“I was on such a high,” Jessica Naz says as she recalls the heady days of summer 2019.
The then-18-year-old scored the goal that secured Tottenham Hotspur’s promotion to the Women’s Super League (WSL) for the first time, then represented England at the Under-19 European Championship a couple of months later.
“I was really excited to get into the WSL,” the England Under-23 international tells The Athletic. “I’d just come from the Euros, had no rest and went straight into pre-season. In hindsight, I don’t think I listened to my body. That’s something I would change: listen to my body more.”
Within 10 seconds of coming on in a pre-season game in Spain, Naz jumped over a tackle, landed and felt her knee move out and in. “My knee looked fine, but I was struggling to get up,” Naz, now 23, recalls. “If I get tackled, I always get on with it. When I couldn’t get up, I knew it had to be bad.”
Naz remembers being rolled around the airport in a wheelchair before the flight home because the team’s only set of crutches was being used by another player.
The prognosis on her arrival back in England was a medial cruciate ligament (MCL) injury. “Minimum two months rehab,” Naz remembers. “There was no ACL (anterior cruciate ligament, which, if damaged, can mean 12 months on the sidelines, not two) mentioned before I had the scan.”
When the physios invited Naz and her father in, however, it all became a blur.
“I didn’t know what an ACL injury was,” she says. “All I heard in that meeting was I’m out for a year and going to need surgery. It was a shock to the system. I broke down crying. Everything just came crashing down.”
Naz, by her own admission, does not find it easy to express her emotions. She usually lets her feet do the talking.
But in the build-up to Spurs’ first Women’s FA Cup final appearance, against Manchester United at Wembley on Sunday, the forward sat down with The Athletic at Tottenham’s training ground — in the northern London suburb of Enfield, where she was born — to share her story.
The Naz household would get “heated” anytime Arsenal (the club Jessica and one of her brothers supported) played Manchester United (of whom her dad and other brother were fans). Despite the rivalry, Naz is very close to her family, including her four siblings. “They are everything to me,” she says. “We’re best friends.”
It was her younger brother who got her into football through casual kickabouts in the park, but when the boys had matches, Naz was literally pushed to the side, playing with her father on the touchline.
Before football, there had been athletics. Naz ran the 100m and 200m and would be the only pupil in her year at her school, Oasis Academy, who would always bring a medal back from the annual district-wide competitions. But her mother said she would turn too muscly if she pursued athletics, so football took over.
It was purely by chance Naz started playing for a girls’ team.
Skirting past Tottenham’s ground on the way to her brother’s training, Naz’s father spotted a tournament going on. It was the first time Naz had ever seen girls play. He asked if his seven-year-old daughter could join in. “I played well, and scored a couple of goals,” Naz says.
By the end of that tournament, Naz, who had no idea of the team’s name, was invited to play for them and was just “buzzing” that she now belonged to a Sunday girls’ team. When she found out she was playing for Tottenham, she was “proper gassed”.
Naz spent four years, from the age of eight to 12, in Spurs’ girls’ setup. Their women’s first team were an amateur outfit at the time — a long way from the WSL and training at schools’ facilities in north London.
With her shirt tucked into shorts way too big for her, Naz’s youth team would, in her words, “destroy” other sides, winning games 10-0. “I thought we were Barcelona,” she says.
Naz would try to replicate the skills, especially the stepover, she had watched Cristiano Ronaldo or Neymar perform on YouTube, mesmerised by their quick feet and pace.
An Arsenal coach spotted the then-13-year-old when playing for Spurs and invited her to a trial. At that moment, Naz realised: “This is actually football. I thought Tottenham was Barca, but this was a different level. The standard was crazy.”
Jessica Naz took her first steps in football as part of Tottenham’s youth teams (Tottenham Hotspur FC)
Naz was selected, along with two others, out of hundreds of girls. “It got to a point where it became too easy at Tottenham and I wanted to challenge myself,” she says.
Being September-born, Naz had to play up an age group in the under-15s, alongside older players such as future Arsenal first-teamer and England international Lotte Wubben-Moy, Anna Patten (now of Aston Villa) and Taylor Hinds (Liverpool). The move cemented her belief she wanted to become a professional footballer, despite her teachers telling her otherwise.
Naz moved through the age groups at Arsenal and in her last months at the club, the then-16-year-old trained with the first team, rubbing shoulders with Vivianne Miedema, Katie McCabe, Jordan Nobbs and Kim Little.
“I was challenged every day, playing against and learning from the best of the best, trying to take in everything I could,” Naz says. “Being in that environment made me decide to leave and play first-team football. I needed a new challenge. The under-21s became too easy.” Given she was so young, Naz realised she was not going to get the opportunity to break into the Arsenal first team.
She combined her studies with football for two years at Barnet & Southgate College, a stone’s throw from Tottenham’s main stadium, also playing for Spurs’ development youth squad (there was not an academy at the time). The club’s former first-team head coach Karen Hills, who also led the girls’ programme, and then women’s head coach Juan Amoros recognised Naz’s potential and invited her to train with the seniors, who were playing in the domestic third tier.
Shy, serious, conscientious, courteous, coachable, highly ambitious and ultra-professional with “some phenomenal habits” are how Glen Hicks and James Edgerley, who worked in the college’s programme, describe Naz.
