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At the end of last year, Chloe Kelly was seriously considering stepping away from football. She was deeply unhappy at Manchester City, her team since 2020, where it seemed as if they wouldn’t let her play, nor let her leave. She wasn’t getting enough time on the pitch, so wasn’t sure that she would be selected for England, who were preparing to defend the title she had helped win in 2022 in the Euros tournament. She was 26, about to turn 27. She had been a professional footballer since she was 18, but her mother was starting to get concerned. She desperately wanted her daughter to be happy again. “I remember my mum coming up to see me and she was meant to go home, but she didn’t go home, because she was so worried,” recalls Kelly.
Less than a year later, and things are very different. At the time of writing, Kelly is favourite to win Sports Personality of the Year after a history-making comeback. At the end of January, she was loaned to Arsenal and in May she lifted the Champions League trophy with the team, very much the underdogs in the final against Barcelona, whom they defeated 1-0. At the end of July, she scored that penalty for England, securing them a second Euros title, against arch-rivals Spain. She was fifth in the Ballon D’or Féminin, and named in the Fifpro World 11 squad for the first time – a peer-voted list of the best footballers in the world. Against the odds, then, 2025 has turned out to be a great year. “For sure,” Kelly smiles. “To bounce back, that’s what makes it the best year of my career.”
Trying to pin down Kelly is not the easiest of tasks. The football calendar is notoriously overstuffed, to the point of controversy. We finally speak the day after Arsenal beat Real Madrid in the Women’s Champions League, a much-needed victory in a turbulent season for the team so far. It is only midmorning, but she and her husband, Scott Moore, drove up to Manchester from London first thing, so that Kelly could see a chiropractor. The appointment was at 7.30am. “I’ve had a little niggle in my back,” she explains. The next women’s World Cup is not until 2027, so there’s plenty of time, but, is it anything we need to be worried about? “No, no, no!” she says, quickly. “I just had a little spasm in the Bayern Munich game. I’m fine. Nothing that stops me.”
We speak on video call; she’s casual in a hoodie, with a massive rock on her ring finger and Moore sitting next to her. She keeps him off-camera, but regularly turns to check with him that she’s right about things like dates, or the ages of her siblings. They’re waiting to go to a spa for the afternoon. “Not so many days off in football, so we make the most of when we do get them,” she shrugs. It’s their dog Brody’s first birthday at the weekend. (She has two dogs, whom she refers to as “the boys”.) They’re throwing a little party for Brody and his brother, who belongs to her mum. And after the party she’ll be reporting for international duty at St George’s Park, the final England camp of the year before friendlies against China and Ghana. The bounce back continues.
(It may have hit a temporary bump in the road. A couple of weeks later, Kelly was injured during the first half of the Ghana match. Arsenal manager Renée Slegers gave an update at a press conference in early December, calling it “an injury, a little ligament in the back of her knee”. It looks as if Kelly will be sidelined until Christmas. “We’ll see,” Slegers has said.)
Few footballers are as cool and composed on the pitch as this striker, no matter how high-pressure the situation. She is regularly described by commentators as a combination of fire and ice. In 2022, in the Euros final, she scored the winning goal for England against Germany – her ecstatic top-off celebration earned her a yellow card – but to do it again required next-level calm. In 2025, the England-Spain final had come down to penalties. It was up to Kelly to bring it home for a second time. She took her trademark run-up and thumped it past the Spanish keeper, then jogged back to her teammates as if there had never been any question that England would do it all over again.
Her family feel the pressure far more than she does, she says. “Scott definitely gets nervous. When I asked him, did you think I was going to score a penalty against Spain, he said yes. Whereas my brothers were … quite nervous.” Did they say no? “They didn’t say no. They just said it was nerve-racking!”
Kelly is so preternaturally collected and confident that sports psychologists must be fascinated by her. “I work closely with psychologists, to make sure my game is at the top,” she nods. “It doesn’t just happen overnight. I think throughout my career … maybe I’m too confident at times? But I really back myself. I like to play on the edge quite a lot.”
It wasn’t always that way. She was 19 when she got her first senior England cap. “I went on to the pitch and my legs were just like jelly,” she recalls. It wasn’t until she tore her anterior cruciate ligament in 2021 that her mindset began to shift. “Before my ACL, I was definitely more of a nervous player. Having the injury allowed me to think, what am I nervous for? I’ve gone through the worst situation and I’ve had to do my rehab for that. So what is fazing me?”
