Homegrown At The Helm (Gemma Davies interview)

Aston Villa’s promotion to the FA Women’s Super League was confirmed by Kelly Simmons on a Zoom call, after a Thursday evening Gemma Davies remembers as having a Christmas Eve feeling about it. Her team went up unbeaten, with thirteen wins and a draw, two years after she took over at 25 with the club second-bottom of WSL 2 and losing 12-0 to Manchester United on the opening day. She describes a club transformed in eighteen months – four contact sessions a week, a changing room, a gym, grass pitches – and a recruitment strategy built around character, which brought Anita Asante and Chloe Arthur. The part she hates is releasing players, eight of them from a title-winning squad. Her footballing philosophy, she says, is a murmuration of starlings, and her biggest lesson was that being herself was enough.