Steph Houghton: the highs, the lows and the sacrifices - and why she's chosen to retire (2024)

At the final whistle, Steph Houghton found herself overcome. She embraced a few of her team-mates and opponents and then a wave of emotion hit her hard. Manchester City’s WSL title challenge was over, but so too, much more starkly, was her career as a professional footballer.

A week earlier, she had been all smiles for a guard of honour and a presentation after her final home game for City (albeit she was an unused substitute). But at Villa Park, on an afternoon when Chelsea held their nerve to beat City to top spot on goal difference, the tears flowed. It looked like catharsis.

Looking back, a week into life as an ex-footballer, Houghton says the main emotion is pride in a career that will see her inducted into the National Football Museum’s Hall of Fame. But she was also struck that day by the realisation that “actually, that’s my last ever game of football”, and by thoughts of “what football has given me over so many years, all those feelings, all those highs and lows”.

Such exhilarating highs, such crushing lows.

Houghton says she had hopes of winning the 2022 European Championship with host nation England and then bowing out on the ultimate high, as her close friends Ellen White and Jill Scott got to do.

“That would have been probably the dream: to kind of mic-drop and leave by winning a trophy with England. That would be the perfect ending for everybody,” she says — but it didn’t come for Houghton, who, after winning 121 caps at senior level, was distraught at being left out of Sarina Wiegman’s squad.

Very few athletes get that perfect ending. Endings are often messy. The final three years of Houghton’s career have been spent fighting against injuries and the “stigma” of being a player in her mid-thirties — and all of this against the backdrop of her husband, and now fellow former professional footballer, Stephen Darby’s diagnosis of motor neurone disease (MND).

She talks of “using a lot of energy” and “making a lot of sacrifices … without getting the rewards” at the end of each week.

At 36, she was left wondering, “What am I actually getting out of this?”. In the end, she concluded, “OK, I think I’m tired now.”

It’s only now, having stepped off the treadmill, that Houghton can look back in wonder at what she and her generation of players have done for women’s football in England, dragging it out of the dark ages and into the spotlight. It has been, she says, “an unbelievable journey”.

When asked to pinpoint a watershed moment, both in her own career and for the women’s game in England, Houghton cites the London 2012 Olympics, and the night she scored Great Britain’s winning goal against Brazil in front of 70,584 spectators at Wembley.

“It was a defining moment in terms of people actually recognising women’s football as a sport,” she says. “I think that’s what made people think, ‘Right, we need to invest in this. We need to invest in these girls’ — so that’s (the defining moment) because of the influence it had on the game, but also on me personally.”

She casts her mind back to her early days playing football, forcing her way into her primary school’s team, playing with and against boys and frequently getting the better of them. But she had no real thoughts of becoming a professional because, at that time, it wasn’t an option for a girl in England. Her childhood heroes were David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and her own club Sunderland’s prolific centre-forward at the time, Kevin Phillips. Women’s football was almost hidden from view.

She made her first-team debut for Sunderland in the then Women’s Premier League (the forerunner to the WSL) in 2002, aged just 13. “And when I first got into the Sunderland team, I had to pay — well, my dad had to pay — £250 a year subs(cription), so I could play,” she says. “We were travelling on minibuses, like, (leaving Wearside at) five o’clock in the morning, to play Arsenal.”

They trained once a week, late at night, once the pitches were no longer needed by the Sunderland men’s teams or the academy. There was a time when she and her team-mates were excited to be told they would be getting new kits. Their coach then arrived with a bin bag and pulled out a set of extra-large strips no longer needed by the men’s team.

“The really big changes I saw were probably when I moved to Arsenal (in 2011),” Houghton says. “Before that, you had to pay to play, you had hand-me-down kit, you didn’t really get any training kit. You had to bring your own stuff. We certainly never got any boots. It’s probably a given now that every (women’s) player gets a boot deal, especially those who are playing internationally or at top clubs.”

Houghton praises Arsenal, Chelsea, City, and other clubs for their investment in the women’s game since the launch of the WSL in 2011. But she feels the revolution in women’s football was powered by the players. She cites Faye White, Casey Stoney, Kelly Smith and Rachel Yankey among those who “gave me a dream” and blazed a trail in much the same way that Lucy Bronze, Scott, Houghton and others later blazed a trail for Mary Earps, Lauren Hemp, Beth Mead, Alessia Russo, Lauren James et al.

“They were the first ones who were able to say, ‘Actually, why aren’t England players getting paid to go and play for their country?’,” Houghton says. “Those were the first conversations. We continued them. They were ones who were fighting for the likes of me to have that opportunity, to have a central contract (with the FA) and play for England and go to Loughborough (University, on a scholarship) and play full-time.”

A few months after those Olympics in 2012, Houghton and 16 other England players refused to sign the central contracts offered by the FA. They rejected not just the minimal increase in basic salary — up from £16,000 to £18,000 ($20,387 at today’s exchange rates) — but what they considered inadequate provisions for maternity leave, living costs and secondary employment.

They dug in before eventually settling on a new deal worth £20,000 a year, with improved maternity provisions and an increase in the number of hours they could work in secondary jobs, up to 24 hours a week, in order to meet their living costs. Houghton became prominently involved in the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA, the players’ trade union in English football), finding herself part of the type of discussions that male footballers were having almost half a century earlier.

“For me as a player, especially in the women’s game, you have a bit more of a duty to do that,” Houghton says. “It takes bravery. Also, you need to have good people around to give you that advice and to say it’s OK to have that conversation. You might not get the answer you want at first, but I think with the willingness, the stubbornness and the togetherness of the England squad, we really stuck together to try and make change.

