After spending a month at the 2024 Under-17 World Cup with England, Lydia Bedford returned to her home in early November, ready to settle back into routine. She wasn’t looking for a new job. She wasn’t thinking about leaving Premier League club Brentford, where she managed the U-18 squad. If anything, she was eager to focus on the season ahead.
Then, she got a text from her agent.
“This crazy opportunity just came up,” it read. “How do you feel about speaking to the people running this project?”
Before long, she was on a plane headed to Canada. The 37-year-old Englishwoman has made it a tradition to be part of history, and her latest venture, to lead an upstart team in an upstart league, is no exception. Calgary Wild FC, Bedford’s new employer and one of the six founding teams in the Northern Super League, Canada’s first professional women’s soccer competition, is set to kick off in April. The club’s leadership is made up entirely of women, meeting a key quota for the league and impressing Bedford from the get go.
Bedford knew little about the NSL at the time of the offer, and she wanted to to be close to family, so she was initially hesitant to take the leap. “My mum has gotten sick recently with cancer so I first rang my parents and was like, ‘this is a bit mad, I should be thinking about being here. What do you think I should do?’” Bedford tells the Guardian. “I signed an NDA after the second conversation, and they shared where they were with recruitment at that point.”
Bedford had a call with league founder and former Canada international Diana Matheson as the final step. Two days later, she agreed to come aboard. Then, “as soon as I said yes, I was on calls with players within 48 hours,” she says.
Bedford is accustomed to making big career leaps. In 2023 she made history by becoming the first female head coach at a Premier League club, when she was appointed to lead the Brentford U-18 team. In her first season, the Bees finished Merit League 2 as champions, after an impressive run of seven wins from eight games.
“To me, it was just football and a job,” she says. “The news blew up in England, and I was like ‘cool, it’s great’, but I’m just going to work and doing my thing.”
It was her first appointment in the men’s game, having begun her coaching career with England’s women’s youth teams. Despite being in her 20s, and one of the youngest to take on a role with the Lionesses, Bedford honed her skills in talent development while completing her Uefa coaching licenses. That foundation led to her first senior coaching role with Leicester City in the WSL. Taking the helm in December of 2021, the team was pointless at the bottom of the table before Bedford guided them to safety. Her next endeavor was as an assistant coach at Arsenal, a club operating at the opposite end of the table with significantly greater backing.
Bedford’s role with Calgary Wild is far more wide-ranging than any of her previous stops: she is building a team from scratch alongside sporting director Alex Bruch. With limited scouting resources, the majority of their time is spent watching footage and speaking to agents.
“It is a difficult task and my phone hasn’t stopped ringing. But a lot of the players we’ve spoken to have been on board, so I’m not panicking.” she says.
Unlike the WSL, the NSL imposes a salary cap of CAD $1.5m (£1.07m), with the average player salary to be about $65,000-$75,000 a year.
“The fact that everybody has the same budget means that, as a coach, your actual skills, to coach your players, becomes a bigger part of what success looks like,” Bedford says. “Your culture, your tactical decisions, how well you’ve paired players across the week matter a lot more. If I was to jump back into the WSL, you’re starting to think, if you move into one of the clubs that has the lowest budget, then you’re always going to be fighting for something, and the chance of getting a job with a top budget only really comes from experience.”
That said, Bedford admits that her past WSL experiences have given her an understanding of how to best use resources to create a high-performing culture.
“One of the things that blew me away in my time at Arsenal was the players’ ability to influence themselves as a group,” says Bedford. “There were times where I walked into the changing room before [manager] Jonas Eidevall, and [captain] Kim Little had already delivered the team talk.”
The Gunners’ changing room is organized in order of when players arrived at the club, as opposed to sitting in order of shirt number or age. This is a principle Bedford is bringing over to the Wild.
“Who’s the player that committed first to be part of Calgary? The athlete that comes in last might be one of our best players, but they’ve still come in the building last. Players will have a legacy that’s already started before even kicking a ball,” Bedford says.
Of the six appointed head coaches across the league, half are relocating to Canada after leaving positions in Europe. This has not only reflected the level of ambition by the NSL, but has also provided new jobs in the women’s game at a high level.
“Some people aren’t brave enough to take a gamble and move themselves across the world. I’m driven and brave to try different things and put myself out of my comfort zone,” says Bedford. “When we look back on this period of time in 10 years and the league has gone from strength to strength, I get a piece of history. For the new generation, it’s so important to have role models that look like you, and that you can watch and enjoy. The more we can aspire, the more legacy this league builds.”
