Karen Bardsley on life after playing: ‘I want to make things better’

Karen Bardsley has just finished watching training on the City Football Academy pitch she was acquainted with for eight trophy-laden seasons.

The difference today is the former England goalkeeper is taking on a decidedly different role: in the boardroom, the research labs, the analysis team, the legal department and wherever else Manchester City will have her.

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This is life for Bardsley in her new job as project officer for the City women’s team, after calling time in May this year on a career that included 82 England caps, a World Cup bronze medal and three FA Cup final wins. For the last years of her playing career, she had one eye on life after retirement — in 2017, she enrolled on a master’s degree in sports directorship at Manchester Metropolitan University, graduating in 2019 as part of a cohort that included Newcastle coach Steve Harper, Dundee manager Gary Bowyer and former Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann — but the future still came sooner than she would have hoped.

During England’s 3-0 quarter-final win over Norway at the 2019 World Cup, Bardsley tore a hamstring tendon off the bone. After 15 months of rehabilitation, she made the initial squad for the Olympics in Japan last year, only for her hamstrings to betray her again.

“I was just in constant pain,” Bardsley, now 38, says from one of the offices at City’s training ground. “I couldn’t put up with it any longer. I’m glazing over it as though it was a very easy process, but it certainly wasn’t. It was very, very difficult to admit to yourself, and then, you know, carry on talking to other people about.”

Was she in denial? She laughs. “I’ve been in denial my entire career. I think it all came down to making the final decision. I was unable to perform in the way I wanted to. That was the ultimate reason.”

As that choice became clearer in her mind — “the more you talk about it, the easier it gets” — she talked to Gavin Makel, City Women’s managing director. Bardsley was eager to stay at City (she was born in Santa Monica, California, but qualified to play for England through her parents, who had emigrated from Manchester) in some capacity and, having been among the first tranche of women players to receive full-time contracts, was eager to push the game forward further.

In 2019, she began shadowing departments and assisting with research projects and data analysis.

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Bardsley gives a brief run-down of how she learned to use Tableau, a visual data-analysis software. It is academic, intricate work, far more mentally involved than her old job out on the grass. That, she jokes, is “where life is simple”, but she has always been a data-head, drawn to how things work.

“I might not retain all the information,” she says, “but I like to understand why things happen, what influences that decision-making. Nothing happens in a vacuum. There’s always context surrounding every single thing. You have to understand what’s going on, other than the obvious.”

She is, she says, a “lifelong learning nerd”.

“There’s certainly a need for all those things I’m already interested in, because the game is growing so quickly,” she continues. “I’ll be looking at research projects and helping the club and women’s football try to find a competitive advantage.”

She and Makel crafted the job description between them. She has nicknamed it “the Manchester City MBA”, or Master of Business Administration; she will have some form of “personal development time” in most aspects of the City Women business.

Many of the players of Bardsley’s generation had hands in other careers long before their retirement. They had to, given how difficult it was to build a career as a paid women’s footballer when they entered the game.

Eniola Aluko was a qualified sports and entertainment lawyer, while the former Chelsea left-back Claire Rafferty held down a full-time job as a financial analyst for Deutsche Bank for much of her playing career.

It is still not uncommon for WSL and Championship players to have degrees. Arsenal’s double WSL Golden Boot winner Vivianne Miedema has a master’s degree, Birmingham City’s Harriet Scott is a qualified physiotherapist and England captain Leah Williamson, also of Arsenal, has studied for accountancy qualifications.

But one of the few drawbacks to the fully professional women’s league we have today is that future generations of its players may not be as well-equipped as their forebears for life after football. The women’s game, too, is neither well-funded or staffed sufficiently to retain all its talent.

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There will be many, then, watching City’s Bardsley pilot with interest.

The role is a good fit for Bardsley, who throughout her playing career has campaigned for improvements to the women’s game off the pitch as relentlessly as she has kept clean sheets on it. She has been a member of the lobbying network Women In Football for years and became the first professional footballer to sit on a county FA’s board of directors when she joined the Manchester FA as an independent non-executive director for women and girls’ football.

“I’m giving people an insight into what the world of women’s football looks like and feels like — essentially providing them another lens to look through at their decisions,” she says.

Has speaking out — chasing better conditions for women footballers — always come easily to her?

“The thing that’s always been difficult, as long as I can remember, is that, particularly with the national team, you didn’t always feel comfortable giving your opinion on things,” Bardsley begins. “You thought perhaps there would be negative (consequences) in terms of selection and things like that.

“There are a lot of things out there that maybe I wish I would have said earlier or raised earlier. But I was always under the impression that no one really cared what I had to say.”

The turning point, she says, came when England began winning things, including the World Cup bronze in Canada in 2015.

“Before that, I think the only platform we had was around (the London Olympics in) 2012, where there genuinely felt like equity between the men’s and the women’s sides. But the Team GB legacy was kind of short-lived.

“There were a lot of things that needed addressing. Things were happening that people weren’t questioning in terms of the development of women’s sport: Why was it being treated and perceived as less than what it deserves? Why is it not getting the respect that it deserves? Every time we make some progress, whether it be domestically or internationally, I feel our ability to speak out and make a positive difference.”

She is, of course, still part of it: she still refers to the England team as “we”, adding, of their letter to the Conservative Party leadership candidates demanding improved access to football for girls in school, that the players “blew it out the water”. Among the best people in women’s football, she says, integrity “seems to ooze out of everyone. Maybe it’s the humble beginnings of women’s football — we understand where we’ve come from, we are grateful for the opportunities we have, but we want things to be better. We’re not satisfied with sub-par actions or attitudes.

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“When I finally got some traction, I was like, ‘People do want to make a difference. People do want to understand how they can help’. I don’t want anyone in professional sport to go through their career without feeling that someone’s in their corner and trying to make things better for them. That’s where my passion lies.”

Her to-do list over the next few weeks?

There is a Q&A at the City Leadership Institute on the impact of England’s triumph at this year’s European Championship on domestic women’s football. She will also develop a curriculum for City’s future education courses because “people are actively seeking to understand what it looks like from the female perspective: What are the important things that land with a female football-specific environment?”

Bardsley spent Wednesday morning at a meeting with the staff for the men’s first team and the afternoon with the media department. Thursday involved commentary for City’s in-house media channels.

“I want to help make things better,” she says. “Not only in women’s football, but I want to make things as good as they can possibly be here at Man City. And I’m not saying I have all the answers — but I’ve certainly got enough enthusiasm to do it.”

(Top photo: Getty Images)