The injury was no surprise in a way; research suggests that female footballers are two to eight times more likely to tear the ACL; this WSL season alone, seven players, including Kelly’s fellow Lioness Michelle Agyemang and Arsenal teammate Katie Reid, have suffered an ACL injury. Players have spoken out about a congested calendar, including the England captain, Leah Williamson, who has called the schedule “unsustainable”. Is it being taken seriously enough? What can be done? “For me, there’s not enough research because, actually, we haven’t been professionals for long enough,” says Kelly. She lists potential issues: who knows what kind of boot design is better for women’s feet, or what sort of pitch is right for women? “But what I will say is, the negativity around ACLs make it harder to go through, than actually what it is.”
What does she mean? “If a player does their ACL and the first thing you see is negativity around it, it automatically puts you in a negative mindset,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the way I think.” From a sprain to a break, any injury can be tough, but the ACL has become a particular kind of bogeyman. The first thing she told Reid was: “It’s gonna be tough and it’s gonna be horrible, but it’s not as bad as sometimes it is [portrayed as being]. You know you’re missing a long period of time, but any injury you’re going to miss that.” There needs to be far more research into why women appear to be more susceptible, Kelly insists. “The calendar is crazy. You want the best players on the pitch, but maybe there’s too many games in the calendar, in both women and men’s football, for our bodies to deal with the loading.”
For Kelly, the hardest moment in her professional life was not her ACL injury. “It was not being able to control what was happening in my career.” She is talking about the events that finally came to a head in January. “It was a dark time,” she says. She had been at Manchester City since 2020, but her relationship with the club had soured. She spent most of her time on the bench, starting only once in the first nine matches of the season. In November 2024, England manager Sarina Wiegman described Kelly’s lack of minutes as “a concern” and “a hard situation”. “Chloe knows that she is not in the best position with her club at the moment,” Wiegman said.
Just before the transfer deadline, Kelly posted a statement to her Instagram, stating that her future was not with the club, and asking to be released from her contract, adding that, “to be dictated whom I can and can’t join with only four months left of the football season is having a huge impact on not only my career but my mental wellbeing”. City allowed her to leave and join Arsenal on loan for the rest of the season.(She signed for them permanently in July.) But the drama continued. Just over a day later, she posted another note, accusing the club of “briefing journalists against me,” calling reporters “to assassinate my character” and planting negative stories in the football press. Looking back on the situation in August, City’s then boss Gareth Taylor told the BBC that he had “always tried to remain as professional as possible” and had “stayed true to his role” as manager.
“Taking charge of your own destiny is massive,” Kelly says, today. “After we won the Champions League, I said, write your own script, control your destiny, and I stick by that. Because I wasn’t in a position to do so for so long, but speaking out for what you believe in is huge.” She is proud to have come back from those dark days. “But also, on reflection, I wish I spoke earlier.” So no regrets, other than that you wish you’d done it sooner? “No, definitely no regrets,” she says, firmly.
Goalkeeper Mary Earps was Kelly’s teammate for years, and they won England’s first Euros trophy together. In her autobiography, Earps went public about her feelings towards Hannah Hampton, who replaced her as England’s No 1. She wrote about how she felt that Hampton’s “behaviour behind the scenes at the Euros had frequently risked derailing training sessions and team resources”, and accused Wiegman of rewarding it.
The story was massive, sending shock waves through the world of women’s football. Other players shared their views on it. Lucy Bronze argued that female players are “constantly under a magnifying glass”. Former Lioness Ellen White spoke of an “unwritten oath”, that what happens in the dressing room, stays in the team.
So has Kelly read the book? “I haven’t,” she says, though she is clearly prepared for it to come up, and looks as unruffled as ever. “I think, for me, I’m in a position where Hannah is my teammate, and we support our teammates. We support Mary, who was our teammate, too. Mary’s told her story. And, of course, in football, you don’t really see it too often, but I think, for me, Mary’s voiced herself.”
In her own statement about Man City, Kelly said she felt it was “time to be open and transparent”. Is this a similar situation? She disagrees. “I think, for me, it was either, I speak up and I speak out on what was happening, or I take a step away from the game. Mary’s situation is obviously writing a book of her whole journey. So, probably a little different.” And, honestly, Kelly jokes, she’s really not a reader. “For me, both are my teammates, and I’m proud to stand side by side with my teammates.” That’s very tactful and balanced, I say. “But that’s me! I can’t comment on something if I haven’t read the whole book. Maybe one day I’ll listen to the audiobook. Because reading is not my forte.”
