Lucy Bronze’s early childhood was spent on the wild, windswept Holy Island, where her grandmother was the caretaker of Lindisfarne Castle. Given that, in a typical year, 650,000 tourists traverse the tidal causeway separating the island from the north Northumberland mainland, it was an important job. Even as a little girl, England’s future right wing-back swiftly learned that the privilege of living in such a magical, mystical, place involved her family shouldering considerable responsibility.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that Bronze grew up to be a custodian. As the most senior Lioness in the squad, she has long served as a key nurturer of England’s ambition.
It is a role the 31-year-old has taken extremely seriously since 2013, when the national team were unceremoniously knocked out of the European Championship in Sweden at the group stage. Bronze was an unused substitute but the forward Kelly Smith wasted no time in sitting her down and handing over a baton. “You’re the future of this team,” she said. “Look after it properly and make sure this never happens again.”
Ten years on, Bronze has more than fulfilled Smith’s faith. Along the road to establishing herself as one of the world’s best players, the multilingual Barcelona defender – she is fluent in French, Spanish and Portuguese – has overcome six knee operations, along with once-crippling shyness.
When Bronze was seven, her parents decided their three children needed greater social interaction and swapped Holy Island, with its population of 150 residents, for the market town of Alnwick. By then, though, she was already immensely independent and happy in her own company, if, in her own words, “socially awkward”.
Not that such shyness held her back. After impressing for Blyth Town and Sunderland, she crossed the Atlantic to accept a sports science scholarship at the University of North Carolina, playing for the famous Tar Heels team coached by the renowned Anson Dorrance.
“Anson taught me it was OK for a girl to be competitive and want to win,” says a woman who now possesses four Champions League winners’ medals (three with Lyon and one at Barcelona) and will collect her 112th England cap in Sunday’s World Cup final against Spain in Sydney.
Born to a Portuguese father and an English mother with roots in the Scottish Borders, Bronze was eligible to represent three countries but always craved an England shirt. Indeed, the prospect of junior caps drew her back to Sunderland from North America, before moves to Everton and Liverpool.
With the English league then still semi-professional, Bronze – who could play right-back, centre-half or across midfield – funded her car and rent through jobs in a supermarket, a bar and a pizza restaurant. It was only when she joined Manchester City in 2014 that she earned sufficient money to concentrate fully on football – and only then that a defender who had written a dissertation on anterior cruciate ligament injuries in women’s sport during her sports science course at Leeds Metropolitan University (now known as Leeds Beckett) abandoned plans to begin accountancy training.
Not that a player whose right knee is a tapestry of surgical scars and, as a teenager, spent a year with a leg in a brace after a nasty post-operative infection takes anything for granted, even now.
As Keira Walsh explains, her Barcelona and England teammate is not averse to giving younger, more pampered Lionesses modern history lessons. “Lucy makes it clear we’ve got to appreciate the older players’ journeys and how they’ve brought the game to where it is now,” she says. “We’ve got a lot to be grateful to them for.”
Bronze regrets just one of the many sacrifices she has made in consistently putting football first. When she was 17 her best friend, Sam Gattens, died in a car crash in Alnwick and she missed his funeral in order to play for England Under‑19s. As the only girl in a childhood boys’ team, Bronze was ostracised until Gattens welcomed her into the group and her grief and guilt at not attending the service dictated that she needed prolonged help from a psychologist.
By the time Bronze joined England’s squad for the 2015 World Cup in Canada, she had undergone four knee operations and feared it may be her last major tournament. Instead, it would prove a springboard to achieving her current status as one of the world’s highest-paid female players, commanding a basic club salary of about £350,000 a year.
Although she began Canada 2015 as a left-sided midfielder, she was soon shifted Bronze moved to right‑back, where she displaced Alex Scott. As the Lionesses won the bronze medal, showed off her hallmark swashbuckling athleticism, high-accuracy crossing and shooting prowess to transformative effect.
After France 2019 and another World Cup semi-final defeat, Phil Neville, the England manger at the time, hailed Bronze, then excelling as an often inverted full-back for Lyon, as “the world’s best player”.
The pandemic provoked a return to Manchester City but their manager, Gareth Taylor, did not always appreciate her sometimes defensively cavalier interpretation of the right-back role.
Although Barcelona soon came calling, Taylor’s reservations remained valid. Or at least they did until England changed formation, reinventing Bronze into not merely a gold standard rampaging wing-back but, quite possibly, the Lioness Spain fear most.
