Weeks after leaving her post as manager of Aston Villa, Carla Ward took a holiday with her five-year-old daughter Hartley and it was then that she had the realisation. Afterwards, she caught up with Emma Hayes, the Chelsea turned USWNT manager who, having left the Women’s Super League this summer, can empathise with the push and pull of a coaching career at the elite club level. “I was saying: ‘I spent the holiday with Hartley, rather than on the phone 24/7,’” Ward says. “For managers, it’s relentless, the summer. I needed a real mental and physical break. I’m getting that now.”
Ward was the WSL’s second high-profile loss at the end of last season, leaving without the fanfare that accompanied Hayes’ exit but with no less valuable a lesson to share. Hayes’ final few months in post were marked by exhaustion and warnings that the game had to change somehow if it wanted to keep mothers in management. Ward, too, had found her burgeoning managerial career was coming at a cost to her mental wellbeing and personal life.
Over the past six years, 40-year-old Ward established herself as not only an impressive coach but a credible, forthright voice and spokesperson for the game. Making her name at Sheffield United, where she led the team to second in the Championship, Ward won wider recognition and acclaim for steering a crisis-ridden Birmingham City to safety in 2021 before transforming Aston Villa to the best of the rest and home of WSL Golden Boot winner Rachel Daly.
But the price has been hours and days away from Hartley, and the physical and emotional toll of spinning too many plates.
“You do what you do to give your kids the best possible chance in life,” Ward says. “I almost gave up my life to be able to give her a life. But then, at the same time, you have to start questioning: you do what you do, but then you don’t actually see or spend time with her.”
At Christmas, Hartley began asking Ward when they would see each other and when they could do things together. Ward says the pair have an “unbelievable relationship” but this was the reality of leaving for work at 5am to return at 11pm or sometimes two days later. There were missed school shows, missed school trips. The breaking point came one Friday when Hartley asked if she had to go to school the next day.
“No, baby — it’s Saturday,” Ward replied. ‘”She said: ‘ Well — are you off?’ I said no. She said: ‘When am I going to spend the day with you?’ And it broke…” Ward pauses, briefly. “Yeah. I literally had tears inside me. I was trying not to cry because she’s a five-year-old wanting her mum. Your heart breaks and you think, I want to be a better mum. It was the most difficult couple of months, certainly, of my professional career and my personal life.
“It got to a point where I was thinking, can I walk away from this, and prioritise that time with her? Everyone says kids grow up so fast, you never get that time back and it haunts you. I spent many, many nights in tears. I spent many nights questioning myself. Am I doing the right thing? The conversations were ongoing for months and months and months. It becomes difficult because I just couldn’t do both.
“I knew I had to make a decision when we were winning. Is this because we’ve lost a few games? Was it because there were a lot of things going on around me? But my mind didn’t change. It really was what I believed it was, and it was about the fact I wanted to spend more time with my daughter.”
Emma Hayes, Carla Ward and daughter Hartley pictured in 2022 (Joe Prior/Visionhaus via Getty Images)
Ward is anxious that none of this comes across as complaining. She reiterates that she always felt “very, very, very lucky” to work in football and fully anticipates she will remain in the game. Rather, she is speaking to The Athletic because she has always been the kind of manager to wear her heart on her sleeve and she sees this as a vital issue for the greater good of the developing sport. She is hopeful the game can take something from her experiences, that they will help more coaches with young families in a still-developing league (the average age of a WSL manager last season was 43).
The bottom line is that two mothers have recently left the WSL for the same reason. The women’s game is in its brightest era but with increased eyeballs come more pressing demands on those inside the bubble. Its template is the vastly different men’s Premier League. Broadly speaking, women’s football has borrowed its structures and working patterns from those dictated by male managers; yet typically women take on far more of the emotional labour in families and across society. Women’s teams operate with fewer staff, lower wages and smaller budgets. It is a more nuanced picture.
