Why Christiansen left best club in the world to head home to Everton
England player tells Katie Whyatt how she returned from Lyon after falling out of love with the sport
In Izzy Christiansen’s words, “everything kind of started tumbling down” and she briefly considered leaving football altogether. She felt lost at Lyon, the six-times Champions League winners she joined in July 2018, and in March 2019, against Japan at the SheBelieves Cup, sustained the injury that put paid to her World Cup. The moral of that story? “Don’t play unless you’re in a good place mentally.” Christiansen releases a peal of laughter and drinks her water.
This is Christiansen’s first newspaper interview since returning to Everton in December – she played here as a teenager while studying PE, psychology and biology A-levels – and the club’s biggest signing wears her
annus horribilis lightly.
“I’m in a really happy place, and a really nice club,” she says chirpily, sitting in a box at Goodison where today Everton Women host Liverpool in front of an expected crowd of 20,000.
Willie Kirk, the Everton manager, admits signing the former PFA Women’s Player of the Year is such a coup that a member of his backroom staff was “still pinching himself at the fact he’s just signed her”.
Christiansen could have remained in France, but “just never took my eyes off the idea of coming to this club”. It is a marked shift from the conversation she had with her mother, part way through rehabilitation for her broken leg and damaged ankle ligaments. “‘I want to give up. I don’t want to play anymore’,” the 28-yearold recalls. “My mum was really supportive. ‘Whatever you want, we’ll support, because your livelihood is more important than a game that revolves around a ball’. But I knew that was not the right thing to do.”
She feels now that she broke her leg because “my head wasn’t in the right place. I was too nervous and uptight about doing well and knowing that there was a World Cup place at stake. I remember Phil [Neville] picked me out in front of the team before the game: ‘You’re playing because you’re good enough. You’re a really important member of this team.’ He gave me a lot of encouragement in front of everyone, which was a bit abnormal. At the time, I didn’t know I needed it.
“The whole of the first half, I completely lost my head. Every time the ball came to me, it was like a hot potato. I planted my foot, about to score a goal, literally a tap-in – bang. In that split second, your life can change or your world can crash, and it crashed. Can you bounce back? That’s one thing about me: I’ll never give up.”
The injury was the nadir of a difficult few months after her move from Manchester City. She warns those moving abroad to find a stable support network. “When I first moved to Lyon, I struggled in terms of establishing myself within the team, just as a person. I just didn’t really connect with anyone. Being a bubbly, lively, jokey person in the dressing room, to then being a non-existent character.
“Lyon’s full of world-class players. They don’t care what they say to people. They don’t care what they do as long as they win. No one really necessarily gets along with each other. It’s more like, ‘We’re here to do a job. We’re like a machine. We just keep rolling’. That took time to adjust to; to understand that people are not there to be liked.”
She would often sit in her apartment on her own. “You go home and get yourself into a horrible way of thinking.”
The signing of Janice Cayman, from Montpellier, helped Christiansen find her feet. By the end she had made “friends I’ll have for life” and was “flying, holding my own against the world’s best” in training.
She recalls leaving the locker room on the final day before Christmas and staring in the mirror. “I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I left without being satisfied,” she says. “In myself, I was. That’s all I care about.”