At the start of every season, England and Bayern Munich midfielder Georgia Stanway writes down her goals. “Off the pitch, my focus has been getting comfortable spending time on my own,” she tells The Athletic.
Stanway has just won back-to-back Frauen Bundesliga titles with Bayern having moved there from Manchester City in 2022. Her initial move to Germany was “all exciting”, she says. “You’re meeting people all the time, family and friends come to visit, blah, blah. By the second season, everything calms down a little bit, everybody thinks you’re OK on your own, nobody really asks you if you’re actually alright.
“The second year for me was (about) getting comfortable with spending time on my own. I found that good. Now I hate people coming round to my apartment because they’re going to mess it up and I hate washing up after people. Maybe next year it’s finding the balance between the two.”
Balance on and off the field, from timing tackles to tattooing, is key to how the 25-year-old from Barrow-in-Furness lives her life. Having made her debut for City at the age of 16 and England at the age of 19, it is easy to forget how young the midfielder still is but as she analyses footage of her performances with The Athletic, the maturity of her responses is striking.
We start with one of her most famous goals: the extra-time winner against Spain in the 2022 European Championship quarter-finals. Stanway has time and space, she allows the ball to roll across her body, takes one touch, then another and unleashes a 22-yard rocket with her right foot.
“I just decide to take the space,” she explains. “I wanted to travel forward as fast as I could with the ball. Spain’s defenders made the decision for me because nobody engaged.” Stanway thought about slipping the ball to Alessia Russo to her left or Lauren Hemp to her right but the centre-back’s positioning in “no man’s land” allowed her space.
“They (the centre-back and full-back) were already travelling to the winger. If a centre-back had come towards me then I would have played the winger. The gap between the two centre-backs is exactly where I hit the ball. It was nice the goalkeeper took a step to the left because that opened up the opposite side of the goal.”
Stanway says her power does not come from any particular gym work. “It’s a lot on technique and how I was taught to pass and shoot. At City, there was a massive emphasis on wrapping the ball in making sure that you’re challenging the player you’re passing to. It was always about how hard you could hit the ball across the floor because the ball moves faster than people.”
Her midfield partner Keira Walsh makes the pass, and that relationship has been cultivated since their time at Blackburn Rovers’ academy and Manchester City. “We both know what to expect from each other,” she says. “Keira does her thing and I do mine. We interact the most when we’re on the back foot, when we can’t quite get a grip of something or haven’t got the upper hand on the opponent.”
That interaction is very subtle. “We just give each other the look and the look is either we need to sort this out or it’s a laugh or a smile, depending on the feeling of the game. If we nearly concede or score, then I can look at Keira and we’re both like (Stanway puffs out her cheeks). It’s just a sign. It might not even be any information — it’s just a look.”
Despite taking fewer shots over the last three domestic seasons (53, 48 and 39 respectively), Stanway is still partial to a long-range effort. Looking at her shot map from last season, two-thirds of her 39 shots came outside of the penalty area but the likelihood of them going in was low (0.09 xG/shot).
Her longest-range goal, however, came from the centre circle in a 3-0 win against Werder Bremen in April.
“I’ve watched this too many times on repeat,” she smiles. In the 95th minute, Stanway spots the goalkeeper off her line and hits an audacious lob…
☄️ It’s Georgia Stanway’s turn to catch Peng out of goal and to send one from far out, making it 3-0 for Bayern!
Available in selected territories. #DieLiga#NewDealforWomensFootball pic.twitter.com/YJNSbvNxoI
— DAZN Football (@DAZNFootball) April 22, 2024
Bayern had spoken about the goalkeeper holding a high line in or out of possession in their pre-match analysis. “She almost acts as the middle centre-back,” says Stanway. “When the ball turns over, you would expect the goalkeeper to track back as fast as possible. There were a few moments in the game where the goalkeeper wasn’t doing that. I’d noticed it the whole game.
