Ella Toone: ‘We’ll maintain combating for equality in ladies’s sport’

Change The Report is a GLAMOUR sequence devoted to profiling and celebrating British sports activities stars. These ladies 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 Ladies’s Euros in Switzerland this summer time, her friendship with Beth Mead and Alessia Russo, and the way she’s bounced again from damage.

There’s one thing about Ella Tooney. When she’s on the pitch, the power adjustments. There is a feeling that something may occur. And by ‘something’, I after all imply an absolute fantastic 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 match. Certainly, her efforts helped blast the Lionesses to victory within the UEFA European Ladies’s Championships in 2022 and a history-making second-place end on the Ladies’s World Cup in 2023, ushering England into a brand new period of girls’s soccer.

At membership stage, Ella is already quick approaching legend standing at Manchester United, along with her No. 7 shirt being the top-selling United Ladies’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 provided 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 address returning to soccer whereas grieving her father.

“After dropping Dad and [finding] how arduous it’s to hold on enjoying soccer whenever you’ve simply misplaced somebody you like, to see Beth do this, go simply get on with it and communicate 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 telephone, and I knew that once I’m at England camps, she’ll all the time be there for me.”