England
From plus one to runaway favourite. If there was any risk of England’s Beth Mead getting carried away with her golden boot-winning and player of the tournament heroics as the Lionesses won a first major trophy at the Euros in the summer, then it was quickly stomped on in October.
The forward was photographed at the Ballon d’Or awards ceremony alongside her partner, her Arsenal teammate Vivianne Miedema, and the caption on the image read: “Vivianne Miedema and a guest”. That “guest”, who laughed off the error, would go on to finish as runner-up to Barcelona’s Alexia Putellas for the international award after a stellar year, but the miscaptioning spoke to just how rapid a rise Mead’s has been on the global stage.
The 27-year-old has become the first female football player, and just the sixth footballer (after Bobby Moore, Paul Gascoigne, Michael Owen, David Beckham and Ryan Giggs), to win BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
It is deserved, but it is also bittersweet, because, when Mead went up on stage to collect the trophy, she did so with a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament injury that has probably ended her season and destroyed any hope of carrying her form for England into the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand in July. Her “guest” on the night, Miedema, shared that journey after rupturing the ACL in her left knee in Arsenal’s 1-0 defeat to Lyon, less than a month after Mead suffered hers in a 3-2 loss to Manchester United.
Mead, though, is used to fighting back stronger. The Whitby-born player’s phenomenal 2022 – in which she scored the most goals and created the most assists and chances at the Euros, after creating 64 chances for Arsenal in the calendar year and finishing the season as the fans’ player of the season and the WSL all-time leader in assists – came after the bitter disappointment at being omitted from the Team GB squad for the Olympics.
Mead scored twice in Arsenal’s 3-2 defeat of Chelsea on the opening day of the new season after being left out of the squad for Tokyo and she didn’t look back. After her third hat-trick for England in six months, following the arrival of the new England manager, Sarina Wiegman, Mead said her confidence had been restored and that she had “channelled my disappointment in the correct way”.
Mead’s talent has been long known by those that have watched the women’s game. She was recruited by Arsenal in 2017 after she scored 77 goals in 78 games for Sunderland. In her first season with the Black Cats, she finished as the National League top scorer with 23 goals in 23 games as Sunderland won the league and the FA Women’s Premier League Cup.
