There is little doubt that this Chelsea side is among the greatest Women’s Super League teams assembled. That is not a new revelation or a hot take on a team that boasts three Ballon d’Or nominees in its frontline alone, one of whom is the most expensive female player of all time in Pernille Harder and another, Fran Kirby, is the most in-form forward in the league.
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Their 4-0 win over Tottenham on Sunday marked their 33rd WSL game without defeat, adding to the record they broke against Aston Villa during the week. The run now stands at 26 wins and seven draws in one year and 11 months.
Chelsea accomplished their latest win without Erin Cuthbert and, for the most part, without Sophie Ingle. With an hour gone, they were able to bring Bethany England, Chelsea’s top scorer last term, off the bench for the league’s second-highest scorer in Sam Kerr. How demoralising it must be to have limited Kerr to just one goal and then see, in the corner of your eye, England pulling off her warm-up bib and inching into view. That is life against a Chelsea side who can so effortlessly swap out one superstar for another. It is like getting through three-quarters of the Monopoly board barely unscathed, worn down by utilities and stations, then looking at the final stretch to see hotels on every square from Oxford Street to Park Lane.
What is obscured by the scoreline is the fact that, to begin with, this game was not easy: a renewed Spurs side came into this in search of their third win on the bounce and, after an opening 20 minutes in which they had Chelsea on the rack, were entitled to feel more emboldened still. For an idea of how quickly it turned, I messaged one colleague and wondered whether Chelsea would be held to a draw; by the time he was back at his desk, Chelsea were 2-0 up and had scored twice in a minute.
Perhaps it is wrong, and premature, to ask this question when Manchester United are following so closely behind, but still: how long before this Chelsea side will be considered the greatest WSL team of all time? And how dominant will they be allowed to be when United, Arsenal and Manchester City — not to mention Lyon and Paris Saint-Germain — are investing so heavily?
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The consensus since the eve of the season has been that Chelsea are most likely to be the first English team to win the Champions League since Arsenal in 2007. COVID 19-permitting, they still, on paper, have a chance of emulating Arsenal’s quadruple from that year: the league, Champions League, FA Cup and League Cup. To do so would mark the second time that Emma Hayes — assistant coach at Arsenal that season — has managed it.
In 2006-07, Arsenal Women earned the nickname “The Invincibles”. They won all 22 of their league games. They won the Premier League and FA Cup double three seasons running, from 2005-06 to 2007-08. They won the Champions League final over two legs — Alex Scott scoring the winner — without Kelly Smith, against a Umea side stacked with Swedish stars and the greatest women’s player of all time in Marta.
Smith was so dominant that she scored 100 times in 112 games over those years. They were so far ahead of their rivals, Smith recounts in her autobiography, that there were days where “it was like cruise control for us”. She continued: “We were just so much better than the rest… The list of potential goalscorers seemed endless.” You are likely thinking the same about this Chelsea side.
“If we scored early, it was like it was game over,” Smith tells The Athletic. “It’s like: how many goals can we get? We would already kind of know that we’d won the game, before stepping over the line. We had that confidence. We had the best team by far. The belief that was instilled in us because we just looked around the dressing room and knew that we had world-class players in every position.
“We just wanted to win every game by as many goals as possible. I still look at this team compared to the Chelsea team: the attacking players that we had could change a game on at any given moment. I would personally say that Chelsea have a better, more rounded squad, in terms of quality in terms of experienced internationals. I just think that their squad is the strongest in the league: the attacking players that they have are just phenomenal.”
Another question could be how even better that Arsenal side would have been had they, like this Chelsea team, been able to be full-time professionals. They trained as a team twice a week in the evenings — most players would get home at 10.30pm — under a manager in Vic Akers who was leading women’s football in its first tentative steps into something akin to professionalism.
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On top of that, they trained alone, at home, at gyms, in fields. Akers had been a community officer and scout for Arsenal: one of his employees had been a female footballer and a number of female coaches were coming through on coaching courses. They mooted the idea of a women’s team and Akers approached David Dein — “a big ally of mine,” Akers says — and Arsenal Ladies were born. Akers feels he could have gone on to a chief scout’s job in the men’s game had he persisted in that avenue “but I was never motivated by money. Seeing how the girls played, I thought, I’ve got to carry this through.”
“It’s different these days because finances have totally changed,” Akers, who is now a scout for Chelsea Women, says. “It’s gone right through the roof.”
It is “going to be harder” to win a quadruple, Akers says, but adds that it might be easier for an English team to win the Champions League. “When I did it, I could only ever really bring in British players. We were only able financially to involve British sides and British girls. We tried to make the best of what we had, in that respect, rather than to think of going abroad, where we wouldn’t have that type of money to pick those sort of players.”
Akers had known Hayes for most of his life — growing up, he says, they lived six doors apart in Camden. She was a player at Arsenal then went off to university in Liverpool, before returning to work at Arsenal’s college and with the first team. There is an anecdote from Hayes about the 2007 Champions League final in the 20th-anniversary issue of the women’s football magazine SheKicks: “My big memory was trying to get the players out the dressing room and they were too busy straightening each other’s hair, showing pictures of each other’s children or significant others,” she says. “They were so relaxed and confident in their ability to deliver.”
The midfielder Katie Chapman, who went on to play under Hayes at Chelsea, made her debut in the Arsenal team along with Karen Carney in that quadruple season. “Back then, whatever position you had was your position. Today, there’s more fluidity within the play. There are more competitive games and it’s harder now than it was. We felt like a team and we had each other’s backs. When we went out on that pitch, we were out there to win, and nothing else was good enough. And I think the only other time I experienced that was going to Chelsea.”
It feels unlikely that one team will ever reign supreme for as long as Arsenal did: the landscape of women’s football is far more competitive. Still, this Chelsea squad feels era-defining. Is it the first super-team of the WSL era? To win all four trophies, when the competition is so much sterner, would be the greatest achievement of Hayes’ managerial career. Last season she said that the WSL was so strong that winning it would be the “finest achievement” of whoever managed to do so.
“In this era, the level of competition is is getting better and better,” Smith says. “I felt like, when we were playing as Arsenal, the only couple of big games we had (were) against Charlton and Everton. They were the two teams at the time that would push us but we were always fully supported by Arsenal and had the best players. I look at the top five, six now and it’s so competitive. I don’t think one team will stand out as much as they did, because everybody else is pushing each other to be better.”’
(Photo: Harriet Lander/Chelsea FC/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)