ZURICH — She is both the most successful female manager in international football history and a closely guarded enigma – but who is the real Sarina Wiegman? What is she like behind the scenes and what drives her?
In the build-up to Euro 2025, The i Paper spoke to her players, colleagues and Wiegman herself to build a picture of the Lionesses boss as she attempts to reach a fifth successive major tournament final.
‘She doesn’t like to lose’
Part of the job of any England head coach is to separate the professional and the private. Away from football, she enjoys Flat Whites, walks with husband Marten and her daughters, and yoga. After four years of adapting to English culture, she enjoys roast dinners – and Chicken Tikka Masala. “But that’s not typical English, is it?” she laughs.
For all Wiegman’s reputation as a strict disciplinarian, it is not entirely accurate. Her players have heard her sing karaoke. In addition to intense, professional training sessions, camp can also be light-hearted, with table tennis competitions, bracelet making and graffiti art.
It is all secondary, however, to the bigger prize – she has won back-to-back European Championships with the Netherlands and England and reached World Cup finals with both nations. “She’s a winner,” is how captain Leah Williamson sums her up.
“She doesn’t like to lose. She wants to do things the right way. She’s a good person, so as a player you want to respect the person that you play for, which we do. And you want somebody that’s going to push you and challenge you.”
There is still something of the former PE teacher who grew up in the Hague about Wiegman. When she took charge in 2021, she told players to stop wearing puffer jackets indoors and to take off their jewellery.
But another first meeting would illustrate how she would go about transforming the culture of the dressing room. Beth Mead’s handling by Wiegman’s predecessor, the interim manager Hege Riise, had caused bewilderment.
Riise called Mead “too aggressive” and left her out of the Olympics. Wiegman got to camp, sat Mead down, shook her hand and told her she deserved to be in the squad. Within a year, she had won a Euros Golden Boot and was runner-up in the Ballon d’Or.
The new boss was then taken on a tour of St George’s Park, the FA’s state-of-the-art Staffordshire base. Unwisely, the Sir Bobby Charlton pitch was introduced to her as “the men’s pitch”. She immediately insisted the senior women’s team should be allowed to play on it too.
The pink cloud
The players were enthralled. “Sarina’s track record speaks for itself,” says Euro 2022 winner Nikita Parris.
“She’s got that winning mentality, in 2022 [before the Euros] that’s what we needed, someone to come in and have that track record of winning. She had that and she was able to galvanise the group to go on and win.”
Mark Bullingham, the FA chief executive who appointed her, says: “It’s worth pointing out that no other coach in the men’s or women’s game has won a Euros with two different nations, so she has a unique achievement in that.
“We were eighth in the world when she took charge in September 2021 and we have not been outside of the top five since winning the Euros.”
In spite of that, England’s early success did not move their new manager. On the training ground, she divided sessions into work with and without the ball, and her squad were clearly progressing. Yet it was all coming too easy – 10-0 wins over Luxembourg and Latvia, before a 20-0 humiliation of the latter.
After putting five past her native Netherlands, she told the squad to stay “grounded”. “Whether we lose or win now, we’re not going to all of a sudden sit, we call it, on a pink cloud.”
In other words, the lows are never too low and the highs are kept in proportion.
The other Lionesses
That is partly why the FA were wiling to wait months for her to officially take over. She had taken the women’s game to new heights with the Netherlands or Leuuwinnen – her former side were also nicknamed the Lionesses.
Wiegman had worked her way up from the ground, having been the first woman to complete her Uefa Pro coaching license. At Sparta Rotterdam, she was the first female on the coaching staff of a Dutch men’s club. Somewhere within, there is still the six-year-old defender who cut her hair to play with the boys and faced abuse from parents on the sidelines.
Just like in England, women’s football had been banned until the 1970s – Wiegman was born in 1969. The starkest change when she got to the UK, though, was that she found football was not only popular, but a national obsession. “In every part of the country, you have people that really support one club,” she grins. “And it’s just their life.”
The golden thread running between the Netherlands and England are the players she’s worked with. Modestly, she puts her success down to the fact she has “worked with very good teams”.
