Yahoo Sports Beth Mead exclusive: It was a rollercoaster, the highest highs in my career and lowest lows in my personal life
“It’s pronounced ‘My-Lee’,” Beth Mead explains as her working cocker spaniel scampers around her St Albans flat. “But we spelt it ‘Myle’. We didn’t want people thinking she was named after Miley Cyrus.”
With or without popstar billing, a one-year-old dog has become the unintended centrepiece of a photoshoot supposed to mark Mead’s inclusion in the Standard’s list of the 100 people shaping London.
Myle nestles among the sofa cushions and poses tongue out for the camera. She plucks tennis balls out of midair with Bergkamp grace and weaves, with her owner’s precision, between storage units bearing all manner of accolades, from an MBE to a Sports Personality of the Year award and a European Championship golden boot.
These most prestigious keepsakes tell part of the story of a defining period in Mead’s life and career, but only part.
Between the summers of 2022 and 2023, Mead experienced what she calls “a rollercoaster… ups and downs, the highest highs in my career and the lowest lows in my personal life”.
The spearhead of England’s Euros success on home soil, she became one of the faces of a women’s football revolution still in effect now and a genuine household name.
She also lost her mother, June, to ovarian cancer and suffered a serious knee injury, which ruled her out of all football for 11 months, including a World Cup that should have come at her peak.
When we meet, it is a year almost to the day since Mead returned to the pitch and so, with some distance, this feels a fair time to reflect.
“Life sucks and life’s great sometimes,” the Arsenal forward says. “But I’m very fortunate. Being able to share some of the biggest moments of my career and winning SPOTY with my mum still here is what I hold onto as a memory. It happens, unfortunately, in life. It’s not a nice disease for anyone to get, but unfortunately I’m not the only one in the world that it’s happened to. It’s the same with an ACL injury. I’m not the only one.”
Perspective and positivity are the two elements of her mother’s mantra which Mead has seized upon.
Viv and I are big advocates for mental health - our dog has been a game-changer for us
“When I did my ACL originally, I knew I could come back from that injury,” she explains. “Perspective was that my mum couldn’t come back from what she had.”
Getting a dog was the idea of Vivianne Miedema, Mead’s partner and, until this summer, Arsenal team-mate.
The Dutch forward, now at Manchester City, thought that looking after a puppy would help Mead through her ACL rehab, not knowing that within a month she would suffer the same injury. Eventually, Arsenal would have four players sidelined by ACL tears at once.
With two members of the household incapacitated, the idea of adding a pet third was deemed unwise.
Once both Mead and Miedema returned to fitness, though, they drew up a list of canine ownership pros and cons and agreed to take the plunge.
“Viv and I are big advocates of mental health stuff and Myle’s been a game-changer for us,” Mead says. “It’s been a blessing that we probably put off too long. You come home and she’s excited to see you, regardless of what you’ve done on the pitch. You’ll never regret getting a dog or having some kind of animal in your life.”
‘A target on our back’
It is not unfair to suggest that a distraction from on-pitch matters has been needed more regularly than is ideal so far this season.
After a slow start, Arsenal are only fifth in the Women’s Super League and parted ways with manager Jonas Eidevall this month.
England, too, have been unconvincing of late and were beaten 4-3 by Germany at Wembley last week in a match billed as a key test less than a year out from their European Championship defence.
“We’ve got a target on our back, we know that as a team now,” Mead says. “Do I think we’ve recently been playing at our best? No. But it’s peaking at the right time in these competitions.We’ve got Sarina [Wiegman], we’ve got good things in place and we’ve just got to back ourselves and not worry about outside noise.”
Mead’s confidence in Wiegman as a tournament coach is telling.
When the Dutchwoman arrived in 2021, already a European champion with her own nation, England were a nearly team, having fallen at the semi-final stage at three major tournaments in a row. Since then, they have won the Euros and reached their first ever World Cup final, narrowly losing to Spain.
“She was a proven winner,” Mead says, and that mattered far more than the fact that Wiegman was not English. Our interview takes place 24 hours after Thomas Tuchel has been unveiled as the new - and first German - manager of the England men’s side, prompting a mixture of justified and jingoistic concerns that a homegrown coach could not be found to do the job.
“A different culture and mindset was never a bad thing for us,” Mead says. She recalls a possession drill early in Wiegman’s tenure, where a crop of players raised to rely on their physicality and pace could be found — not to put too fine a point on it — “running around like blue-arsed flies”.
“Sarina just said, ‘Stand still. Get the ball. Play football’. It’s one of the biggest things I remember. We just played so much better, we weren’t running around and losing balls, being really hectic and chaotic. Sarina came in and brought complete football back for us.”
Sarina just said, ‘Stand still. Get the ball. Play football’. We just played so much better, we weren’t running around and losing balls, being really hectic and chaotic
Great expectations
Now 29, Mead’s own coaching journey is already underway.
Along with Miedema, she is part of an all-female cohort working towards her Uefa A licence and coaches girls in Arsenal’s academy as part of the badge.
She also fronts McDonald’s Fun Football campaign, which provides free sessions to young children and, in the aftermath of England’s Euros win, saw a 60 per cent increase in uptake among girls.
“Knowing how difficult it was for me to get into football, I want to try and make it as easy as possible for these young girls,” says Mead, who had to travel 45 minutes from the village of Hinderwell, in rural North Yorkshire, to Middlesbrough to find her closest girls’ team as a child. “That’s the rewarding part. You see these girls and you hope that one day they will be playing in Euros and World Cup finals.”
In the three years since England’s success, no WSL club has done more than Arsenal to make a summer’s breakthrough stick. Last season, the Gunners’ average home league attendance was 32,618, higher than almost half of men’s Premier League clubs.
Matches at the Emirates Stadium have become the norm (bar Champions League qualifiers, they have played every home game at the ground this season) and the crowds are such that when only 5,000-odd turned up to watch the midweek win over Valerenga earlier this month it felt to Mead, in the best way possible, “really, really weird”.
“It feels more like a fortress now, a place we want people to fear when they come and play us,” she says. The stage comes with its own pressures and the scale of discontent among Arsenal supporters when results faltered at the end of Eidevall’s reign felt a fresh development for the women’s game.
Knowing how difficult it was for me to get into football, I want to try and make it as easy as possible for these young girls. That’s the rewarding part
“I know in the past people have come because it’s been a kind of ‘cool’ thing to come to a game,” Mead says. “Now, people are coming and they’re really invested in our journey as footballers and us as a team. You can tell that people are a lot more dedicated and that comes now with expectation.”
It has been almost eight years now since Mead made Arsenal and London her home. It was not swapping Sunderland for the most successful women’s club in English football history that made her nervous, but rather being a “countryside girl” bound for the biggest city of them all.
“The thought of coming to Arsenal was always a dream of mine but then physically doing it and getting here was very daunting,” she says. “London for me used to be a weekend break with my mum, my auntie, my cousins. We used to come to the theatre and do the touristy thing. Now I live here.”
Mead still enjoys trips to see West End shows and counts Mayfair’s Novikov as her favourite restaurant.
But stationed on the fringes of the city, five minutes from Arsenal’s London Colney training ground, she enjoys the option of detachment and calm.
“It’s nice to have that time away with the dog to switch off, but also be able to go into London and enjoy the hustle and bustle,” she says. “I guess that kind of takes me back to being a kid.”
Beth Mead was celebrating the latest free wave of McDonald’s Fun Football sessions this Autumn, available to all children aged 5-11 across the UK. Sign up now for your nearest free session at mcdonalds.co.uk/football