To many, and for good reason, Kelly is a hero. Predictably, to some, her self-belief can seem like arrogance. There are corners of the internet where people post about how she comes across as cocky, or cringe. When she says that she might be “too confident”, what does she mean? Sometimes, she explains, she’ll have confidence on the pitch, and then afterwards she’ll be hard on herself, and wonder if she could have done it differently, or done it better. “Maybe that’s ‘too confident’. But I think confidence is huge. Especially as a woman, to be able to step on to a pitch or to be able to step into a room, I feel a lot of confidence within myself. I think that comes from playing with my brothers and growing up with my mum and dad. They would say, be yourself, and just don’t change who you are.”
Kelly is the youngest of seven. She has one sister, Paris, who doesn’t like football. “She wishes me good luck, and she’ll say to me, ‘Oh, your hair looked lovely today’, but she couldn’t care less if I score, if I miss, if I have a great game, if I have a bad game,” she says, not unhappily. She has five brothers, three of whom are triplets, and they had a big role in making her confident, tough and unflappable. She grew up playing in the cages of the Windmill Park estate, in Southall, west London. There’s a commemorative plaque there now in her honour. “If I bring someone to my mum’s house, me and Scott are always, like, let’s drive to show them the cages,” she says. “It’s a very special place to me. Always will be.”
Her brothers never treated her differently because she was a girl. “They never made it easy. Even to their friends, they’d say, ‘Don’t go easy on her, she’s playing here with us.’” Her oldest brother is 10 years older than her, but playing against his friends never fazed her. “I’d be, like, ‘I can beat you, let’s go,’” she grins. “They’d say to my brothers, she’s a bit cheeky, ain’t she?” And did you beat them? “Yeah,” she says. “I think sometimes I did. Sometimes I lost! But I learned from it.”
At school, she played on boys’ teams. She would arrive for a match and know they were being judged for having a girl on the squad. “And then I’d come away with player of the tournament. And I remember seeing my mum’s face, like, so proud, saying, ‘You did it, girl.’” She knew then that football was what she wanted to do. “And, academically, I wasn’t too clever,” she laughs. “Still ain’t.” Unlike some of her teammates, who felt they needed a backup career and qualifications outside football, Kelly never had a plan B. “I actually didn’t, I won’t lie. I just always wanted to be a footballer, and that was my overconfidence.” Then she remembers that she did have another job. “I worked for one day,” she laughs. “I went to work with one of my friends, at an Olly Murs concert. We sold merchandise, and I was, like … I don’t want to do this.”
She describes her parents as “hard-working people”. Her father fits big machinery, she says, then turns to Moore. “Is that a rigger?” Her mum worked at the same nursery school that Kelly attended and, later, worked with children with additional needs. Neither of them drove, which meant that getting their daughter to training sessions involved a lot of early morning buses and trains. When she was 16, Kelly got the call to train with the Arsenal first team, then known as Arsenal Ladies. She had her first professional contact by 18. The money was so bad that her father had to help her out with her living costs. “I was on a professional contract, but my dad would pay me each week so that I could get to training and I could actually live,” she says. It is a sign of how much the women’s game has grown, and how quickly. And that was less than 10 years ago? “Yeah. 2017, I’d say?” Her salary is not disclosed, but in 2023 Forbes estimated her annual club earnings to be £400,000.
She was playing for Everton when she met Moore, a groundsman there. I want to talk about him, I say, but is it awkward if he’s sitting next to you? “No!” she beams. “It’s fine! I always speak about Scott, whether I’m with him, or not.” At the time, Kelly was in rehab, recovering from a torn syndesmosis and subsequent ankle surgery. “I was coming out of the indoor astro [pitch], and Scott was walking behind me. I held the door open for him, and that was our first interaction.” She laughs. “When I say interaction, he said, ‘Thank you.’ And I said, ‘It’s OK.’”
Moore plucked up the courage to slide into Kelly’s DMs, but the message languished in her requests. Eventually, she saw it, realised they had mutual friends, and they started to talk. Moore took her to Ikea for their first date, and she asked him to stay and help her build the furniture. “I remember sending a picture to my mum of Scott putting the drawers together,” she says. Their story sounds impossibly sweet. “We’d go and get milkshakes, or just have a drive. We used to go to just watch the planes come in at Liverpool airport. Even now, we’re inseparable.” They got married in July 2024. A week before their first wedding anniversary, Kelly was playing for England against Sweden in the Euros, in that hellish quarter-final match, though she says it was her favourite of the tournament. She wore custom-made shin pads, with her wedding photos on them.