“It’s the consistency of who she was on the pitch, off the pitch, around the college,” says Hicks. “As a coach for 25 years, I don’t think there’s been any more impressive person, boy or girl, than Jess.” From her timekeeping to a single-minded mentality to get the best out of herself, Naz distinguished herself from the rest.
She is quiet off the field but as soon as Naz crosses that white line, “she just comes alive”, says Edgerley.
“When I step onto the pitch, it’s a way for me to express myself, show off my skills and pace without having to talk too much,” says Naz. “I’m not really a talker.”
When Naz scores, her stirring-the-pot celebration usually follows (Tottenham Hotspur FC)
Naz has found football to be a creative outlet but when she was growing up it provided a much-needed physical escape from reality.
“Enfield was very diverse,” she says. “It was good because it was such a mix, a community, so many different races, everyone just got along. It wasn’t the safest at times. That’s why football was good — to get away from that side. I never went to parties because I had to go to training. Football was a way out and not a lot of people have a way out in Enfield.”
Naz believes “football changes people” because of the different challenges the sport presents.
For her, suffering that ACL injury at such a young age was a key factor in “moulding her as a better person mentally”. She had surgery straight away in that summer five years ago and built muscle quickly. But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit the following March.
“I find it hard to express my emotions,” says Naz. “I’m a person who gets on with things, I don’t complain.” During her ACL rehab, however, she struggled. “Some days, I just didn’t want to come in. Doing the same exercise, not progressing, it’s so lonely. There was stuff going on back home as well, my parents splitting up. It was just such a mad period.”
Physio Sarah Budd, who has been at Tottenham since 2009, could see Naz was down.
“They just made me feel really comfortable to open up,” Naz says. “They said, ‘It’s OK not to be OK. If you don’t want to come in, say so, you don’t have to pretend, you don’t have to always put on a brave face’.”
Women’s first-team coach, and former Spurs player, Anton Blackwood, who also grew up in north London, worked closely with Naz, “eating and breathing” her return to play: training, lunch, gym, on repeat. “It made me understand the power of connections with players, because you can push a player but you have to understand what makes them tick,” says Blackwood, who is like a big brother to Naz.
“North London is a very small, tight community. I understand her, how she was brought up, and she understands me. That’s why we have such a natural connection. Shaun Harris (another former Tottenham coach) and I both played a big role in helping her, as a minority, feel comfortable in an industry where maybe she doesn’t see a lot of coaches that look like myself, or players that look like her.”
As well as Blackwood and Budd, her family and her team-mates — especially Alex Morgan and Rianna Dean — helped Naz through that time. When USWNT international Morgan joined Spurs from the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) in September 2020, she was building back to full fitness having given birth four months earlier, while Naz had just started back out training on the grass. The teenager opened up to the two-time World Cup winner and Olympic gold medallist, who had previously suffered an ACL injury herself.
“We used to do shooting drills,” says Naz. “She’d say ‘OK, we’ve got 10 balls. How many are you going to score?’. Your detail goes up because you’ve said you’re going to score seven, so you want to score seven. She was a great person to learn from.”
When new head coach Robert Vilahamn arrived at Tottenham last summer, he liked the threat of Naz’s pace during pre-season but she did not score. With captain Bethany England recovering from hip surgery, the club opted to sign Scotland international Martha Thomas from Manchester United as their No 9.
At the start of the season, Naz had some injury niggles too, continued to be unreliable in front of goal, lacked self-confidence, according to Vilahamn, and dropped to the bench. Naz did not complain, kept her head down and has now started the past six WSL games. “You can see she has the power in her eyes that she wants to play,” Vilahamn says.
When Naz’s finishing is clinical, as demonstrated against Leicester City in the FA Cup semi-finals last month, Vilahamn believes she is one of his best players because her “X factor is so good”, adding: “You don’t get self-confidence from her because she’s quite calm but you can see it in her eyes, she’s expressing herself with the football instead of words.”
As Naz’s self-belief grows, she is starting to express herself in different ways, whether that be speaking up in team meetings with one-liners that get everyone laughing or pulling out her “stirring-the-pot” goal celebration. A former dancer who now takes to TikTok with her siblings, she first came up with the move when the accompanying music came on during an England youth camp. “When everything’s right, you just stir the pot: finishing, timing, placement,” she smiles.
@jessnaz SKEUU SKEUU #foryou #foryoupage #fyp #skeuskeu ♬ original sound – Jess Naz
Naz is also quietly asserting her authority: in the recent 2-2 draw away to Manchester United, team captain England played a long pass on the ground and Naz told her, in a respectful but demanding way, that she wanted the ball hit over the top.
Communication is an area Naz has been working on. “I used to be mute in games,” she says. “You have to get to a point where you’re comfortable talking to players and them not taking it the wrong way. The environment we’re in now, we can all challenge each other.”
Vilahamn has nourished that culture and his team will need to demand the highest standards of one another in Sunday’s final.
“We’re creating so much history,” Naz says. “I would never have thought I would get to this point. I just knuckled down and then good things come from that.”
But don’t be fooled by Naz’s seemingly shy nature.
“She doesn’t like losing,” says Blackwood. “She’s a winner down to her core.”
(Top photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC)
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