The making of Lucy Bronze – best player in the world

Full-back always stood out as a huge talent and now she is leading the England charge to glory

There is a photo of 12-year-old Lucy Bronze, smiling behind wire-framed glasses, getting the better of her brother Jorge on a playing field in Alnwick. It is early in the millennium and Bronze, lunging into the tackle, is about 16 years from the day she will do the same to Norway’s left-sided players with such menace and nonchalance that the England coach Phil Neville will term her “the best player in the world, without a shadow of a doubt”.

The glasses, back then, were something of a trademark: she wore them to her trial for Sunderland’s Under-12s, 45 miles from her home in Alnwick, but the nearest team for a player banned from playing for Alnwick Town because she was a girl. “She was a standout because she was wearing those glasses,” recalls Mick Mulhern, Sunderland’s former centre of excellence and first-team manager. “As soon as you see that, you think, potential danger – make sure that the player’s OK. But it quickly became apparent, in five minutes, that she had some talent.”

For the next five years she would attend The Duchess’s Community High School in Alnwick – along with her future England team-mate Lucy Staniforth – and her parents would drive to Sunderland. She hid, at first, in the folds of her mother’s coat, the outsider, the youngest.

“She’s a very private, quiet girl,” Mulhern says. “Her mam would do most of the talking. Lucy would just stand and look and smile a bit. A quiet girl, but a strong personality. Very athletic. Timid,

but very intelligent – and that showed the way she could read the game.”

Bronze’s year group at Sunderland included Jordan Nobbs, Staniforth and Demi Stokes. All graduated to the first team, reaching the FA Cup final in 2009, played in front of 23,000. They lost 2-1 to an Arsenal side in their fourth successive final. “Quite a narrow scoreline, considering how dominant we were at that time,” remembers former Arsenal captain Faye White. “Lucy got player of the match. She was outshining some of the older, senior players that were already England internationals.”

Aged 17, Bronze moved to America on a college scholarship at the University of North Carolina, having been rejected for the women’s football programme at Loughborough University because they did not think she was good enough. “She used to go, every year, to America to training camps,” says Mulhern.

Bronze trained with Tobin Heath, the United States midfielder. The two-time Olympic gold medallist and World Cup winner Mia Hamm was a member of the alumni network and popped in periodically.

“You become a winner out there, because of the way the US players play and train,” adds Bronze’s former England team-mate Kelly Smith. “You leave everything on the line, every training session. She brought that back into the England environment from her US days.

“They got treated like royalty out there because their programme was so successful. You’re training, studying, getting your college degree, being given the best training facilities, nice gear, free boots. If you’re grateful for that and you want to push on, you do. It elevates you.”

The next year passed in a flurry of chartered flights to games, crowds in excess of 1,000 watching college football – until Bronze cut short a four-year stay because the course did not feel right and transferred to Leeds Beckett, training at Everton and Liverpool, all the while working in Domino’s.

To watch videos from this time is to see a gap-toothed, ochreskinned 21-year-old telling an interviewer that her only priority was to recover, finally, from three knee surgeries in two years, the first at 18 and the third sustained, most cruelly, during rehabilitation from the second.

Another 10 months in limbo, waiting for normality to begin. In an interview to mark her first senior tournament for England, Bronze admits her reaction to the call-up was relief, more than anything, that England had not forgotten her. Three years earlier, they had: they let her down gently via a phone call in hospital after the first operation, telling her she could not expect to make the England camp in four months’ time. Her dog was her recovery partner and they ran laps in the park together. Within three months, England did an about-turn and she was back on the books.

“She was told because of the injury, she wouldn’t have a long career,” recalls Matt Beard, Bronze’s manager at Liverpool. “I guess if you get told you’re not going to play at the top level for a long time… I think she wanted to prove everyone wrong.

“We were still part-time [in Bronze’s first season], but were in an extra two nights a week. That enabled Lucy and everyone to have more contact time on the ball, do more injury prevention stuff. It was a little bit of her trusting herself and her trusting the medical team around her.”

At Euro 2013, Hope Powell gave call-ups to Bronze, Nobbs and Toni Duggan. It was Powell’s last tournament, ending in a groupstage exit and England’s worst performance in the competition since 2001. It was doubly testing for Smith, restricted by injury in a group that, she recalls, “weren’t really together and united. I remember saying to these youngsters: ‘Remember this feeling, because this is horrible. You don’t want to feel this again’.”

Nobbs and Bronze “were looking at me, two big puppy-eyes, taking it all in. Lucy was this young kid that just lapped everything up, taking everything on board. She kept to the comfort of Toni and Jordan, but they had this different mentality to what my era had”.

Bronze found an early ally – and rival – in Alex Scott, the former Arsenal right-back who wanted to be the best in the world.

“Lucy’s a very confident person – she always believed in herself and verbalised she wanted Alex’s shirt,” Smith says. “Some of the other youngsters would keep it quiet. Alex appreciated that someone was pushing her so hard.

“When Alex was coming to the end of her career, she guided Lucy, giving her little titbits. Alex was trying to improve her game.”

Since moving to Lyon in 2017, Bronze has won the Champions League twice and been crowned the BBC 2018 Women’s Footballer of the Year.

Technically, she has reached another level – but in other ways, she has barely changed. She is humble – “always deflecting to what people have done before,” White says. “From what I hear about how professional she is, she’s gone to Lyon and almost changed their mindset, because she was so fit in comparison to some of them. World-class, top players, and she’s kind of gone in there and gone, ‘Hang on – you’re not fit enough’.”

“She was a leader at Liverpool,” Beard adds. “She wasn’t frightened of saying her piece. She’s so quick, over short and long distances.

“Having Lucy Bronze enabled us to get players on the ball in the pockets, because when Lucy overlaps, it strikes fear into the defender’s heart. They drop a little deeper, and it creates gaps. She’s undefendable. You can’t replace her.”

‘When Lucy overlaps, it strikes fear into the defender’s heart. She’s undefendable’