Steph Houghton’s 10 years at Man City – the defining moments in her own words

Manchester City Women’s Steph Houghton will retire as a player this summer, but not before ticking off a few more milestones.

Saturday marked 10 years since her FA Cup debut for City, and today (Wednesday) is 10 years since her first Women’s Super League (WSL) appearance for them. It has been a productive spell, yielding one WSL title, three FA Cups and four League Cups.

To celebrate the anniversary, The Athletic asked Houghton and the coach to whom she gave her peak years, Nick Cushing, to look back at her decade with the club, inspired by a series of pictures we showed them.

The launch day for the reformed Manchester City Women drew media from across the world as they announced their intention to become the WSL’s first ‘superclub’. Rumours abounded of £80,000 annual salaries and 16 pitches at the £250million (now $314m) City Football Academy facility — headline-worthy numbers in an era when Arsenal, the league’s best at that time, had to wait in a nearby Starbucks for their male counterparts to finish training before they could begin.

Their wishlist included Houghton, a two-time WSL winner with Arsenal, and Everton midfielder Jill Scott. Houghton and Scott had known each other since they were “nine or 10” and at Sunderland’s centre of excellence, Houghton says, when Scott was already “as tall as she is now”. They made their first-team debuts and moved through the England age groups together.

“We always said we wanted to be on the same club team together, apart from Sunderland,” Houghton says. “There was a chance I could have done that when she went to Everton, but I chose to go to Arsenal.” Years later, Houghton heard on the grapevine that City were interested in making Scott their first professional signing. “There were rumours about Jill. I asked, ‘What are you doing?’, and she was like, ‘Well, what are you doing?’, and I was like, ‘OK. You tell me if you’re going…’.”

She trails off, chuckling. “You have such a good relationship that you know what each other is thinking. Those three, four years with Toni Duggan, Izzy Christiansen, Jill and Karen Bardsley — for us to play a massive part in the title-winning season made those years special. Jill is not just a good person, but she was unbelievable for City as someone who brought energy and could drive the team forward. What I love about her is that no matter what she’s done, where in the world she is, she’ll always check in and meet up for coffee. And that’s when you know they’re good people.”

Moving to City was a risky proposition for Houghton, and not only because so many of the women’s teams that had previously promised full-time football and heavy investment had quickly disappeared.

As Arsenal captain, Houghton was well-regarded at the most decorated women’s team in the country and had her sights set on getting back into the England team. When she travelled to Manchester to see what would become the City Football Academy (CFA), she had to wear a hard hat and hi-vis jacket because most of it was still under construction. Arsenal only trained a couple of times a week, in the evenings, with Houghton and other centrally-contracted national team players topping up their training programmes by cobbling together their own regimens at home. Moving to City, Houghton recalls, was the only way to “live my life like a footballer”.

“It did take a while for us to make the decision to move to City,” Houghton says. “Once I heard about the idea, it was like I knew I had to move now or I was never going to get that opportunity again. The first year was like a rollercoaster. Everything was new for everybody, always wanting to be the best and setting the standard. In the beginning, we probably didn’t get that right with the coaches and the players we had.”

Initially, only five players — Houghton, Scott, Duggan, Bardsley, Christiansen and New Zealand international Betsy Hassett — were fully professional. “We would train in the morning and then wait for everybody to finish work at night-time, which was pretty crazy,” Houghton says. “We did that for about four or five months.”

The City Football Academy that City Women would eventually call home was still a year away from completion. City’s five professional players trained at Platt Lane each morning, with the men’s youth sides, before meeting the part-time players retained from the old Manchester City Ladies team at Wright Robinson College in south Manchester for 7-9pm training three to four nights a week.

Cushing, who had worked for the boys’ academy for six years, was 28 when he was appointed head coach. City started with a win over Reading in the FA Cup but a four-game losing streak, including a defeat by second-division Doncaster Belles in the Continental League Cup group stage, checked their momentum. It left Cushing pacing his living room until the small hours as he questioned whether he was cut out for it all. What made it worse was that the newly formed City had replaced the Belles in the top flight amid a wider league restructure.

“That was a really, really turbulent evening for the support staff and as the head coach, trying to keep the team together because of the differences we had in the two groups,” Cushing says. “It was two different worlds for the players. The professionals had a really polished environment, and the training intensity and standard were that of a Premier League under-18s or under-23s team. But then in the evening, when we pulled the team together, it was the opposite. There were no changing rooms. The physio room was a cupboard within the school. To go from one world to another was really difficult mentally for the senior international players.

“We had, probably, a disparity in the group. We had one group of players who were really professional, really experienced, and another group trying to catch up quickly.”

