Aeolienne
Well-Known Member
(Not written by me)
It’s one of spring 2025’s Mediterranean afternoons when the face of Lucy Bronze appears on my laptop screen. The blue of her Chelsea top is a dead ringer for the sky above the London training fields and she’s beaming for reasons unrelated to the weather. The night before we speak, her team trounced Crystal Palace 4-0, edging within touching distance of the Women’s Super League title – a feat they’ll go on to achieve a week later, beating Manchester United with a single headed goal from their star defender. Then she flashes another reason for the grin – a ring on her right hand.
There’s no diamond, but for the athlete once ranked the best female footballer in the world by Uefa and Fifa, this slim black band contains something more precious: data. It’s part of an arsenal of performance-optimising tools – sleep-tracking, saunas, red-light therapy, supplements and installing an at-home ice bath – that the oldest Lioness is using to balance a relentless club schedule with staying at the top of her game ahead of England’s first Euros match against France on 5 July.
A shared enthusiasm for the field Lucy calls ‘small gains’ sees me immediately disregard the first rule of celebrity journalism – delicately break the ice with impersonal small talk. Somehow, our ice-breaker segues straight to the 33-year-old’s ovaries and in less time than it would take to discuss her commute to work, I’m prying into her periods.
‘There’s a phase in my menstrual cycle when I’m physically capable of doing more and can train even harder, it’s insane,’ she tells me of her Euros prep, with an excitability most of us reserve for summer Fridays. ‘Men – they’re just this baseline the whole time. Whereas we can “periodise” training around the four phases of the cycle and get a lot of benefit. Research is quite low-level at the minute…’ Lucy – the sports science graduate – clarifies, in one of many times during our conversation when I feel as if I’m chatting through an article idea with a WH colleague. ‘But it’s like I’ve been given a superpower for a week.’
Does having brought football home once already ease some of the pressure going into this tournament, I wonder, or pile on even more? ‘It’s a bit of everything,’ she reflects. ‘What we’ve spoken about [as a team] is that we admire what we’ve done in the past, being the Euros winners. But we’re a “new England” going into this and we’ll create our own history.’ The squad’s self-proclaimed ‘bossy mum’, Lucy hopes this new England approach will lighten the load for the new Lioness cubs. ‘There are people going to the Euros and it’ll be their first ever tournament wearing an England shirt. You want them to enjoy that. And I think taking away that pressure is a great way for them to do it.’
Ahead of the competition in Switzerland – ‘10 days when the only time we’re apart is when we go to bed’ (and yes, Lucy smiles, they do get a bit sick of each other) – squad contact stays within the group chat. Club matches ended in mid-May, when players were granted 10 days’ holiday. But while she suspects some of her teammates will give short shrift to manager Sarina Wiegman’s plea to ‘be sensible’ when they’re OOO (‘the girls tend to do what they want,’ she laughs), Lucy’s eyes are never far from the prize. ‘Yeah, I’m always thinking about the Euros,’ she confirms. ‘I can’t not think about it. Everything I do is to play in the Euros and win the Euros. Though people who know me know that I am a little bit obsessed.’
Lucy’s mum, a maths teacher, suspected her daughter was neurodivergent, but lingering stigma meant she shied away from seeking a diagnosis for her daughter. ‘I read stories that said they’re the kids who need to be put in the corner, which is exactly what mum didn’t want me labelled as.’ Instead, she stuck Lucy in every sport available – and her child came alive. ‘Off the pitch, I couldn’t even make conversation because I was so within myself. But when I was on the field, I was the most confident person in the world. When you’re doing something you love, it brings out the best in you and that’s what I had as a child with sport. Sport would unlock the gates of Lucy Bronze.’
When her older brother, Jorge, let her join in with him and his friends playing football, something clicked. ‘I fell in love with football because I loved that [Jorge] did it – and then I loved being in a team. I was painfully shy and sport was the only way I knew how to connect with people. You already have a common ground of: you’re playing football and you want to win. You don’t need to say anything else; you don’t need to explain yourself. I think that’s why I love sport so much, because it was obvious what I was trying to do without even speaking.’
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The Bronze Age: Lucy Bronze talks candidly about neurodivergence and proving people wrong
England’s most decorated female footballer has made net gains from not fitting the mould. As the Lionesses enter Euro 2025 as defending champions, Lucy Bronze talks about her team’s chances, life after her ADHD and autism diagnoses and why she doesn’t fear her career’s final whistleIt’s one of spring 2025’s Mediterranean afternoons when the face of Lucy Bronze appears on my laptop screen. The blue of her Chelsea top is a dead ringer for the sky above the London training fields and she’s beaming for reasons unrelated to the weather. The night before we speak, her team trounced Crystal Palace 4-0, edging within touching distance of the Women’s Super League title – a feat they’ll go on to achieve a week later, beating Manchester United with a single headed goal from their star defender. Then she flashes another reason for the grin – a ring on her right hand.