Ward adds that the Villa CEO Christian Purslow “supported me more than anyone would ever realise” as she worked through the mum guilt and the breakdown of her 14-year relationship. “My life was coming down around me while I was still trying to manage,” she says. “That was tough, but I had the complete support of the club when results dropped. That (form) was a reflection, maybe, of where I was at. But they supported me. They looked after me. I don’t know if other clubs do. Not everybody gets that opportunity and that support. I think it’s really important clubs do start to support them and look at the bigger picture: people with kids, people with families at home. We know it’s a results business, but then it has to be reflected with, if not support, certainly watertight contracts or pay increases.
“You have to have a good agent who makes sure your contract’s watertight — that if you do get the sack, you’re looked after.
“As the game grows, the pressures grow. You’re only two or three games away from getting the sack at any given point, at any club. That’s just the reality. Women’s football is changing in the right way, but at the same time, there has to be a level of support for managers. If you’re a male manager and you get sacked, then financially you’re very well looked after. The women’s game isn’t there yet financially, so there has to be some leverage in terms of the pressures.”
Ward left Villa on her own terms — “on one side, it’s harder because you’ve got such good relationships with the players, the board, the fans; it feels like it’s family” — and found some closure in knowing she left them with “strong foundations, an unbelievable squad and an infrastructure off the pitch that just wasn’t there when I first came in”.
She worked for every gain. Her alarm would go off at 5.15am and she would leave at 5.30am to collect her assistant manager, Leanne Hall, from Rotherham. She would arrive at the training ground at 7.30am for staff meetings at 8.15am and a team meeting at 10am. The rest of the day would be a blur of pitch sessions, gym sessions, meetings. Early on, she made deals with the several staff members with kids. “If they committed to staying late on the Tuesday — which would be the night I would usually stay down, because sometimes I’d still be working at 11pm at night — and get everything ticked off for the week, we would let people leave a decent time on Wednesday to go back to pick up the kids from school,” Ward says. “That was my one day where I could get back and pick Hartley up.”
The work followed Ward home. She estimates she would speak to her director of football “up to 50 times a day. There’s never a time where you can switch off. You have to be accessible 24/7. That is the reality. If you’re talking to players, it might be around clips, performance, their everyday struggles”.
She added: “You have to be a mum to these players. With the staff, you might be talking analysis, tactics, acquisition. With the director of football, it might be recruitment, board level, a million and one things. With the board, you might be speaking to them about what you might need in the window, what you might need on the training ground, what you might want for the players. You might talk to commercial, marketing, HR. You have to constantly have communication with all these people. You finally get home — it might be one day, two days later — and you’re absolutely exhausted, but you’ve got to walk in, turn your mum hat on and be mum straight away.”
She reflects now that the strain of fighting for better over eight years might have stacked up more than she realised. During Ward’s spell at Birmingham, players wrote a letter to the board outlining their concerns over facilities, medical support and travel. The club survived relegation under Ward, but she resigned after the final game of the season, having left Sheffield United the previous season amid similar concerns over the direction of the women’s team.
“You’re constantly having to fight, constantly having to get more for the players, constantly having to try to build relationships with everyone at the club to try to welcome the women in,” Ward reflects. “My mentor says working at a million miles an hour is my strong point. But it can also be my weak point, because you can burn out. I think it got to a point after eight years where I realised I needed a real mental and physical break.”
Ward and Hayes’ departures mean there will be just three permanent female managers in the WSL next term. That is dispiriting for Ward, who has benefitted from Hayes’ mentorship “because ultimately she feels strongly about helping females”. Hayes’ view, expressed after Chelsea’s 8-0 win over Bristol City in May, was that female coaches would continue to leave women’s football unless their wellbeing became a priority. “If you’re a parent, forget about it,” she said. Hayes’ suggestion was for husband and wife-style co-coaching teams.
“Do I believe co-coaching is the way forward? Yes,” Ward says now. “Not just for females. If I go back into a club, I would probably consider speaking about that model because I think it would be important. It gives the players two people: a manager who picks a team and looks after them as people, then a head coach who looks after the philosophy, the playing style. I could see that happening. I really could.”
And she will be back — of that she is certain. She has a successful enough CV. “When? I’m not sure — but I’ll be back.”
(Top photo: Neville Williams/Aston Villa FC via Getty Images)
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