Moore works with Kelly’s management team now. “Honestly, I love it,” she says. “It’s funny, because when we text about work we don’t put any kisses. It’s just direct, blunt. Then we talk about something else, it’s just two kisses, after every text. So the balance is amazing. It allows us to spend a lot of time together, which, in football, is crazy, so you have to make the most of that.” Who does he support? “Scott’s an Evertonian, so it was nice that I played for the club,” she says. And when you’re playing for Arsenal, does that change anything? “Well, no. To be honest, at our wedding, in his speech, he said the best thing to come out of Everton was our relationship,” she laughs. “I hold a close place in my heart for Everton, especially with the happiness that it has brought me in my relationship. But I’m a QPR fan, so I don’t celebrate too much, either!”
Kelly’s fellow Lioness Ella Toone tells a story about when she first realised she might be famous. “I got papped eating a pasty in Tyldesley,” she said, in a moment that went viral. What about Kelly? After the 2022 Euros, she remembers taking her nieces and nephews to Legoland, where people kept stopping her, asking for pictures. “My nieces and nephews were like, ‘Chloe, is this gonna happen all the time?’ They were so confused.” Are they excited that you’re well-known? “They just see me as their auntie! They don’t see me as Chloe, the footballer.” But her nephew sometimes texts her if he’s playing EA Sports FC (the video game that used to be called Fifa). “He’ll get me, and he’s, like, ‘Look, Chloe, who I’ve got in my team!’ But I don’t know if they realise how huge the women’s game has got.”
As the women’s game grows in popularity, so does the scrutiny. “There’s definitely misogyny when women are successful. People don’t like women being successful. People don’t like women being in an environment where maybe you don’t think we should be,” says Kelly. Fire and ice, they say, but that’s the fire, right there. “We are exactly where we should be, and we’re here to stay.”
Does she think that female players are held to a higher standard? She says she’s not sure, to be honest, and that plenty of male players are on the receiving end of harsh criticism and comments. But the pressures are a little different. “I think as women players, we try to be the best, inspiring young girls, inspiring women to take a step into something that they enjoy and something that they can be great at.”
But what’s different is that you don’t often get comments about male players’ appearances. “For sure. If you comment on if I’m good or bad at football, that’s fine. That’s your opinion.” She has to listen to the opinions of the staff every day. “If you’re going to comment on me as a human being, it’s a little bit different, but I am myself, and I’ll be myself wherever I go. For young girls that maybe are a little more insecure, that’s when it’s not nice.” Still, she tries to see it from another angle. “But I guess it’s a sign that we are being more successful than they wanted us to be.”
A recent BBC investigation found that over the course of a single weekend in the Premier League and WSL, more than 2,000 abusive messages, including death and rape threats, were sent to players and managers on social media. “You obviously see it,” says Kelly, on trolling, which she struggles to understand, adding that she doesn’t watch tennis, but that doesn’t mean she’s about to start slating tennis players. “I’m not going troll you for doing your job. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I’d love to be in a world full of full of peace and happiness. But, yeah,” she sighs, “we’re a million miles off that.”
Kelly has started to notice that, as well as young girls, more boys are looking up to female players now. “I meet so many that say, ‘Oh, you’re my idol, you’re my favourite player.’ Which is amazing, because actually, we’ve changed something. You’re actually changing the mindsets of those young boys, and as they grow up they will then teach their kids that this is normal.”
Kelly has a lot of plans outside football. She’s becoming a more regular fixture on red carpets, joining the fashion set at the pink-themed British Museum Ball in October, wearing see-through bejewelled couture at the Harper’s Bazaar Women of the Year Awards at the start of November. She’d like to move into fashion herself and wants to show more of her personality off the pitch. “And I would love to have a family. For me, being around my family so much, I’d love to have one of my own.”
But she isn’t thinking too hard about that just yet, because there’s something else on her mind. “I’ll know when the time is right, and right now I have a World Cup to get to and to win. So my focus is to make sure that I’m at my best to represent England.” And how is she feeling about the World Cup? She smiles. “I don’t look too far ahead. Who knows what the journey looks like to get there?” But, equally, she can’t help herself. “I’m hungry,” she says.”