There’s no diamond, but for the athlete once ranked the best female footballer in the world by Uefa and Fifa, this slim black band contains something more precious: data. It’s part of an arsenal of performance-optimising tools – sleep-tracking, saunas, red-light therapy, supplements and installing an at-home ice bath – that the oldest Lioness is using to balance a relentless club schedule with staying at the top of her game ahead of England’s first Euros match against France on 5 July.
A shared enthusiasm for the field Lucy calls ‘small gains’ sees me immediately disregard the first rule of celebrity journalism – delicately break the ice with impersonal small talk. Somehow, our ice-breaker segues straight to the 33-year-old’s ovaries and in less time than it would take to discuss her commute to work, I’m prying into her periods.
‘There’s a phase in my menstrual cycle when I’m physically capable of doing more and can train even harder, it’s insane,’ she tells me of her Euros prep, with an excitability most of us reserve for summer Fridays. ‘Men – they’re just this baseline the whole time. Whereas we can “periodise” training around the four phases of the cycle and get a lot of benefit. Research is quite low-level at the minute…’ Lucy – the sports science graduate – clarifies, in one of many times during our conversation when I feel as if I’m chatting through an article idea with a WH colleague. ‘But it’s like I’ve been given a superpower for a week.’
Euro vision
Most would argue that Lucy’s superpowers are markedly more timeless. Beginning her senior career in 2007, she’s played as a defender for some of the best clubs in England – Liverpool, Manchester City and, since 2024, Chelsea – plus European powerhouses Barcelona and Lyon. (Adding Spanish and French skills to being raised bilingual by her Portuguese father, Lucy – real name Lucia – often translates for Chelsea’s international players). After Chelsea won the FA Cup last month, she became the first player to win the domestic treble – three major domestic competitions within the same season – in three countries and she’s won the Champions League five times (for context, my husband credits the elation of Barcelona winning the Champions League one year as the reason he proposed to me). An England staple since 2013, Lucy became a household name as a cornerstone of the team that beat Germany to win Euro 2022.Does having brought football home once already ease some of the pressure going into this tournament, I wonder, or pile on even more? ‘It’s a bit of everything,’ she reflects. ‘What we’ve spoken about [as a team] is that we admire what we’ve done in the past, being the Euros winners. But we’re a “new England” going into this and we’ll create our own history.’ The squad’s self-proclaimed ‘bossy mum’, Lucy hopes this new England approach will lighten the load for the new Lioness cubs. ‘There are people going to the Euros and it’ll be their first ever tournament wearing an England shirt. You want them to enjoy that. And I think taking away that pressure is a great way for them to do it.’
Ahead of the competition in Switzerland – ‘10 days when the only time we’re apart is when we go to bed’ (and yes, Lucy smiles, they do get a bit sick of each other) – squad contact stays within the group chat. Club matches ended in mid-May, when players were granted 10 days’ holiday. But while she suspects some of her teammates will give short shrift to manager Sarina Wiegman’s plea to ‘be sensible’ when they’re OOO (‘the girls tend to do what they want,’ she laughs), Lucy’s eyes are never far from the prize. ‘Yeah, I’m always thinking about the Euros,’ she confirms. ‘I can’t not think about it. Everything I do is to play in the Euros and win the Euros. Though people who know me know that I am a little bit obsessed.’
Gatekeeping
I suspect that ‘little bit’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Lucy’s fixation with football began in Northumberland in the 00s, when the sport became her salvation. ‘I got bullied when I was younger and had to move schools,’ she shares, of the worst of that time. Dyslexia frustrated written tasks, but she was smart, competitive and a natural at numbers – with cognitive processing that was steps ahead. ‘All these things could have been seen or used as a strength of mine, but they made me seem like a problem. It was, “She’s arrogant, she’s bossy, she’s not listening to others.” I wasn’t listening to others. But it wasn’t because I didn’t care, it was because I knew I was right.’Lucy’s mum, a maths teacher, suspected her daughter was neurodivergent, but lingering stigma meant she shied away from seeking a diagnosis for her daughter. ‘I read stories that said they’re the kids who need to be put in the corner, which is exactly what mum didn’t want me labelled as.’ Instead, she stuck Lucy in every sport available – and her child came alive. ‘Off the pitch, I couldn’t even make conversation because I was so within myself. But when I was on the field, I was the most confident person in the world. When you’re doing something you love, it brings out the best in you and that’s what I had as a child with sport. Sport would unlock the gates of Lucy Bronze.’
When her older brother, Jorge, let her join in with him and his friends playing football, something clicked. ‘I fell in love with football because I loved that [Jorge] did it – and then I loved being in a team. I was painfully shy and sport was the only way I knew how to connect with people. You already have a common ground of: you’re playing football and you want to win. You don’t need to say anything else; you don’t need to explain yourself. I think that’s why I love sport so much, because it was obvious what I was trying to do without even speaking.’
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