“The lesson I learned in football very early,” Leah Williamson reflects, “was to have other things in my life.”
It is not only a pivotal moment for Arsenal as their season begins – two-and-a-half weeks earlier than their Women’s Super League rivals – with a Champions League qualifier against Rangers at Meadow Park.
For Williamson too, the new campaign marks a reset. The schedule, the England captain tells i, will be “notoriously unforgiving”, and comes at the end of her first proper pre-season in two years following the ACL rupture that cost her nine months of football, including last summer’s World Cup.
There has been little let-up since, particularly for those who were involved in June and July’s Euro 2025 qualifiers – the timing of which, Williamson concedes, was “less than ideal”.
“It was one of the most bizarre situations I’ve been in, having international games with no domestic football in between.
“It was an opportunity if you weren’t at the Olympics to get an actual rest, which we’re all overdue.
“But this opportunity to build slower and get fit, rather than rush in to be fit for games has been great. I’m noticing with age it’s taking a little bit longer, but it’s nice to feel you have something to work towards rather than constantly being fit but burning out. So it’s been really good and I feel healthy.”
Keeping the 27-year-old fit will be crucial if Arsenal are to close the gap on Chelsea and Manchester City this season, a five-point buffer in 2023-24 the reason they are having to qualify for the Champions League in the first place.
Mariona Caldentey’s arrival from Barcelona has been Jonas Eidevall’s headline signing of the summer, alongside Daphne van Domselaar and Rosa Kafaji, but there has been plenty of activity the other way; Vivianne Miedema, Cloe Lacasse, Sabrina D’Angelo, Kaylan Marckese, Giovana Queiroz and Teyah Goldie (loan) have all departed.
“If you look back at previous seasons, we’ve not been far off,” Williamson insists.
“It’s just that detail. Two years ago, we lost the league by a point. We don’t need an overhaul, we just needed to improve the areas we needed to improve it.
“I think we’ve got a great squad, we’ve just added and tweaked things to help us in the problems that we’ve had previously over the last couple of seasons, in terms of bringing players in that have the skillset to do those things.
“The Champions League is the hardest to win I think. We’ve put ourselves in a good position to compete across all fronts.”
Within Arsenal, there is still frustration that they were unable to push their title rivals all the way last season, particularly having beaten City home and away and cruised past Chelsea at the Emirates.
“Last year we fell short not against those teams, but teams that on paper we should have beaten,” Williamson points out.
“The beauty of our league is it’s competitive and people take points off each other, that’s where we lost it last year. But I’d be more worried if we were looking at us taking no points off of the top teams, instead we took nine from 12.
“When you’re working as a team you focus on things and you’re improving those things, while other things maybe get left behind a little bit. You have to try and bring it all together. We struggled against a low block that was obvious last year – but in fact towards the back end of last year we really turned that around.
“I think that was the main reason really that teams knew the threats that we have and did well to stop them, and we weren’t as well versed in countering that.”
Williamson has been able to keep that in perspective, not least because of “the stuff I call ‘real life’ other than football”.
In addition to her study of accountancy, she has spent her time away involved in the writing of the latest in her series of children’s books The Wonder Team and the Rainforest Rescue. Leah, the main character, finds herself with her friends in Tanzania, trying to save a group of chimpanzees from a gang of poachers. She is taught to revel in rivalry, a message co-author Jordan Glover admits is rare to find.
“It ties in with confidence as well, but what do you do when somebody comes into a situation and you feel like they’re better than you, you can’t quite meet up to the standard they’re setting?” Glover tells i.
“We kind of wanted Leah in the books to run into that problem and see how she copes with that and how she comes to realise that competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It doesn’t mean her talent is any less – if anything it’s going to push her to be better.”
It is also a message which is particularly important for girls to hear, Williamson believes.
“When we look at kids and the interactions that you had particularly in school, there’s so much as adult women we would all look back and say that we were taught to fight against each other, rather than using each other. In sport that’s quite an evident lesson you learn quite early, that you can’t always fight, sometimes you need to work with people and it’s better if you find somebody else that can offer you something to learn from.”
Changing the way youngsters think about football has been a theme of Williamson’s career – and the coming season could be the greatest test yet, the first since 2021 without a major international tournament following Team GB’s failure to qualify for the Olympics.
“It’s a test,” Williamson agrees.
“We’ll see the outcome when we start getting into the games but we’ve built something that’s sustainable in terms of the interest and it doesn’t deter from that. The contrast of having a home tournament then a summer off is very, very different.
“It heightens the importance of qualifying for these tournaments so that we’re there, we’re present. But this is a good test for the game to see where we’re at and make sure that interest is sustainable and it’s still there regardless of the football being in front of people’s faces.”
The Wonder Team and the Rainforest Rescue by Leah Williamson and Jordan Glover is out now, £7.99
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