Interview ‘We had to play in boots so small it hurt’
Lucy Bronze has developed into one of England’s stars but started in the women’s game in much more primitive times
Lucy Bronze is one of the best and most recognisable female footballers on the planet and has just signed for Barcelona, where she will link up with one of the finest club sides in order to try to win her fourth Champions League trophy.
Yet, at the start of her career, Bronze was working in a pizza shop, playing part-time for Everton and was once told to stop complaining when she told coaching staff the boots she had been given with England were too small and were crushing her toes.
“When we’re on international duty now, we have everything, all the support, all the facilities,” Bronze tells Telegraph Sport from the team hotel at England’s training base at St George’s Park. “We stay in fancy hotels, everything is provided for us. You get boot deals, boots sent to you with your name on. You get trainers to wear, every single piece of kit, all with your name on.
“I remember my first tournament in 2013, it was the first time Nike sent boots to the players who were sponsored. You didn’t get to pick your style, you were asked what your size was and you were sent a boot. It was any boot they had in that size basically.
“We all ended up getting the same one and it came up a little bit too small. We all needed half a size up so we asked if we could swap them for slightly bigger ones.
“The answer that came back from the coaches was, ‘Don’t be so ungrateful’. We played the entire tournament in boots that were too small for us.”
Bronze laughs a lot during this anecdote. It is one she has shared privately with team-mates and it is telling that when the likes of Lauren
Hemp, her former team-mate at Manchester City and England, talks about players who tell them to stop complaining about little things, it is Bronze’s name that comes up.
That is partly because she is one of the senior leadership group and a player the new generation of England stars such as Hemp grew up admiring. But it is also because Bronze has straddled the amateur and professional era – the good and the bad.
“I was living the uni life, trying to make a bit of money and support myself in my football career,” she says. “Imagine if I had to go and work in a pizza shop after training with
England now. That’s the sort of thing people were doing. Play football, work in a takeaway. You just made it work, you did what you needed to get enough money to live and play football.
“We did it for the love of the game. There was no talk about contracts, social media, what you look like in a video. I play with players now who get their contracts at 18. They have an apartment they rent close to the club they play for and they train every day. It’s brilliant for them and sometimes you think, wouldn’t that have been great for me.
“But no, I wouldn’t have changed the path I took. It was amazing, the memories I have, they are so unique. The experiences that I have got, they are priceless.” Bronze tries not to romanticise the past and has no bitterness towards those who benefited from the launch of the professional Women’s Super League in 2018, when she was playing at Lyon. But she has no regrets.
“It’s funny when you tell the younger players, ‘I did all the toppings, cut the pizzas, I can tell you all the types… we try not to say to them, ‘Back in my day’, but we do make a joke of it,” she says. “It’s not their fault that the game has changed and they have a different experience.”