Abby Dahlkemper’s introduction to the Women’s Super League has been rapid. The January transfer of the US World Cup-winning centre-back to Manchester City happened swiftly. “I wasn’t expecting it,” she says. “But when the opportunity came, I couldn’t pass it up.”
Having played in a 4-0 defeat of West Ham and 2-1 win at Arsenal, she is preparing for a first Manchester derby and the team are helping to ready her. “I definitely get a sense of just how much history and competitiveness there is between the two clubs,” she says. “I can definitely tell that there’s a really rich tradition.”
The 27-year-old joins compatriots Sam Mewis and Rose Lavelle at City and will face the team of their international teammates Tobin Heath and Christen Press on Friday. “I haven’t had much contact with them before this game,” she says with a grin. After a topsy-turvy week at the top of the WSL, in which the leaders Chelsea lost against Brighton and Manchester United were beaten at home by Reading, the momentum is with City. The hosts sit two points behind United and five behind Chelsea with a game in hand on each.
“We heard the results after the game [against Arsenal] and we were really excited,” says Dahlkemper. “We just have to control what we can control, and that’s our performance for each game. It’s a very exciting and unpredictable title race.”
Dahlkemper’s arrival in Manchester marks another key moment in the development of the WSL. She follows other players such as Heather O’Reilly and Carli Lloyd in choosing to play in England. However, Dahlkemper is the first signed to a long-term deal, due to keep her at City for two and a half years. It bucks the trend of short stints in Europe, but the centre-back thrives off being pushed out of her comfort zone.
Growing up in a sports-focused family, she was about six or seven when she started playing football. Her mum, Susan, played basketball until she started a family (she had Abby at 23) and her dad, Andrew, played football and ran track. One of her two brothers plays lacrosse at a Division 1 college in North Carolina.
“I’d like to say I was pretty decent at basketball and volleyball,” says Dahlkemper, who swapped from forward to centre-back at 17. “But not in comparison to football. I feel like I just was this different animal on the field, really aggressive, wanting the ball all the time, wanting to score.”
Despite the supportive start and winning a national championship at college, it has not always been plain sailing. She was captain of the US Under-17s who failed to qualify for the World Cup after losing on penalties to Canada and, more seriously, in 2016 a “very very painful” sepsis foot infection threatened her career.
“I definitely had doubts about whether I would come back the same player; if I would be able to kind of adjust to the way that my foot or my toe recovered from the infection and having surgery on it,” she says. “Injuries are a part of sports and it was a scary one, but luckily and thankfully, it worked out in my favour. It was definitely really humbling and hard to get back from that.”
It instilled the attitude that inspired her to move across the world during a pandemic. “I just roll with the punches and like finding the good in everything. Everyone is suffering from this pandemic in different ways. It’s important to really stay on top of your mental and physical health, be adaptable and try to make good out of something that’s been really tough on the world.”
The setbacks have made the successes sweeter. “Every athlete struggles with adversity at some point in their career and life; every person in their life struggles with adversity. Being able to achieve a childhood dream of mine and then being able to literally win the World Cup was just … kind of indescribable.”
In 2019, at her first World Cup, Dahlkemper was the only outfield player to start every match, playing all but eight minutes. The backline had been considered the weakest part of the team, but they conceded only three times. “It definitely got us riled up. But we were so hyper-focused on the task at hand and we had spent so much time and practice together that, I think going into the World Cup, we weren’t really worried about what people were saying. More so it was just about doing our job.”
Now she hopes she can help bring the US team’s fabled “winning mentality” to City. “Winning is a part of the women’s national team DNA, to win at all costs. That’s been formulated years ago and it’s always stuck in the culture and identity of the team. To be able to be on the national team and stay there, you have to adapt to the culture and identity and buy into that. So it’s nice that me, Sam and Rose are able to kind of bring things that we’ve learned here.”