In 2017, the generation of Dutch stars that lifted the Euros – Vivianne Miedema, Lieke Martens, Jackie Groenen and Danielle van de Donk – were far less established. It was Wiegman who put them on the world stage. Women’s football went from a niche sport to a household staple. Links Rechts became the song of the summer as armies in orange bobbed left and right up and down the cities.
Though the Netherlands came up short in the 2019 World Cup, beaten by the USA, she would soon reach another milestone with England.
The glory years
By winning Euro 2022, Wiegman managed something no England manager had done since 1966. At full-time, in the glow of the Wembley sun, she ran backwards onto the pitch and kissed the bracelet belonging to her sister, who had passed away shortly before the tournament began.
In the hours after the final, Wiegman danced in the dressing room. “She’s got some moves,” as one player put it. Others hailed her as a “genius”.
A hallmark of England’s 2022 campaign, and the 2023 Finalissima and World Cup that followed, was her team huddles. The message, Jess Carter says, is always about “sticking together”, win or lose.
So the secrets to her success are not just about the raw quality of players. She instructs her squad to watch YouTube videos of other players in their position and make notes. When they would play darts and snooker off the pitch together, she would bring mini trophies to give to the winners.
The 2023 World Cup felt more intense, on the other side of the world and with fewer freedoms for players to escape the bubble. She would allow them to walk the beaches of Terrigal, New South Wales but the message was always clear – they were there to win, not to go on holiday.
Though England were beaten by Spain in the final, Wiegman still won Women’s Coach of the Year. She dedicated the award to the Spanish players who had suffered in the Luis Rubiales scandal.
England in crisis?
That summer in Australia was the last time England felt fully settled. Later that year, they failed to qualify for the Olympics on behalf of Team GB. They suffered chastening defeats in the Nations League.
The ask has been for Wiegman to evolve, which she has done. Lucy Bronze points out her “flexibility of tactics”, an answer to critiques that she was too rigid and uncompromising. The personnel have changed too. First, she lost the likes of Ellen White, Jill Scott and Rachel Daly, more recently Mary Earps and Fran Kirby.
Much has been made of the “crisis” that unfolded weeks before Euro 2025, when Earps and Kirby retired and Millie Bright pulled out. The reception when Earps told her manager she was bowing out was frosty.
“I don’t beat around the bush,” Wiegman always insists. But she is also adamant that she is “honest and treats people in the right way”.
She also learned a key lesson in 2022. Back then, players who didn’t make the Euros squad still had to remain in camp. Later, she conceded that was a mistake. So when Kirby told her she wanted to retire, the Brighton forward says she was offered the chance to go home.
“The last training sessions, she tried to give me some good feedback from training,” Kirby says.
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“We had a picture after training and she really respected the way that I wanted to tell people. For me, she was great in that period, but I can imagine it was tough for her to tell me.”
In fact it is the part of the job Wiegman least enjoys. “I am actually very caring and that’s often not very helpful in this job,” she says.
“I want to take care of people, but I have a job where I have to make hard decisions. Then I, as a former player and maybe as a mum, I’m trying to not put myself in their shoes and think ‘oh, they must feel horrible’. Because I have to shut that out for that moment.”
There are now fewer rules in training too, hoping players will apply their “common sense”. And it is a different breed of player Wiegman is managing now. Most of her 2022 winners had previous jobs – in Domino’s, fish and chip shops, accountancy firms. Now they come through elite academies.
“People sometimes say I don’t change,” Wiegman points out. “I think my values won’t change but I have to adapt to new situations.”
What’s next?
Soon, that prediction will come true again. Her long-term assistant Arjan Veurink will take the Netherlands job after the Euros, and she will be without the man she has relied on for fitness training, video work and as a general ear.
Kay Cossington, the FA’s women’s technical director, has moved on too. Wiegman is quite right when she describes this as a “new England” and she is a very different coach to the straight-talker who arrived four years ago.
“I’ve become a little bit older too, with more experience in football and life,” she surmises.
The ultimate question is how she can reinvent herself – and her team – yet again.
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