“I could have played my winger or No 9 in, but the goalkeeper was too high. It just felt right to shoot from distance and I’m happy to have executed it. I almost chip it. I want a little bit of backspin so as the ball bounces it comes back on itself rather than propels forward.”
Stanway goes to celebrate with her team-mate Jovana Damnjanovic who scored a very similar goal earlier in the second half. “I said, ‘I win’ because I thought mine was further back than hers, but I actually think they’re pretty much perfect and in line with each other.”
It was a commanding performance that helped Bayern on their way to win their third league title in four years. For Stanway, it signalled the power was shifting away from Wolfsburg who have won the domestic competition seven times since 2012. After Bayern’s 4-0 victory over their rivals in March, the first time they had beaten Wolfsburg away from home in 16 years, Stanway told her team “the tables are turning”.
“I want the girls to believe that,” the 2023 Ballon d’Or nominee says. “This is Bayern, and this is exactly where we’re meant to be and where we want to go. The year I came to Bayern, everything was Wolfsburg. They got the furthest in the Champions League, they always won the league, they were the team you wanted to beat.”
Stanway recalls the first time she played Wolfsburg away in her maiden season in Germany. “There was a lot of fear, a lot of nerves, a different atmosphere in the changing room,” she says.
Stanway and Bayern lost 2-1 at Wolfsburg in October 2022 (Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)
“This year it felt different, the overall vibe and emotion. I wanted the girls to realise that now’s the time to keep pushing. I don’t want the girls to forget that because we’ve not only beaten them 1-0 or 2-0, we beat them 4-0. I want the girls to realise there’s so much talent, we want Wolfsburg to fear us, Frankfurt to fear us, we want other teams to look at Bayern and think, ‘I don’t want to play them’.”
Stanway, who left the Women’s Super League two years ago, believes the competitiveness of England and Germany’s leagues are “on par” with one another although she says the WSL has perhaps grown since she played there.
“I want to be outside the league,” she says. “I love that I’m in Germany, away from everything and can just play my football. German teams in general are very structured, tactically driven, robust and strong as individuals. It’s really difficult to break teams down. Sometimes when you score one then the floodgates open, but sometimes they don’t. Every game is completely different. It’s like the WSL in that any team can take points off one another.”
Bayern faced Arsenal in the Champions League quarter-finals in March 2023. “I remember this,” she says. “As soon as you said Arsenal, I knew which one.”
In the first minute of the game, Stanway fairly dispossesses Lia Walti with a sliding tackle. Both players go to ground but Stanway gets to her feet and drives into space, creating an overload. “There’s always that little bit more fire inside you playing against an English team. I just wanted to be on fire from the first minute. That means tackle hard, pass hard, try and influence the game as much as possible. This is a strength of mine but also a weakness. I need to be able to control it in the right areas. In the first minute of the game, that’s good because it’s a statement. It shows we want to be on the front foot.”
The timing of such a tackle is key. A trigger point for Stanway is when the opponent does not have full control of the ball. “The ball is about 30cm away from Lia Walti, that gives me the perfect opportunity to take it. Tackling in general is just intuition; you just have that feeling when you should go. You also know when you’re too late or early. As soon as you make that decision, you know straight away whether it’s going to be a good or bad choice.”
As she referenced herself, Stanway’s crunching challenges can be her biggest strength but also her biggest weakness. In her first season with Bayern she picked up the joint second highest number of yellow cards (eight) whereas last season, she received six.
“I’ve got way better over the last 12 months,” she says. “Last year was a little bit different — I was coming to a new league, new referees, I’ve already got a target on my back because the referees know I’m a player that likes to get stuck in. They give me no room for error. Everything I did was always seen as a negative. If I’ve already got that reputation, then it’s also hard to lose that reputation. But hopefully one day I will.
“I feel like referees are engaging more with me in conversation. Those things are important because it allows you to get the balance and control. I have so much control on the ball, but I need to get that control off the ball to be better defensively. As soon as I go to ground or I move too early, I’m potentially out of the game and I’m leaving my defenders with the hard work to do.”
