A new-look Lucy Bronze cuts through the throng of reporters for her first meeting with the media since returning to the WSL. We say new-look because this time she is in the blue of Chelsea, not Manchester City or Barcelona or Lyon, and returns aged 32, two years on from a move to Barcelona that saw her become the only English footballer to win the Champions League five times.
The hope is that Bronze will turn out to be Chelsea’s missing link, having been part of the very Barcelona sides who have on three occasions denied Chelsea a maiden European crown.
Europe, of course, dominates the conversation, as it dominates Bronze’s thoughts given she has always wanted to lift the Champions League trophy with an English club. That, she says, would eclipse all the others. Surely it would for Chelsea’s fans, too, who spent the Emma Hayes era as the dominant team domestically but never went all the way in Europe.
Hayes’ replacement, the former Lyon head coach Sonia Bompastor, won the Champions League as a manager by doing the very thing Hayes never managed to — beating Barcelona in the final. That Bompastor also won the Champions League twice as a player could, in Bronze’s eyes, “be the thing that takes Chelsea to another level”. In a bizarre swish of symmetry, Camille Abily, Bompastor’s assistant coach, herself won five Champions League titles as a player.
“It’s the biggest push but the smallest little bit needed to try to win the trophy,” says Bronze. “Sonia said to me: ‘What do you think is missing at Chelsea?’. I was like: ‘Nothing, they’ve got everything’. Sonia replied: ‘I know, I thought that as well!’. This club has more things at their disposal than a lot of the teams I’ve played for.
“I always get asked: ‘How does it compare to Lyon and Barcelona?’. I’ve loved my time at both those clubs and the players and talent at those clubs was unbelievable, but they didn’t necessarily have all those resources in place to back the team. Chelsea have all the resources and the talent there. The environment, the setup, everything is 10 times what I thought it was.”
Many of Chelsea’s rivals warn that the seven-time WSL champions will be no weaker as they enter a new era. Hayes has found herself reinvigorated in her new role with the USWNT. Bronze, too, was ready for a new challenge. She felt she “needed to come back to England one more time”.
“I’m not at the start of my career so I had to make smart moves to try to accomplish these dreams that I have,” she says. “I wanted to win the Champions League with an English team and Chelsea are the best team to do that with.
“Chelsea have been the best team in England for years, been dominant in the league and then getting Sonia Bompastor and Camille Abily in as the coaches — I spoke to them for 30 seconds and I was a Chelsea player.”
Bronze is at the point in her career where her thoughts turn to her legacy a little more frequently and, inevitably, people question whether she can still cut it more than a decade after winning her first WSL title. Her message to her detractors? This summer made for her first proper off-season and as a result, she returned “the least fit I’ve ever been”, but “still beat all the kids in the fitness tests”. Motivation, too, is not an issue. “I’m motivated by the fact that I absolutely love what I do,” she says simply.
Like most players, she has had reservations over the gruelling schedule of the women’s game — she was back at St George’s Park for England duty fewer than 48 hours after winning that fifth Champions League — and earlier this year, wrote an open letter on behalf of FIFPro, the global players’ union, asking for proper rest periods in the calendar. She had just 48 hours off before flying to the World Cup last summer.
“I knew that I was done with Barcelona when I saw that the season finished at the end of June,” she says now. “It was crazy. Going into the Olympics, I said that the Spanish team would struggle. They are the best team in the world and in that tournament, but, physically, it’s crazy. It’s too much. As a Barcelona player, I didn’t think I could keep going at that level and playing that number of games every year, and all the travel they go through.
“Coming back to England, there are fewer games — maybe they are a bit more intense each, but I have more time to recover, which is more important to me.
“I want to make sure that from the word ‘go’ to the very end of the summer next year, I’m in a good place. I feel really well-looked after here and there is a good connection with the England national team as well. It’s been better than I could have hoped for.”
For now, she is acting as a de facto translator between Bompastor and Chelsea’s English contingent. She thought she had lost her French, but the company of Chelsea’s four French players has brought much of it flooding back.
“My football French is better than Sonia’s football English,” Bronze says. “She will say something in the team talk and then she will go: ‘Lucy, how would you say this in English?’. That’s what I used to do at Lyon — translate in football terms. The game the other day was Sandy Baltimore and Mayra Ramirez in the No 9 and No 10, and neither of them speak English. I was trying to shout in French and Spanish at the same time.”
Down the line, Bronze’s role will be to humanise a Barcelona team that so often look untouchable. “People think of Barcelona as this dominant team, and they are, but we played that final against a Lyon team that Barcelona had never beaten,” she says. “I can tell you every team have their nerves going into games and have to go past these barriers. Barcelona had that last year with Lyon. Chelsea had that with (not yet) winning the Champions League but they have broken down so many by beating Lyon and beating Barcelona.”
On the biggest stages, Bronze will bring the know-how, the focus, the clearer head. “Sonia, myself and Camille can add that to Chelsea and push this team over the line, because the talent’s there,” she says. “If we can get the best out of all these things that we’ve got and the talent that we’ve got, then we would be unstoppable against most teams.”
She has reason to be confident: this season will unite Bronze and her England team-mate Lauren James for the first time at club level. “I told her: ‘I’ll just pass you on the ball and you take everyone on, score and I’ll have 10 assists at the end of the season’,” Bronze says, with a half-joke that shows how seamless the transition to this brave new era could be for Chelsea if they get it right.
Indeed, Hayes’ fundamentals have remained and Bronze says there have been no teething issues. “The first few weeks with new staff and players, everyone was a bit like, ‘What’s going on?’,” Bronze says. “But it just felt like home and a good team in a good place, and everyone’s very settled now. The players and the club have kept the good things that Emma’s set in place. The intensity of training, the winning mentality that Chelsea has — that’s not going to leave us overnight. Those things have stayed and the changes that Sonia’s brought in are just going to add to that.”
(Top photo: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
