It feels like we’ve seen more of Steph Houghton since she’s retired. Not literally — although maybe her burgeoning media career means she is more visible to rival fans who would only glimpse her twice a season — but in a deeper, more human sense.
Houghton’s interactions with the media were always cordial and insightful, but you got the sense there was more under the surface.
In recent months, Houghton has emerged from her shell to become a more candid, forthright voice. Consequently, it’s easier to glimpse the leader who not only represented Manchester City and England with distinction but transformed the women’s game along the way.
Even more so in her memoir, Leading From The Back: My Journey to the Top of Women’s Football, out this week. In it, Houghton lays bare her role as off-field leader, chiefly in her negotiations with the Football Association over contracts and bonuses.
Houghton’s England teams had it better than their predecessors but did not have the luxury, for instance, of direct or business class flights home from the World Cup in Canada in 2015, where they won bronze. They played in the Women’s Super League (WSL) four days later. The most moving chapters are on Houghton’s husband, the former footballer Stephen Darby, and his 2018 motor neurone disease diagnosis, of plans derailed and a player forced to choose between family and football.
There is doubtless a vulnerability and discomfort in drawing back the curtain, if a catharsis, too. As Houghton put it to Ian Wright on Crossways, their shared podcast, she wanted the book to be raw and real. “Sometimes people just see us as footballers, but there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes,” she said.
This brings us to Houghton’s interview with the Guardian about the end of her England career — and, moreover, the backlash. Those who felt Houghton had spoken out of turn, and came across as entitled or bitter, were quick to let her know. (I wonder how many are newer fans of the women’s game and, unfamiliar with her career, have only ever seen Houghton in this light.)
Houghton had received a similar response to a Daily Mail interview before the 2023 World Cup. She detailed the pressure she had put on herself and how hard it had been to justify that dedication when Darby had fallen at home and been rushed to hospital while she was on the bench for a game at Aston Villa.
Houghton’s response on Friday’s podcast was to hope that people would read her feelings in their full context, in her book. Only then will they truly understand her side of the story.
I have read it. I don’t think she came across as entitled or bitter. Rather, as Houghton told of the demise of her England career, all that came through was sadness. Houghton played her final game for England against the Republic of Ireland in a behind-closed-doors match at St George’s Park. Compare that to Jill Scott and Ellen White’s final bows for England: winning the European Championship against Germany at Wembley.
Houghton was thrilled for them but inevitably wished she was among them. She did, at least, get a send-off at Wembley last month, leading the team out one final time, against Germany, in what might have felt like a facsimile of the Euros final — the alternate universe where Houghton has one last run of sold-out games.
Steph Houghton with the England team before their game against Germany at Wembley last month (Marc Atkins/Getty Images)
Houghton details the rehab programme for a torn Achilles that she undertook with England’s blessing — she recorded 10-hour days visiting a physio in Crewe — and says all parties had understood all along that she wouldn’t play for her club before the Euros in 2022. England checked in every six weeks. She made the provisional squad of 30 for the tournament. In the end, manager Sarina Wiegman’s view was that Houghton had not played enough games; the player’s view was that they knew this would be the case.
Houghton recalls her tears when she takes the phone call from Wiegman in which she learns she will no longer be England captain. “I was upset that I’d found out over the phone,” she writes. “For me, that’s a face-to-face conversation.”
I don’t disagree. Houghton never had anything against her successor Leah Williamson but was heartbroken that “the best thing (she) ever had a chance to do” was ending after eight years.
World Cup rejection hits her less hard but is still painful. She felt she had done all Wiegman asked: playing regularly for her club, winning against Chelsea and Arsenal. Wiegman offers a tactical assessment and adds that she doesn’t feel she can take anyone out of the squad for Houghton. Houghton feels like Wiegman has moved the goalposts. Wiegman delivers this news at St George’s Park, where Houghton, allegedly unbeknownst to Wiegman, had been working with Nike. There, Houghton is told she will probably never play for England while Wiegman is in charge.
“I also found myself wondering if this would have been a face-to-face conversation if I hadn’t already been at St George’s,” Houghton concludes. “The problem was more that I think she’d intended to have this conversation over the phone, and she knew she was going to tell me I wasn’t in her plans at all. I thought that called for a face-to-face conversation given the career I’d had.”
Suffice to say it is, as Houghton promised, a little more complex than some responses would have you believe.
This column isn’t about whether you would have taken Houghton to either of those tournaments or about Wiegman’s alleged handling of it all. It is about the reaction to Houghton’s pain, and the expectation we have of female footballers to expose all their vulnerabilities when the audience is not prepared to meet them with empathy.
Why does everyone find it so hard to acknowledge that Houghton was in pain — and understandably so? Her last notable act for England at a major tournament was missing a penalty against the U.S. in the semi-final of the 2019 World Cup. All of it — from the injury to missing out on the Lionesses’ first major trophy — will have triggered complex emotions in a player whose 121 caps were won in such a critical period for women’s football. That is before you examine how Houghton’s personal circumstances make the stakes, in that area of her life, so much higher.
Of late, women’s football has seemed to steep itself in the idea that the sport moves forward when we hear of players’ pain in full. No varnish, no euphemisms: tell us of every horror of your rehabilitation from your anterior cruciate ligament injury, so that we can understand and make change. Tell us of your mental health struggles and your relationships — in which fans are invested — to inspire those watching. Tell us, Houghton, of what really happened with England, because after all this time, we want to know.
Many players, from the WSL’s record goalscorer Vivianne Miedema to the two-time FIFA Best women’s goalkeeper Mary Earps, have been met with understanding for expressing their vulnerabilities. Why not Houghton here?
Is it personal? The criticism of Houghton always seems to have a different kind of fire behind it — is it that her replacement was the hugely popular Williamson, so among a newer, younger, more chronically online fanbase, it is convenient to cast Houghton as a villain? On some level do we still expect sportswomen to be compliant, grateful, and magnanimous when it comes to team selection and tactics? Or simply that the minute those feelings become complex or unpalatable — too much light and shade to fit in a tweet — people don’t want to hear them? That people can’t separate a divisive subject like team selection from the human at the centre of it all?
I don’t know, but many women’s football fans approached Houghton’s comments — and the end of her England career — with a lack of respect and understanding. Sportspeople, in particular, have devoted their lives to pushing themselves to lengths most of us would rather not, but surely most of us would have felt the same in Houghton’s position. Add in the extraordinary choices she had to make and I’m not sure how many of us would have even had it in us to keep chasing major tournaments.
We should, as a minimum, allow Houghton to give voice to her experience without being so quick to judge, dismiss or condemn.
Sport is a fundamentally human thing. You don’t have to agree with Houghton, but she’s allowed to say all this: allowed to say that it hurt and allowed to say that she wishes it all could have been different. At least let her speak. Given the ending, and the scale of her contribution, she deserves that.
(Top photo: Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