In England’s first game of the 2023 World Cup, Stanway was awarded a yellow card but played the whole tournament without being cautioned further. That was, in her words, “a big achievement”. “I proved a lot of people wrong,” she says. “I proved I can be sensible and that I have got a brain sometimes.”
Stanway’s brain was certainly ticking when she had to retake a penalty in England’s first group stage game at last year’s World Cup against Haiti. Her first attempt was saved but VAR showed the goalkeeper had stepped off her line early.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Fair play, keeper’s outdone me’. It was a great save. I had a lot of power in the shot.” But Stanway had a second chance. When she steps up again, she stares intently at the ball. It is part of her process that “gets her in the mood”.
Stanway ‘gets in the mood’ by staring down the ball (FIFA)
“I can’t tell you my process because I’m giving it away to the opposition,” she smiles. “I just take as long as I need. There’s absolutely no rush.” The Lionesses took on the same learnings as the men’s team following the Football Association’s dedicated research on penalty shootouts.
“There’s a prime time,” Stanway continues. “As soon as the whistle goes, you have to remember it’s on your time, when you’re ready. You can dictate the next few seconds, whatever you need to get in the right headspace.”
Stanway concentrates on cancelling out the noise and activity around her when taking penalties. Indeed she has been practising at her club with crowd noise blasted out from speakers. “There’s loads of different things to consider: where’s the ball, the goalkeeper, is the goalkeeper wasting time, are there people surrounding the penalty area? At the same time, my focus is on the ball and my team-mates will deal with everything that’s around me.”
Stanway’s primary focus is execution. “At Bayern, I tell the keeper where I’m going to go so that even though she knows, can I still put it in a place where she’s not going to be able to reach it? Everybody naturally has a stronger side. A lot of things may be dictated by the goalkeeper. If they make a decision early then it should be easier to find the space.”
Moments after her penalty being saved, Stanway steps up again, but how did she decide whether to go the same way or change it up? “I just backed what I’d been practising. In that moment, the right thing was to find that corner and just hit it as hard as possible to try and give the goalkeeper less of a chance.” Stanway went the same way, to the goalkeeper’s left, and kicked off England’s World Cup campaign with a winning start.
Stanway speaks with her mentor Luke Chadwick, a former Manchester United academy graduate, every week to review not only her games but life too. Reflecting on last season, she says she hit a lot of her football targets. Her biggest struggle came in December, however, where she felt extremely fatigued.
“It was just off the back of the World Cup, I played a lot of games, Champions League and it was just a lot for me,” she says. “He (Luke) was there when I needed him. Coming back in January after the Christmas break, I almost put too much pressure on myself because I knew I wasn’t at my best in December because I was tired. I needed to switch off from football and (have) some family time.” Stanway recharged the batteries in December but her first game back in January was, in her words, “terrible”.
Stanway reacts to Bayern’s UEFA Women’s Champions League defeat at Ajax in December (ANP/Getty Images)
“That was like a catastrophe. Everything I thought I needed in order for my game to be fixed, I got. That hit me hard.” Stanway used her individual development plan to process her thoughts. “I just needed to knuckle down and sort myself out,” she says in typical Stanway fashion. “The next game I had a great game.”
Striking the right balance is hard, but Stanway has found her escapism by mastering the art of tattooing. “At the start of the year, I wanted the distraction from football, I wanted the balance,” she says. “I found that in tattooing. I find it really therapeutic, just my opportunity to switch off.” Team-mates such as Carolin Simon and her brother have trusted her with the needle.
“If the girls offer up, that’s massive because it shows they’re willing to trust me. They also know that if something was to go wrong, then it’s a story rather than a mistake.”
It sums up how Stanway approaches her life. She’s not afraid to push herself outside of her comfort zone on or off the pitch and with that attitude she will certainly have plenty more stories to ink in years to come.
