“Do you want to play for your country?” Emma Hayes asked Jess Carter. It was the summer of 2019: two years since Carter’s form as an exciting teenager at Birmingham City had won her a single England cap and, later, a move to Chelsea. But in between times the young defender had lost her way a little. Her first season had gone badly. And her manager had had enough.
“I do, but not now,” Carter replied. “I’m not ready for it.”
“Why did you come to Chelsea?” Hayes asked.
“To get there.”
“But what are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want you to show every fucking day that you give a fuck about yourself,” Hayes said eventually. “It’s up to you to decide your future. It’s up to you to decide what your outcome is at Chelsea.”
And for a long time it felt like that would be Carter’s story in English football: a tale of squandered talent and unfulfilled potential, a gifted athlete who perhaps didn’t quite want it enough. Certainly the prospect of representing England in a World Cup final in four years’ time seemed remote. Even so, Hayes was not quite ready to cash in her chips just yet. Which is why her firm rebuke was actually an opportunity in disguise. “I paid a lot of money for you,” Hayes told her. “If you don’t improve, I’m selling you.”
Everyone knew about the talent. Carter was only 16 years old when she made her Birmingham debut in a Champions League quarter-final in 2014, winning the player of the match award. A few years later, she was named young player of the year for her sparkling displays in the Women’s Super League. International recognition and a big move followed. But as soon as she arrived at Chelsea, the problems began.
Carter’s difficult early spell at Chelsea is chronicled in the Dazn documentary One Team, One Dream. Indeed, she is one of the main characters in the show, an irresistible mix of bravado and vulnerability, a young woman trapped between the urge to feel good and the urge to do good. She was frequently late for training. Club staff consistently warned that she was missing fitness targets. And when they bawled Carter would react, recoil, retreat into a sulk. This was not the carefree, hedonistic lifestyle she had enjoyed at Birmingham. This was not the game she signed up for. “When people are on my back because I’m not good enough, I get even more pissed off,” she admits.
Hayes and her staff set in motion a plan to get Carter’s career back on track. They decided that she needed a certain micromanagement, particularly with regard to her diet. “The only thing I’ve ever enjoyed is food that’s not good for you,” she confesses – and to ram the point home the producers show us shots of her chomping on a slice of pizza after a game, or craving a bar of chocolate. “Why would you eat seeds?” she puzzles in one scene, peering disapprovingly into a tub of Alpro. “It completely ruins the yoghurt.”
But the ruthless new head of performance, Bart Caubergh, was not a man to brook excuses. Carter was put on a personalised nutrition plan, every meal, snack and swig laid out for her in advance, right down to telling her when it was time to take an Omega-3 supplement. They made her send pictures of the meals she cooked at home with her partner, the goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger.
On the training field, they began to work on her mentality. “Jess, you pass but don’t speak,” Caubergh told her. “Give something extra. Give direction to the pass. Ask where you want to have the ball.” In the warm-up she was encouraged to lead, to stand at the front of the group instead of sulking at the back. “Fuck off Bart,” was her reaction. “You’ve just come in here, you don’t know me, you don’t know what my work-rate is.”
And there has always been a healthy rebellious streak to Carter, a natural distrust of authority that perhaps stems from having an alcoholic mother who abandoned her when she was a baby. From an early age Carter was determined to live life by her own rules and to her own tempo: laid-back, cheeky, self-deprecating, irreverent. And for all the benefits she began to reap from her new regime – better sleep, better focus, more energy in training – by the end of the 2019-20 season she was still minded to leave Chelsea in search of more game time.
But a knee injury to Maren Mjelde gave her an opening and a run in the side. It was Carter’s cross for Pernille Harder against Bayern Munich that helped Chelsea into the Champions League final for the first time. She ended 2021 as a treble winner and an England player once again, as Sarina Wiegman recognised her exceptional reading of the game, her one-on-one skills, her ability to play both at centre-half and right-back.
Carter played a small role in the Euro 2022 win and, after beginning this World Cup at centre-half, lost her place for the 1-0 win against Denmark. But it was the switch to a back three – a system Carter knew well from her time with Hayes at Chelsea – that offered her a route to glory. And quietly she has been one of England’s revelatory players at this tournament: calm in possession, largely error-free and with a swelling collection of star forwards in her pocket from Linda Caicedo to Sam Kerr. Her desperate goalline clearance against Australia, instinctively flicking the ball away with Emily van Egmond about to pounce, was one of the pivotal moments of the semi-final.
What seems clear now is that Carter had always craved success, but perhaps lacked the confidence to commit fully to it. For a player who had always seen football as a form of escapism, Hayes was probably the ideal coach to shoo her out of her comfort zone and its easy temptations, to reassure her that there was no shame in coming up short if you gave everything. And that indeed, in a ruthless and increasingly professional game, it was the only true path to a sustainable career.
“If you sleepwalk your way through life, you won’t survive,” Hayes says at one point. “Complacency, the mother of all devils, creeps in, and then it’s goodnight.” And when Carter, now 25, steps out into the cool Sydney night to play the biggest match of her life, a World Cup final against Spain, it will be the crowning achievement for a skilful defender and a complex personality who learned – just in time – how to give herself completely to the game.
