Strong Story

When the newly crowned UEFA WOmen's  Champions League winners signed the young Canadian from Liverpool on 17 July 2025, it marked a historic milestone for women’s football. The north London club paid £1 million for the winger, at the time the highest transfer fee ever paid for a female footballer. But what is it like to play with the pressure of such a huge price tag?

Difficulties with the sale of broadcasting rights just before the start of the Spanish Liga F are slowly becoming something of a national tradition in Spain. Once again, the streaming platform DAZN found itself in a dispute with the Spanish women’s top flight and sought to terminate the contract early. The fiasco and international embarrassment were only averted at the very last minute.

La Tigre. A nickname Carolina Morace earned thanks to her performances on the pitch. Her teammates said that during matches they could see the determination and ferocity of a killer in her eyes. She had displayed the same tenacity even as a little girl growing up in Venice. The daughter of a naval officer spent every afternoon with a ball at her feet, alongside her brother Davide, who is two years her senior.

Rayo Vallecano's story is one of the clearest examples of how neglect can bring down a historic women's football team. In 2026, the club's decline reached a new low as Rayo's women's side were relegated to Tercera RFEF, the fourth tier of Spanish women's football.

The path to professional football is relatively simple in Europe: players come up through professional clubs’ youth academies where they play for free and then join a senior club squad once they graduate from their academy. In the US, with most professional women’s clubs not having affiliated youth clubs, the landscape is a little more complicated. What does youth football development look like in the United States, and what are the different pathways to going pro?

“I was a rebel.“ These are the exact words Elena Schiavo uses to look back on her extraordinary career. For her, rebellion wasn’t just a pose, it was a necessity. At a time when many in Italy believed a woman’s place was exclusively in the kitchen, she decided to go against the grain and devote herself to a sport that was considered a purely male pursuit. 

Today, on July 29 2026,  we celebrate a birthday of Sweden and London City Lionesses captain Kosovare Asllani. World probably never aprecciated her enough, but in Sweden are children books written about her. And yet she was originally supposed to wear the Tre Kronor jersey. Do you know the story of Kosovare Asllani?