatley said. “We want to make sure women’s football is front and centre of the club.” Both Wheatley and Garlick emphasised how this has cemented Arsenal Ladies’ reputation as a galvanising force in the game. Yet the club’s rapid ascent has brought institutional complications. As Garlick said, “Each club can decide where it wants to be in the overall pyramid – and there are some great clubs that exist in the WSL – but we’ve got multiple Lionesses in our team. So, we’re operating with different ambitions.”
Most of the other 11 teams that comprise the WSL play at smaller grounds, other clubs not having invested as much as Arsenal. This has led to an asymmetry in the league as well as cognitive dissonance for the players, who are expected to perform at elite standards in environments that sometimes resemble amateur set-ups.
Reflecting on the transition from being “just female footballers to household names”, Williamson spoke of how it’s both “a strength and a weakness, but every player has to deal with it. It’s safer in general to be at the Emirates; it’s a lot safer for us as players as our profiles grow.”
“You notice a difference now,” she continued. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.” Smaller stadiums make more famous players vulnerable. “You’re more accessible,” Williamson noted. “It’s a five-metre difference [between the players and the fans]. So, the dynamic changes from being in a stadium where you can hear a boo or a cheer to then a personal remark.”
Williamson, who was born in 1997 in Milton Keynes, always knew that she wanted to play football. She joined Scot Youth, a local boys’ team in Bletchley, aged six, playing on a “standard grassroots Sunday league sort of pitch”. In 2006, aged nine, she joined Arsenal’s Centre of Excellence before making her debut for the club’s senior team in 2014, the day after her 17th birthday. One of the most technically gifted and intelligent defenders of her generation, she has been a first-team regular ever since. In June 2018 she played her first game for England and became the national side’s established captain in 2022. In her tenure as captain so far, England have won the Euros twice (2022 and 2025) and were runners-up to Spain in the 2023 World Cup (though she didn’t play in that tournament due to injury). She holds an accounting qualification, though it is something she has “put on the back-burner” given how, as she modestly put it, her “football took off”.
Williamson’s rise seems seamless, but an athlete is only as strong as their last injury: 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 one of the game’s most devastating injuries – remedying it almost always requires surgical intervention and up to a year of rehabilitation. Williamson returned to the pitch in January 2024, playing for six months before suffering a concussion in training. She underwent a minor knee procedure this August and is following a programme of recovery and training, aiming to rejoin her Arsenal teammates in matches later in the season.
The risk of an ACL tear is up to eight times higher for female footballers than for their male counterparts. At the 2023 Women’s World Cup, at least 25 players didn’t play due to tears to their ACLs. Little wonder Williamson believed hers was inevitable. “I felt like it was my time,” she said. “It got me, and it was going to get me at some point.”
Biology goes some way to explaining this particular disparity between the men’s and women’s games. Medical research suggests that the hormonal fluctuations that are part of a woman’s menstrual cycle can affect tissues like muscles, tendons and ligaments, leading to a greater overall susceptibility to injury.
But research also suggests that there is a mismatch between women’s bodies and a game built for male physiques, and indicates that football’s design flaws exacerbate some of the physical disparities. From a biological perspective, women are on average shorter, lighter and slower than their male counterparts. One 2019 Norwegian study suggested that, to align with such statistical differences, women’s pitches should be smaller, as should the goals. The balls in women’s matches should also be smaller and weigh less; researchers have found that women playing with a standard men’s football is roughly the equivalent of their male counterparts playing with a basketball. A 2018 study found that repeatedly heading a football seemed to harm women’s brains more than men’s. Other studies have suggested that female footballers are at greater risk of concussion. Historically, designing boots for women has meant using the men’s template and making it smaller, ignoring subtle anatomical differences, such as bone length and arch shape. It was only in June this year that Adidas launched its first ever football boot for women, the F50 Sparkfusion.
Gender parity is accounted for in other sports: in athletics, women throw a lighter discus and leap over lower hurdles; in volleyball, a lower net is used; in the Women’s National Basketball Association, a lighter ball is used.
“I don’t think there’s a problem with our game,” Williamson said when I asked her what she thinks of suggestions that the game should be altered to accommodate female bodies. “I’ve never thought about it, because [this is the way] I’ve always played.”
It’s a surprising answer, though it highlights the complexity of the topic. Adjusting the game would come with significant political implications, and could reinforce misogynistic ideas that women’s football is derivative – or that received chauvinist notions of inferiority on the pitch were being patronisingly pandered to.
Williamson was quick to acknowledge another issue: that more female-orientated scientific data is needed. The women’s game, she said, is “in the research phase” given that “the literature and studies in the past have been male-focused”. Because of this, the players “encourage each other to commit to research projects or give our information so that in ten or 15 years’ time, hopefully the data is there for the next generation”. The intellectual openness and professional pragmatism Williamson revealed is perhaps an odd mix: wanting women’s football to be more informed by research while also being inclined to keep the game as it is.
What concerns Williamson most, however, is the intense demands of the industry’s schedule. Competing in games for the WSL, Euros and World Cup ensures a crammed schedule. Some footballers play matches every three days. “We haven’t been brought up like boys in the academy,” she said. “You’re asking girls that have potentially been part-time trainers for the majority of their lives to now suddenly be professionals. That’s dangerous… [And when] I think about the direction that football is now going in, we’re on a fine line, I’d say, of burnout… The more successful you are, the more at risk [of injury] you are. So that’s where everybody has to come together to make sure that player welfare is still at the centre of – and the first thing considered in – any decision.”
Juggling these demands creates a tension Williamson seems keenly aware of. “That’s the balance: when you talk about the growth of the game and the investment, you want it to be sustainable. That’s the aim for everybody. But because we see it as a profitable industry, we can’t just keep taking more money… [or] you won’t have these top players.”
Arsenal have been able to position themselves as the one of the biggest forces in the women’s game because, argued Garlick, they have successfully “captured the swell of interest” in recent years. “You could just look at [the game] as a cost and say it doesn’t make business sense.” In terms of the immense profits top clubs can amass from their men’s teams, the women’s game is still in a very different league. But at Arsenal, says Garlick, “we’ve seen it as an investment rather than a cost”.
For now, Arsenal’s insulated world offers a glimpse of what the women’s game could become if resourced properly by all teams in the WSL – a league that aims to be the first women’s football division to generate £1bn in revenue over the next decade. While the club is at the forefront of establishing the game’s legitimacy, football is, after all, a weakest-link sport – the league is ultimately stymied by the lack of resources across other clubs.
Women’s football is growing but in its nascency as a commercialised institution. As a professionalised industry, it is young, it is fragile and its future is unclear. Williamson perhaps understands this precarity more than most. Her career, punctuated by injury, serves as a reminder that progress in sport is neither linear nor guaranteed. The game is in a state of transition, from grassroots pitches to stadiums, balancing its localised, community-focused heritage with global ambition. If it can make this transition successfully, it might be able to hold on to the spirit of commitment and resilience it started with in the game it might yet become.
[Further reading: After Troy Parrott’s goal, Ireland dreams once more]
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This article appears in the 04 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Books of the Year