Everton’s Women ‘Not Shame on Being Ambitious’


LIVERPOOL, UK – Some of the changes are minor, at least too small to be perceived from the outside. This summer, Everton hired someone specifically to take care of the women’s jerseys for the first time. It’s kind of a reminder that many small battles are still won in women’s football.

These small changes still have an effect; they still offer marginal gain. Laundry will no longer have to be done by another staff member, someone who needs to analyze video or schedule coaching sessions, or even by the players themselves. All this time saved can now be used correctly. Everything could be a little better.

Some changes were also significant, such as the nine new players joining the Everton roster in the last few months. There are three players named Swedish House Mafia by their new teammates from veteran British international Toni Duggan, German defender Leonie Maier, Italian midfielder Aurora Galli and Sweden’s stand-in champion Rosengard.

The most significant change is the hardest to describe, at least according to the club’s coach, Willie Kirk. He shot it most clearly when he was with his team at a pre-season camp in Scotland last month. He could tell something clicked.

“Maybe it’s believing in yourself,” he said, trying to put his finger on it. “Maybe it’s the feeling of watching another player walk through the door and thinking: Yes, this is another quality transfer. Maybe it’s knowing that no player can be sure of starting the next game and that competition sets the standards.”

Kirk may not be able to name it exactly, but he’s happy to talk about it. When the club’s highly experienced midfielder Izzy Christiansen first sat down with Kirk in the winter of 2019, his lasting impression was definitely a “no feathers” coach. He didn’t try to sell hard as to why he had to sign with Everton.

“There wasn’t a step,” Christiansen said. He just bought him a coffee – “It’s a way of convincing me to join a club,” he said, and explained how he saw him as a player, what he thought he would bring to the team, and what he and his club would bring. they were trying to do. “It was really important,” he said.

He’s exactly the same when it comes to his intentions for his team. “We don’t shy away from being ambitious,” Kirk said.

When asked if the season opener was to challenge England’s Women’s Super League’s Big Three Leagues (Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal) on Saturday, Christiansen recalibrated the question. “This is what we plan to do,” he said. “Competing and surpassing. We want to take the club back to the Champions League where it belongs.”

Of course, the landscape of women’s football has undergone a seismic shift, both domestically and in Europe, since the decade Everton last graced this rivalry. In the early 2010s, Everton’s rivals for a place were Arsenal, Birmingham City, Liverpool. These were teams of mostly English players; few, if any, have been trained at the same facilities as their men’s teams.

The WSL of 2021 is completely different: it is dominated by multilingual squads built by Chelsea, City and Arsenal at a generous cost. The first features not only striker Pernille Harder, the most expensive female player of all time, but also Sam Kerr, the world’s highest paid female player.

Manchester City can call the backbone of the England national team – captain Steph Houghton, Lucy Bronze, Ellen White and half a dozen others – and have enough finances to lure Australian wing Hayley, one of Everton’s top players. Raso to Manchester this summer. Meanwhile, Arsenal can claim to have possibly the best player in the world: Dutch striker Vivianne Miedema. On Friday, he got one of the American stars. Tobin Health.

These three teams have been standing almost unbeatable at the top of WSL for some time now. They have combined to win the last five titles (Chelsea have won three) and have made up every English spot in the Champions League since 2014. As Kirk admits, they are a formidable hurdle.

Still, the club believes it can break that strait. “I’ve made it clear to the players that we have to go over our weight in terms of budget to do that,” he said. “Finance comes into play, but we feel like we’re there.”

For much of this growth, it relies on the “smart” recruitment led by the club’s sporting director Sarvar Ismailov – the nephew of Everton majority owner Farhad Moshiri’s business partner Alisher Usmanov, who is now appointed to the club’s board of directors. “We have to be flexible and smarter,” Kirk said.

Within the club, Ismailov is known for having both a keen eye for talent and a good bargaining skill: “There aren’t many people who like her at the women’s game,” Kirk had said earlier and approvingly. Perhaps most notable among Everton’s summer recruits was Ismailov, who led the campaign to take down the club’s record signing 18-year-old Swedish midfielder Hanna Bennison.

But that’s just one element. Looking back at the club he joined almost two years ago, Christiansen sees “something special”, Kirk’s trail isn’t just in new players.

“We’ve improved our work practices,” he said, a category that undoubtedly includes hiring a uniformed officer. “We have signed with many winners before. We’ve always had a positive environment, but that fosters a winning culture.”

This is a trend he’s seen across the club. Everton are trying to build a (mainly) new stadium for their men’s team. The last two coaches of the men’s team, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benítez, became Champions League champions. In Kirk’s eyes, the ambition of the women’s team is no different from the ambition of the men.

Perhaps, this relationship does not work quite as often as it is presented. Everton – through sheer economics as much as anything else – has been doomed to live in the Premier League’s upper middle table. Even having any hope of overhauling Manchester City and Chelsea’s men’s teams will cost the club hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees.

However, the woman can now see herself as a force in the game. He might talk about winning a place in the Champions League and think about winning a championship, not entirely for nothing. He may think of meeting clubs in a different tier in men’s football as something that approaches equality in women.

That didn’t come cheap—Bennison alone cost Rosengard a “significant six-figure sum” to convince—and it wasn’t easy. But Everton, unlike many of their peers in the under-elites in the Premier League, now has the reward: a chance to compete, challenge and perhaps surpass. This impetus did not flow from the men’s team to the women’s team, but vice versa.

That’s what all these changes, big and small, come together: a club with a stage that will once again be really challenging, and a team that’s not afraid to talk about it.





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