Georgia Stanway was one of England’s brightest stars at Euro 2022, her finest moment coming in the quarter-final against Spain when she blasted a long-range drive into the top corner early in extra-time to win the game and send the Lionesses roaring into the semis.
Like international teammates Keira Walsh and Ella Toone, the girl from Barrow-in-Furness, now 24, progressed through the Blackburn Rovers youth set up before ending up at Manchester City, for whom she played 109 times between 2015 and 2022, scoring 39 goals and winning the PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year award for the 2018/19 season.
Like Walsh and Lucy Bronze, she has since left the Barclay’s Women’s Super League to test herself at one of the European superclubs – in their case Barcelona, in her’s Bayern Munich.
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Winning the Frauen-Bundesliga in her debut season, the already reliably-cheery Stanway has since told The Guardian that the move has made her “so much more open”.
“I went to a country where no one knew me and I could be whoever I wanted to be,” she said. “No one was going to judge me. I’ve developed so much. I was never the most sociable person but in a new environment I’ve wanted to go out for tea every night. In Germany, I’ve wanted to see people.”
Stanway says the move to Bavaria has forced her to be more independent, seek help when necessary and emboldened her to become more of a leader on the pitch, although she admits that, like Walsh in Catalonia, she has struggled to learn the language.