The solution was to make them all professional. Bardsley, Scott and Houghton were Cushing’s life rafts when City, he says, were “consistently losing games when the media and women’s football world had put so much expectation on us”. That trio did not dismiss him as a young head coach who was out of his depth, and never shot back that they were sold a dream but living a nightmare.

“I bought in straightaway,” Houghton says. “After that first run of games, you’re thinking, ‘Did I make the right decision?’. Slowly, over that year, we established ourselves as a team that was going somewhere.”

“To retain the focus, loyalty and commitment of the international players, it was all down to players like Steph and Jill,” Cushing continues. “Their experience and that leadership meant it didn’t go in the opposite direction and they didn’t give up. That was the moment I realised how special Steph was, as a character, a person and a leader.

“There was a lot of expectation on our team — the launch, the press, the way we did it, the team we were. And there were a lot of teething issues. Steph played a real leadership role instead of complaining, or splintering and fracturing in those moments. She could have developed a character of, ‘Well, I was sold a different story…’ — but she didn’t. She played a huge part in embracing what it was, in fixing areas, leading the players who hadn’t been professional.

“We often say when we get together that those first months were so turbulent that they could have taken us two ways: they could have completely fractured us or brought us all together.”

Houghton found her faith vindicated when, in October 2014, City played their first cup final, beating Arsenal 1-0 to win the Continental Cup at Wycombe Wanderers’ Adams Park.

Manchester City’s Continental Cup victory in 2014 was a landmark moment for the club (Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

“I loved that day,” Houghton says. “We stayed down the night before, all went out for dinner and we were never, ever expected to win. We were such underdogs.”

Arsenal, with Houghton featuring, had won all three editions of that competition until City came along. Houghton would win the trophy for a fourth successive season, this time as part of a side fielding a 16-year-old Keira Walsh up against legends Kelly Smith and Rachel Yankey. “I remember the goal so clearly: Krystle Johnston getting the ball on the right and Izzy Christiansen getting a header at the back towards the middle of the goal,” she says. “We practised that move so many times. To win the first trophy for the club just showed we were ready to compete, ready to enjoy winning some more.”

“It was a real catalyst,” Cushing adds. “I don’t think there was any relief; by almost absorbing all of the negative moments and the pressure, rolling with the punches, we developed a real fearless way — ‘Throw whatever you can at us’.

“Winning it energised us. It made us hungry, almost addicted to winning and wanting it again. And that’s why we came out so strong in 2015.”

Houghton and her husband, the former Liverpool, Bradford City and Bolton Wanderers defender Stephen Darby, have a cabinet each for their medals in one of their spare rooms at home; Houghton received hers as a Christmas present one year. Cushing keeps his in the family den in the basement of his house in New York, where he is now manager of MLS side New York City, alongside photos of his children Harry, Frankie and Heidi at the FA Cup finals he managed in, a signed England cap from Houghton and Scott’s shirt from her 100th Manchester City game.

There have been other mementoes. Among the most iconic was the October 2014 issue of UK football magazine Shoot, which featured Houghton as the publication’s first female cover star. She had been interviewed by Shoot but did not know until two days before the edition with the article in hit newsstands that she was on the front page. Inevitably, female footballers hold the dual responsibility of excelling on the field and growing the game beyond it.

“Those players had a lot of experience and big moments in their career, so they built up the ability to tolerate a lot of pressure,” says Cushing. “I always offered them support. I never felt like the players needed it, but we spoke about it a lot. That professionalism and behaviour meant we didn’t have to worry about whether it was going to take a toll on them.”

By the time City won their first Women’s FA Cup in 2017, with a 4-1 win over Birmingham City, Houghton had become a household name, having been the England captain who led the team to a bronze medal at the World Cup in Canada two years earlier. In 2013, a 14-year-old Georgia Stanway had donned her Blackburn Rovers centre of excellence sweatshirt and spent FA Cup final day queuing for a photo with Houghton. Four years later, Houghton flung champagne in Stanway’s face out of the bowl of the FA Cup as they celebrated victory as City team-mates.

Houghton, Stanway and their team-mates celebrate at Wembley in 2017 (Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)

“If you know Georgia, she probably deserved it,” Houghton says, laughing at the memory. Another future Manchester City and England team-mate, Ellie Roebuck, confessed she was starstruck when she first began to train with Houghton as a teenager; she had been a GCSE student staying up past her bedtime to watch England’s third-placed finish at Canada 2015.

“Knowing what it’s like to come into a new environment when you are young, it’s important you involve them, guide them, but also treat them as normal people,” Houghton says. “That’s important. When you’ve had that experience yourself, you wouldn’t want to let anybody not try to be themselves in this environment. That game really topped off our performances over the season.”

