Sunday’s Women’s European Championship final doesn’t need any hyping up. England, Germany, at Wembley, in what has become the biggest women’s football tournament of all time – the reasons for excitement are plain. But there is one further factor that shouldn’t be neglected: a shootout for the Golden Boot.
Beth Mead of England and Germany’s Alexandra Popp go into the final with six goals each in the tournament. Headers, howitzers, placed finishes and poaches, they have found every type of way to hit the net. Wolfsburg’s Popp has scored in every match, a record for the championship, while Mead has done so against every team bar Spain. Both have also shown real leadership when their teams have needed it. Now one has the chance to steal the accolade of tournament top scorer from the other.
Australia’s and Arsenal’s Steph Catley has as much experience of facing up to Mead as anyone. On the training pitch and at international level, the left-back has dealt with the forward up close. “There’s many reasons why she scores so many goals,” Catley says of Mead, “but I think from playing against her it’s the fact she’s just constantly on the move. She’s moving, she’s looking where she can get the ball, how she can get in behind a player or in front, and she’s making selfless runs for other players which puts her in positions where on the second ball she’s able to score.”
The instinct of being in the right place is something natural, according to Catley, but it is augmented by an approach characterised by desire. “Mentally she knows where she needs to be but she also has the work rate, which means she’s always going to get into the right position,” Catley says. “When the ball’s transitioning she’s the first with her head down sprinting towards goal, trying to get in a position where she can score. I think it’s that ruthlessness and wanting always to score that puts her above the rest and in the right positions.”
Catley believes, off the pitch, Mead wears her commitment to excellence lightly. “The best thing about her is that when she is off the field she is so warm and welcoming,” she says. “She is such a happy person, such a positive person, and I think that reflects on to the field because she doesn’t take anything too seriously. I think when she’s playing you can see that she’s having fun and the stuff that she does is creative. That positivity really comes out when she’s playing, and when she’s having a good time playing, she’s scoring.”
This combination of determination, technical ability and a lightness of approach is borne out in what Catley considers to be Mead’s trademark move: the chop. “There’s a few moments I can think of that she does repetitively but I think the main one is where everybody thinks she’s going to shoot and then she just chops,” Catley says. “She’s so calm and composed that it looks like she’s got an hour on the ball, and she just calmly slots the ball into the net. It’s one of the hardest things to do in football but she does it so convincingly. And she does it often.”
Mead and Popp have already come into contact this season, in the first leg of Arsenal’s Champions League quarter-final with Wolfsburg in March. In a 1-1 draw at the Emirates with numerous chances for both sides, Mead and Popp lined up against each other down Arsenal’s right side. Mead was an influential presence in the game, Popp quieter – still feeling her way back into form – but both showed the strength and versatility of their game, drifting in from the flanks with or without the ball to create trouble in the box. Both were booked for late challenges, and Popp’s was on Mead herself.
With the German captain now spearheading her side, the players will not be direct opponents on Sunday, but stats from Opta show that both have been playing an expansive game during this tournament. They share touch maps that show a presence on both flanks as well as down the middle (though Mead’s strongest area is on the right side). Their shot maps, too, are similar. Mead has taken 15 shots to Popp’s 17, but both players have scored most of their goals and taken most of their shots in the area between the penalty spot and six-yard box. This is the optimum place for a striker to shoot from, and – in the manner explained by Catley – they have managed to find it after darting in from outside. See Mead’s goal against Sweden and Popp’s second against France – a dominant header – for proof.
Popp struck an impossibly cool figure as she drifted through the mixed zone after the semi-final win in Milton Keynes. Players can often look harried after a match, or desperately eye their phone to avoid being questioned, but Popp seemed to almost be drifting above all the hubbub, showing the same calm as she does in front of goal. This is her, and one of the reasons why she has proven so valuable to Germany in this tournament, but it is all the more impressive given she is set to realise a goal she has been denied almost cruelly to this point.
