Wales women head for Euro 2025 wanting to scale heights and leave legacy

The Guardian

11 hours ago

The rain cascading down on the Vale of Glamorgan is so heavy, so incessant, that the hotel's reception has run out of umbrellas for guests to borrow and frustrated golfers crowd the lobby. Only two sets of residents seem oblivious to the weather; those heading to the spa and the Wales Women squad. It is late May and with Rhian Wilkinson's players flying to Switzerland for Euro 2025 at the end of June far too much is at stake for anyone wearing a national tracksuit to be at a loose end.
Charlie Estcourt has travelled to the sprawling Vale Resort from the United States where she plays for Washington's DC Power, but the midfielder is not about to succumb to jet lag. Instead, she is focused on impressing Wilkinson as the team trains at the Welsh's FA's centre of excellence within the hotel's verdant grounds. 'We have a no-excuses culture now,' says Estcourt. 'It's something Rhian's brought in and it's really helped us get to the next level.'
That change enabled Wales to qualify for their first major tournament while opening a window to social change. 'A really big thing for us as a collective is that we want to leave a legacy for Welsh women,' says Estcourt. 'To create the sort of opportunities for girls growing up in Wales today that we never had.'
The squad's Euro 2025 slogan is 'For us. For them. For her'. They are entering a formidable group containing England, France and the Netherlands motivated by a desire to reach the knockout phase for not just themselves and their families but every aspiring female footballer in Wales.
'We're want to show how empowering women's football can be,' says Estcourt, speaking with the assured fluency of having completed a sports broadcasting degree. 'One of the most amazing things about the game is all the people you meet, the places you visit, the connections you make. So we're trying to do our bit to grow women's football here. We go out to schools and when you talk to the young girls in their replica kits they're so excited. We don't want them to lose that feeling.'
To place this in context, it is only recently that Wales Women acquired parity with the men's team in terms of not merely equal pay but training facilities and support staff. The squad did not acquire their first full-time manager until 2010 and wore shirts with numbers but no names on the back until 2019. Dave Adams, the Football Association of Wales's technical director, says 'We're doing a lot of catch up. You'd hope your daughter would be afforded the same opportunities as your son.'
In Wilkinson's case, the personal and the political are inseparable. Although the Wales head coach was born and brought up in Quebec her mother is Welsh and her late father was English. Between 1989 and 1991, the family relocated from Montreal to their beloved south Wales. Y Bont Faen primary school in Cowbridge is six miles from the Vale Resort, but it is where the move soured when it barred Wilkinson and her sister from playing football, a sport they had enjoyed in Canada.
Although her parents, in Wilkinson's words, 'went into battle for us and took on the governors' only minimal changes were made and the family, reluctantly, returned to Quebec because the girls 'weren't going to get the same opportunities here'.
For Wilkinson, that parental sacrifice paid dividends in the form of 183 caps for Canada, two Olympic bronze medals and the foundation of a coaching career that peaked in 2022 when Portland Thorns won the US's National Women's Soccer League title.
It also dictates that she views the Wales job as more akin to a crusade than a mere entry on a CV that briefly became clouded when she and a senior Portland player informed the club they shared a mutual attraction but had done nothing inappropriate. Although an investigation cleared the manager of any wrongdoing while exonerating her conduct, Wilkinson resigned during a sanctimonious social media storm.
'I was completely vindicated, but I was very hurt. I was made an example of,' she said when becoming Wales coach in February 2024. 'It was very public and very painful. Safeguarding is critical but when anyone's investigated people assume they've done something wrong because there's so much wrongdoing in sport.'
Returning to Wales has proved restorative. 'This is a special team,' she says. 'They're strong and don't quit on each other. I've never been prouder. But my arrival maybe came just at the right time to ask these players to do things that in the past they weren't ready for.'
After a morning on the training pitches, her squad return to the Vale Resort for lunch before disappearing into a series of conference suites repurposed as video analysis studios and media rooms. When Jess Fishlock emerges from one meeting and walks down a staircase into a public lounge a couple of guests sitting in the lobby quietly nudge each other.
Fishlock remains the team's most recognisable face and her enduring presence is at the centre of preparations for Switzerland where she is convinced Wales will escape their group of death.
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At 38, the Seattle Reign midfielder remains world-class, with her on-field partnerships alongside the Wales captain, Angharad James, a Reign teammate, and the former Chelsea enforcer Sophie Ingle key to shocking Europe's elite. 'Jess is so important,' says Estcourt. 'She's so experienced, so knowledgable. On the pitch she's invaluable; she controls the tempo, she brings goals, she brings assists. She also brings that calm head when things get a bit chaotic.'
Wales arrive in Switzerland as the lowest-ranked team but they rarely lose games by more than a single goal and are awkward opponents. 'We're used to being underdogs, but we're not going to the Euros to make up numbers,' says Estcourt.
'We've shown we can compete. Rhian's made us very adaptable; we can change our style depending on who we're playing and we understand all the different systems so well. We're such a tight-knit group. We chat all the time; that closeness definitely pushes us on.'
Fast forward one month to 9am last Thursday and it seemed fitting that Wilkinson named her final 23-strong squad on the summit of Yr Wyddfa, or Snowdon. While her staff and media ascended by a tourist mini railway the Wales coach marched up in 90 minutes.
Significantly, the squad's meeting and dining rooms at the Vale Resort are routinely studded with pictures of the Welsh mountain superimposed with the team badge and a fixture list. The former Real Betis defender Rhiannon Roberts explains that as Euro 25 qualifying games were ticked off the badge was regularly re-pinned on its climb towards the summit.
If some of the squad were sceptical when Wilkinson introduced the Yr Wyddfa metaphor after taking charge, they are now looking forward to images of a Himalayan peak at the training camp on Portugal's Algarve and, then, their Swiss tournament base near Lake Constance.
'The mountain was used as a theme because qualifying was always going to be an uphill battle, with setbacks,' says Wilkinson who has also introduced a mental performance coach and invited the Wales men's manager, Craig Bellamy, to address her players.
In recognition of the scale of the challenge ahead, the squad's Swiss base is every bit as high end as any occupied by Bellamy's players. A luxury hotel has been block-booked by the FAW and a purpose-built training ground media centre constructed along with a new gym and freshly laid pitches.
As Estcourt reiterates, there are no excuses for underachievement. 'We're so inspired by what Wales men did in reaching the semi finals of Euro 2016,' she says. 'They also went as underdogs and I think we might surprise a few people too.'