“She was such a good captain because she could put any hat on, always play the role needed in the moment,” Cushing says. “There were many moments when she was the big sister to them. She could be hard on them and she could pull them into line. She could put expectations on them: performance, standards, behaviour, focus. The real marker of whether you are a good leader is the respect that those players show you, whether you’re hard on them, soft on them, showing them love, helping them with detail. I’m sure those players hated her at times and loved her at times but they definitely had respect for her in every moment.”

Houghton influenced City’s younger guard in other ways, too.

“It was actually Steph who scouted Jess Park,” reveals Cushing. “She went to a school tournament with her agent from the PFA. Steph was giving out the trophy for the winners of the tournament. When she came back, she actually said to me, ‘There’s a player there that we need to sign. There is a player who is good enough to play in our first team now. She’d absolutely dominated the tournament. She was the best player by a mile’.”

They tracked Park down through the England youth setup and invited her and a schoolteacher to the CFA.

“I wouldn’t have known who Jess Park was,” Cushing says of a player who is now a senior England international.

By Cushing’s admission, he would have liked to have taken another league title from Emma Hayes, the Chelsea manager, with he and Houghton having done so just once. Houghton has finished as a runner-up in the WSL six times at City, each one painful but especially so in 2015 when they finished two points behind Hayes’ Chelsea in a race that went to the season’s final day. In the aftermath, Houghton gave a speech to the remaining supporters at City’s Academy Stadium.

Houghton addressed the fans after missing out on the league title in 2015 (Dave Thompson – The FA via Getty Images)

“Most of it (the speech) was saying we knew the intention was always to win the league that year, but I remember saying we’d qualified for the Champions League for the first time,” says Houghton. “That was maybe not realistic in 2014, but it certainly was that year. It was a pretty special moment for the club, considering where we’d come from: we were a brand new team, we had people who were invested and we kept adding quality players, such as Demi Stokes and Lucy Bronze. We wanted to keep bringing the best players and to compete at the highest level. We were making a squad that was hard to beat.

“You put on a little bit of a front because you’re the leader. Nick would have done the same. I don’t like to lose, but you’ve got to put stuff in perspective.

“Those who signed in 2014 were in it for the long haul. That was what I always reminded myself: if we stick around, keep doing the things we’re doing and the club still buys into us, then the good times will come.”

There were darker moments, too, when Houghton had to represent the city of Manchester in a different way.

After the bombing at Manchester Arena that killed 23 people in 2017, Houghton, a captain of one of the city’s two football clubs, led the tributes at the following Manchester City Women’s game, receiving flowers from visitors Arsenal’s Alex Scott.

Houghton and Scott in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing (Jan Kruger – The FA via Getty Images)

“That was a massive shock for everybody, not just in Manchester but throughout the country,” Houghton says. “Never should anybody experience that. From being in Manchester for three years, it felt like home. So many lives were lost. Having that connection with our fans and people that may be affected, it’s important you represent the city as much as possible — not just as a footballer, but as a person.”

Cushing spent seven years in charge of City Women (Charlotte Tattersall/Getty Images)

When City won the WSL in 2016, they went unbeaten and conceded just four goals in their 16 league games. It came from “all the years of talking and sitting down in coffee shops and going through everything and bringing in good people,” Houghton explains. “Karen Bardsley is really, really logical and will think of things that I would never think about and the what-if? scenarios. Jill is probably a bit of a mix of both: she can be emotional, but also logical. I’m probably a little bit ‘reacting to emotions’.

“It’s good that we could all have those feelings, but Nick would be the one that would bring us all back together. I learned so much about how to be good with people, to know it doesn’t have to be serious all the time and how to bring the best out in others. He was always thinking about football, and when your manager is like that, you want to repay him.”

Houghton will be faced with different kinds of finals in the coming weeks: her final training session, her final team meeting, her final WSL game and, possibly, a final title.

Manchester City Women have demonstrated they are capable without her on the pitch but have never known a time without her behind the scenes; Cushing points out that through the TV coverage he watches in the U.S., he can often make out Houghton giving instructions on the sidelines. City have worked to develop her as a coach.

Cushing says he would not be averse to working with her again in the future. Even her critics — or those who were indifferent to her omissions from recent England squads — must concede there is something about a player who, at club level, has been able to keep up with the game’s leading internationals season after season after season.

Maybe Cushing said it best: since City’s inception, Houghton has been “the heartbeat, the real engine room of the team”.

(Top photo: Eddie Keogh – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)