“There’s a lot of hard work that probably hasn’t been spoken about: behind the scenes, the meetings, the sit-downs, the potentially not signing contracts, to allow us to get something bigger. The team became more powerful. We had to try to change people’s perception… and keep driving that standard.”

It was at one of the PFA’s annual meetings that Houghton met her husband.

Former Liverpool youngster Darby was there as a representative of his then club Bradford City’s players, Houghton on behalf of Manchester City. Their agent, Matthew Buck, introduced them and thought nothing more of it until the following day, when they both messaged him to enquire about the other.

From there, romance blossomed. They married in the summer of 2018 — “The best day ever,” Houghton called it at the time.

But life can be cruel. It can be brutal. Just three months later, Darby was diagnosed with MND, a neurodegenerative disorder for which there is no known cure. Their lives were turned upside-down. Houghton contemplated retiring to become a full-time carer for her husband. He would hear nothing of the idea, urging his wife to chase her dreams for as long as possible.

As captain, Houghton led England into the 2019 Women’s World Cup. They reached the semi-finals but, at 2-1 down against the United States, she had an 84th-minute penalty saved. This is part of what she means when she talks of a career that has encompassed lows as well as highs.

In September 2021, the day before Wiegman’s first game in charge of England, Houghton tore an Achilles tendon in training. She was told she faced a race against time to be fit for the following summer’s Euros. Although she put everything into her recovery mission, when tournament time came, she was lacking match fitness and Wiegman left her out. As her friends and team-mates achieved their crowning glory at Wembley, Houghton was on the outside, looking in.

“Yeah, it hurt, because ultimately you want to be part of an England team and you want to be part of the Euros,” she says. “The Euros in this country was the biggest stage and one that we’d spoken about for numerous years, especially when it got delayed (by a year) because of COVID.

“So, yeah, of course it hurt, because I know how much I put in in terms of (being) away from family, away from Stephen, to get myself fit for that tournament — and it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to.

“That didn’t stop me being absolutely buzzing for the girls winning the Euros. I think I was their biggest supporter, always messaging them, wishing them good luck. But I would be lying if I said it was easy. You go from being England captain for eight years, and having a lot of communication with a lot of people from the FA, to absolutely nothing for two years. That’s quite hard to take as a human being, but also as a football player. That was probably the hardest thing… (and) the most disappointing thing.

“I wanted my international career to end in a different way. But with everything that’s going on in my life, ‘perspective’ is a big word for me. There’s even more important things than being part of that squad. It allowed me to spend more time with Stephen.”

Houghton elaborated on this in an interview with the BBC’s Sportsday programme, expressing her pride in the work Darby has done to raise awareness of MND. Along with her father, uncle and in-laws, she joined the recent March Of The Day charity walk, which raised more than £200,000 for the Darby Rimmer MND Foundation.

“Stephen’s great,” she said. “Mentally, he’s really strong. He’s really positive and yes, of course, physically things are a lot different for us now, but we don’t really ever complain and I think that’s the biggest thing about us: that we’re strong, we’re strong together.

“I think sometimes, when you have someone like Stephen, with the condition that he has, things do get put into perspective quite quickly. I think it was time that I actually put a little bit more energy into my family and to being a part of Stephen’s life a lot more, in terms of being with him every single day, rather than going away. But other than that, we’re really good. Our mental state is good, we’re positive and we’re trying to fight the fight as always.”

As well as the milestones Houghton has passed on the pitch, there are others that chart the growth of the women’s game in England.

She knew she and her team-mates were getting somewhere when, in 2014, she became the first woman to appear on the front cover of Shoot!, a UK football magazine which had been running since the late 1960s. It felt similar when she and her team-mates were included in the FIFA 2016 video game.

Earlier this month, Houghton joined Karen Bardsley, Izzy Christiansen, Beth Mead and Vivianne Miedema at St George’s Park in a group of 17 current and former female footballers studying for the UEFA A Licence coaching course. “It shows a lot of women are wanting to stay in the game and contribute in a way that can help clubs, help national teams and help influence girls and boys,” she says.

Houghton is not yet sure whether she sees her future in coaching. She has been encouraged by City to consider a wide range of future roles, ranging from coaching to ambassadorial work to executive positions. Last year, she was encouraged to run to be the first female chair of the PFA, but lost out to Leyton Orient defender Omar Beckles.

She feels it is only a matter of time before women begin to earn prominent roles in the men’s game.

“I can’t see why not,” Houghton says. “I look at what we were doing at St George’s Park and we’re all (men and women) learning the same thing. We all know the game. We coached a boys’ team last Tuesday and the response they gave us was the same they’d give any male coach. It’s the same information you’re giving them. You might be delivering it in a different way, but we’re all different.

“Whether you’re male or female, I think opportunity comes because you’re good enough and you’re able to have an effect in that certain area. I think that’s how it should be, whether it’s punditry, coaching, anything in the boardroom or whatever it might be. You have to know that you’re actually at that level to be doing that. I don’t want to be selected just because I’m female. I definitely don’t want that. I want to be selected for whatever it might be because of the qualities I could potentially bring to a role.”

She reflects on how far women’s football has come in England in the past decade, never mind in the two decades since she started out at Sunderland. She expects changes over the coming years to be more “subtle”, but she wants to remain part of them.

When asked about her legacy as a footballer, Houghton says she hopes to be remembered as someone who has helped to take the women’s game “to a better place” and to “challenge and put up a fight as women — not just as footballers but as women — to be given the same kind of opportunity that boys and men get”.

She will be remembered as the leader of an inspirational generation of women footballers in England. A game-changer, on the pitch and off it.

(Top photo: Gareth Copley/Getty Images)