Change The Report is a GLAMOUR sequence devoted to profiling and celebrating British sports activities stars. These girls are flipping the narrative on what it means to be an elite feminine athlete, from competing on their durations to balancing coaching with being pregnant and motherhood, navigating physique picture pressures, and sure, chasing world data.
Right here, we chat with Ella Toone about preparations for the Girls’s Euros in Switzerland this summer time, her friendship with Beth Mead and Alessia Russo, and the way she’s bounced again from damage.
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There’s one thing about Ella Tooney. When she’s on the pitch, the vitality adjustments. There is a feeling that something might occur. And by ‘something’, I after all imply an absolute great thing about a aim.
She is, for instance, the primary England participant – ever – to attain in a quarter-final, semi-final, and closing of a serious event. Certainly, her efforts helped blast the Lionesses to victory within the UEFA European Girls’s Championships in 2022 and a history-making second-place end on the Girls’s World Cup in 2023, ushering England into a brand new period of ladies’s soccer.
At membership stage, Ella is already quick approaching legend standing at Manchester United, together with her No. 7 shirt being the top-selling United Girls’s jersey. After injuring her calf in coaching final yr, Ella returned to membership soccer with a powerful aim throughout an FA Cup match towards West Brom in January. This was a very particular second on condition that it was her first aim since her father, Nick, handed away in September 2024.
In dialog with GLAMOUR, Ella mirrored on how her friendship with fellow England participant Beth Mead [whose mother, June, passed away from ovarian cancer in 2023] has helped her deal with returning to soccer whereas grieving her father.
“After dropping Dad and [finding] how exhausting it’s to hold on enjoying soccer while you’ve simply misplaced somebody you like, to see Beth try this, go simply get on with it and converse so brazenly about dropping her mum, I feel she’s a job mannequin for me,” Ella says. “As quickly because it occurred, she was on the cellphone, and I knew that once I’m at England camps, she’ll at all times be there for me.”