How Manchester United fast-tracked their way into the Women's Super League

Manchester United’s promotion to the Women’s Super League felt inevitable from the moment their reformation was announced in May last year - barely eleven months ago - and predictably they have zoomed over the line with three league games remaining.

That Casey Stoney’s side did it via a 5-0 win over Aston Villa, the side against whom their league campaign began with a 12-0 demolition, was a fitting end to promotion hunt that ultimately turned, as it was always wont to, into a fairly relentless procession.

One more win hands them the title and it is hard to imagine Stoney’s side slipping up when they have won 15 of their 17 league games with an aggregate score of 81-7 and such are the expectations of their manager that her assessment of United’s 4-1 win over Spurs in November read: “I actually think we should be playing teams more off the park.”

The coach

It was only right that Manchester United’s return to women’s football after a 13-year absence was spearheaded by one of the most recognisable faces in the game and Casey Stoney - 130 England caps, MBE, Team GB captain at London 2012 - was the obvious candidate.

The months Stoney spent as Phil Neville’s England assistant at St. George’s Park have informed her approach to management and her conversations with Gareth Southgate over dinner - specifically, his emphasis on ensuring his players “love playing for England” - spawned Stoney’s Team United programme. That saw the first team locked in mazes, having boxing lessons at 6am, filming street dance videos, completing the assault course from Ninja Warrior UK and handling snakes and spiders to improve their mental steel.

The psychological support for United Women has been transferred directly from the men’s side and they have their own in-house well-being coach with whom Stoney consults to plan her sessions.

“We want to align our behaviours to our values, and what that looks like day-to-day,” Stoney told Telegraph Sport. “What we live, what we eat, what we breathe, who we are, what our identity is. But that’ll come from the players, not me. I won’t tell them what their behaviours have to be. They have to decide, own it and be accountable to each other.”

Key players

It is difficult to pinpoint a Player of the Year for United given five of the Championship’s top ten scorers, including the joint top two, are Stoney’s players: Jess Sigworth (14), Ella Toone (14), Mollie Green (13) Lauren James (9) and Katie Zelem (9). Of those, two are midfielders - Zelem and Green - and two are teenagers. Toone is 19 and James 17.

James, sister of Wigan’s Reece James, has already been earmarked as a future England talent and it is slightly terrifying, given the ease with which United overcame Brighton with James at their heart, that her date of birth is Sept 29, 2001. The former Bayern Munich forward Leah Galton can run a game from start to finish and at their best United have blown teams away in a whir of aggression, furious pressing and urgency. Goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain and full back Alex Greenwood have just shy of 100 England caps between them.

Full-time team, part-time league

Rightly or otherwise, the debate over whether full-time United should have ever been in the Championship, a part-time league, in the first place has soundtracked their season like an incessant echo. Durham inflicted United’s only defeat in the second tier, winning 3-1, but despite Durham’s achievements this season that game will be remembered, by United, as no more than a minor blip.

The official line from United chief executive Ed Woodward was that “launching a team in WSL2 would give many more of our graduates from the regional talent club the chance to establish themselves as first-team players”: bar Siobhan Chamberlain, Amy Turner and Alex Greenwood, every player in Stoney’s squad is under 25.

The argument - one Stoney has peddled at length - is that United had just 52 days between the day they were founded on May 28th and the first game of their season on 19th August. Stoney was not appointed until June 8th even though United applied for a license for the second tier back in March 2018.

Yet the fact remains that United’s resources far outweigh anything any of these clubs, most of whom operate entirely separately to their men’s sides, have to hand. Aston Villa have one professional footballer on their books, 19-year-old Jodie Hutton, and in the past their players have had to pay for their own medical treatment.

The amount of time United can devote to scouting, fitness and analysis far outweighs anything the other ten teams can and this has told time and again. Spurs’ Ashleigh Neville is a full-time teacher and all the players at Crystal Palace have other full-time jobs.

In November Stoney defended their place in the second tier, saying: “We’re full-time, I do appreciate that, and all the other teams aren’t, but I actually think it was a sensible decision by the club to go the way we’ve gone.

“Because let’s be honest, we didn’t know what we were going to be able to recruit in a very, very short space of time. We had three weeks to build a team, put staff in place and get everything in place. We never knew what was going to be able to happen to do that. We’re a very young team and we’re still growing. People criticise us, but half of our squad is WSL 2 players. It’s not as if they’re playing in a league dropping down. I don’t ever feel bad.”

How big is the gap to the Women’s Super League?

It always felt like United’s season was a warm-up ahead of the bigger tests in the top tier next season, where their first Manchester derby, in the months following a World Cup, could be a landmark moment for the game.

It is reasonable to expect United’s budget to dwarf that of most of the Super League clubs and if United were forced to recruit at the eleventh hour last summer it has barely showed in a squad with an average age of 22.

United’s results against top-tier sides this season have been mixed: they beat WSL strugglers Everton 3-0 in the League Cup in December, West Ham 2-0 in the same competition the following month and Brighton by the same scoreline in the FA Cup in February. They lost 2-0 to Reading in August but beat Liverpool 1-0 earlier that month.

However, they were knocked out of the FA Cup quarter-finals by Reading, losing 3-2, but may have felt slightly aggrieved when they were exited the League Cup by Arsenal in February after a 2-1 away defeat having given the WSL leaders a terrible fright.

The evidence is that they are, already, at least a mid-table WSL side, but bigger tests against serial winners Manchester City and Chelsea, the side with the deepest squad in the division, await. Stoney’s ambition is to one day win the Champions League with United but the genuine acid tests are still to come.