“It’s an incredible story,” is how Popp described it herself. “I can’t put it into words: we’re in the final against England and it doesn’t get any better than that.” Germany’s captain has won two Champions Leagues, seven league titles, 11 cups and Olympic Gold, has been a world champion at Under-17 and Under-20 level, played at three World Cups and in nearly 20 finals, but even she hadn’t experienced a moment quite like this.
If Germany weren’t supposed to make the final of the 2022 Euros, Popp wasn’t supposed to make the Euros at all. But then, as her national coach, Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, says: “She always gets up again and again; she comes back from every crisis even stronger.”
Aged 31, Popp has played 119 games for Germany and scored 59 goals. But until this summer she had never been to a European Championship. She missed out in 2013 with an ankle injury and 2017 with a knee injury and had the current competition gone ahead as planned last summer, she would have missed that too because of a potentially career-ending cartilage injury. After spending this season recovering her strength and sharpness, she got Covid three weeks from the start of the Euros.
On the opening night, she was a substitute. But she came on and scored against Denmark. Once she had started she couldn’t stop. Every game, there was a goal and, on Wednesday, there were two to take Germany into the final. “It’s unbelievable what Poppy is doing,” said her teammate Lena Oberdorf.
“I had the feeling people had written me off,” Popp admitted after the Denmark game. Voss-Tecklenburg was not one of them; she knew. She had been the striker’s coach when Popp joined FCR Duisburg 14 years ago. She could certainly play, that was for clear from the start. She could also fight. Listen to Voss-Tecklenburg and her teammates talk about Popp and it’s as much about temperament as talent.
Growing up in the Ruhr Valley, Popp had only played with boys – women’s football would not be good enough for her, she thought – until she was 16, but she earned a place on the federation’s Berger Feld elite facility in Gelsenkirchen at 17, the only female there. The grant was not big and the money was given to keep her family afloat after her father’s butchers went under.
When Wolfsburg came for her, Ralf Kellermann, the sporting director, had arranged a job for her but there was no way she was going to sit around in an office. An animal lover – she has an Australian Shepherd called Patch – she did a three-and-a-half-year zookeeper’s qualification, working at Essehof zoo. There were lessons for football there, she said: in animal behaviour, solidarity, the pack as a workforce. It provided an escape too, the monkey cage a release.
The goals kept going in, any which way: a relentlessness about her. Over and over again. The medals rolled in with them. Which isn’t to say she always won: sent off, she watched as Wolfsburg let slip a lead that cost them the 2018 Champions League trophy against Lyon, who she had turned down to join Duisburg. The cup wins, played on the same day and in the same stadium as the men’s finals, carried a significance perhaps even greater than the league titles. A first Germany goal came 12 years ago and she’s not finished yet.
The injuries have not derailed her. Popp recounts the story of driving to Berlin for a test on her injured knee last year, never imagining she would fail, only for that to be what happened. She cried all the way home again. And then returned to work, more determined than ever before, telling herself over and over: “You absolutely must go to the Euros. It wouldn’t be me if I said: ‘Well, that’s it. I’ll just have to accept it.’ What I accept is the fight.”
And it was one thing to get fit, getting in the team was another, for club and country. When she dived in to score a header against Denmark, she slipped to her knees, put her head down and hit the turf with her hands. It had actually happened.
Turns out, that was just the start too. Turns out, it was better this way. “I’m enjoying these experiences a lot more: I like football even more than I did before,” Popp said after the semi-final. “It doesn’t mean I didn’t like football then. But now I appreciate the moments on the pitch more and that makes it very special to be here. Having the opportunity to perform like this and being fully fit at this stage makes me very proud.
“I’ve become very dangerous, like I was in the past, but that hadn’t been the case for a while because I was injured. It’s thanks to the team. I’ve never experienced team spirit like this and they’re just great: they have my back and they are happy with me after my whole story of suffering.
“This means a lot to me. You saw it in the goal but also in the previous games: I’m more emotional than I used to be. That’s because I know what it has taken for me to arrive at this point.”
