With Ella Toone and Grace Clinton leading their respective Manchester clubs into a title race in the WSL, how has player development evolved over time in the women’s football pyramid? And what still needs to change as clubs look to optimise facilities for elite female athletes?

“We didn’t have a girls’ team,”

The Lionesses’ triumphs and increased exposure have had a dramatic impact on the outlook for budding young footballers nationwide, but it wasn’t long ago that this answer, from Ian Gregory, Head of PE at Fred Longworth School in Tyldsley, was commonplace.

The difference for Gregory was simple; he had a special talent on his hands.

Ella Toone’s rise has been meteoric, Blackburn’s Academy, to Manchester City, to a rejuvenated Manchester United women’s outfit, but her start in football was hardly routine.

“She mithered me and the other teachers constantly about setting up a girls’ team,” Gregory reflected.

“She was like a dog with a bone.”

Pretty soon after, Fred Longworth relented, and Toone’s talent was telling.

“She did everything, winning tackles taking throw-ins, corners,” Gregory said.

“She kept our team alive.”

With United’s senior outfit disbanded in 2005, and City hyper-focused on their growing men’s project, Toone signed for Blackburn Rovers in the hope of pursuing her dreams of a career in senior football.

All the while, she continued to push herself and the school to the limit.

FA rules state that mixed football cannot continue past the age of 15, or Under 16 level, but Gregory admitted Toone’s desire for football was insatiable, and with a lack of girls’ teams to compete against, she looked elsewhere for competition.

“She was not happy when she was told she wouldn’t be allowed to play,” he said

“So through family support petitioning the school, she just kept playing, all the way through to Year 11 (aged 16),”

Toone’s early years in football reflected a game which supported minimal ambition.

Even the Women’s Super League, the top division of women’s football in which Toone now plays, did not turn fully professional until the 2018/19 season.

Her move to City on a dual registration basis from Blackburn in 2016 was a logical next step to a chance at being a professional.

Simon Verry, who facilitated Toone’s development at City alongside others as Head of Elite Athlete Co-Ordinator at Carmel College, reflected on how youth player development has changed over time.

“We couldn’t focus our girl’s program solely on a career in football like we did with the boys” Verry said.

“By the time of retirement, they wouldn’t necessarily have had the resources to stop working or take up another career in women’s football- they needed a career to fall back on,”

Resources remain the biggest point of difference between male and female football development, even at the top level, and this is something that continues to the present day.

“Male scholars have access to an education program sponsored by the Premier League,”

“Our female scholars don’t have an equivalent.”

Toone’s journey to professional football was being a pioneer, a trendsetter who helped to carve a superstar football career that didn’t exist before. Verry acknowledges that the environment was different by the time he taught at-that-time Everton academy starlet Grace Clinton.

Already well known to coaches up and down the country by the time she arrived at Carmel aged 14, Clinton’s route to being professional was far more focused than Toone’s, even considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For Ella (Toone) it was about using her feisty personality,” he said.

“By the time I was working with Grace (Clinton) there was a more visible route,”

There is no sense here that Verry was looking to downplay the toughness required by Clinton to make it to the top level, but there is a sense that she had her eyes on a pathway that was far more established that the one taken by Toone.

“Grace was single minded,” Verry said.

“She was totally focused on football, to the point where her studies took second priority.”

Success quickly followed.

Clinton has since signed for Manchester United from Everton, had two successful loan spells at Bristol City and Tottenham, and now signed for league leaders Manchester City in the summer of 2025, after securing the Euros with the Lionesses in Switzerland.

So what has the landscape shift been?

Simply put, the region has been moved away from the decentralised FA model of Centres of Excellence, and towards a better managed system of academies at top level clubs.

Manchester City’s investment in a state-of-the-art 17,000-square-foot, £10 million facility for their women’s team on the Etihad Complex has shown ambition.

However, whilst it is certainly easier to picture a pathway into professional sport for budding women’s footballers, there are teething problems.

Take Manchester City’s record investment, for example, one criticism is that it fails to address core concerns about female-specific facilities.

Speaking to Dr Ella Tagliavini, the current Fulham Ladies centre back who captained Toone at England Youth level, she shares some of those concerns.

She reflected on what the key shortcomings were around top female clubs coupled to elite men’s facilities:

“The obvious answer is sanitary products and specialised club doctors who know how to maximise our performance when we are going through the menstrual cycle,” she said

“But also it’s important to monitor how we treat these top-level athletes when they are on maternity leave. Not just retaining their jobs but also thinking about longer term impacts.”

“Like how we tailor the way we return these women into football.”

Manchester City have not confirmed whether they will provide such facilities to female players, or whether they might go one step further, like Kansas City in the National Women’s Soccer League.

A premier club in the US, they have recently opened a $17 million revamped training facility complete with childcare facilities, gynaecological treatment centres and high-performance nutrition.

Progression in women’s football here in Manchester cannot be understated, but it is not so long ago that Manchester United’s embryonic women’s team, containing Toone and Clinton, were training out of portacabins at United’s Carrington base.

“How can teams develop new waves of talent in the women’s game if they don’t prioritise the team?” Tagliavini said.

“Clubs are moving at such different speeds, it can be frustrating.”

Ultimately, the change in environment from Toone to Clinton is overwhelmingly positive. England’s Euros success in 2022 has opened a professional pathway for women’s players and the increase in fan attention has forced football’s conglomerates like United and City to sit up and take notice.

That does not mean perfection, and there are still questions to be answered by Manchester’s elite on exactly how they will tailor development to female athletes.

Advocates for women’s football must press home those stepping stones that can help create elite, sustainable women’s football to ensure Manchester remains a hotbed of talent.