Big Gloves To Fill: Is Goalie Hannah Hampton The Lionesses' Answer To Winning The Euros?
Hannah Hampton was never meant to be a goalkeeper. She was born with a squint and, from a young age, had numerous operations on her eyes under the care of Birmingham Children's Hospital, where the 24-year-old is now proudly an ambassador.
Some procedures were terrifying. She remembers waking up from one with her eyes still glued shut; they remained that way for the next four hours. The doctors who tried to fix her eyesight, which still isn't fully corrected and affects her ability to judge distances, told her parents that she would never be a fighter pilot, a brain surgeon or a professional sports player. How wrong they were.
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Defying expectations is just one of Hannah Hampton's many skills. 'I've gone through life proving people wrong,' she tells me when we meet a few days after she lifted the Women's Super League trophy for Chelsea: her second WSL win in two years, and a victory that was helped by her impeccable run of 18 games without conceding a goal. The team partied on the King's Road – Hampton snuck out at 10pm for ice-cream – and the next night she was awarded the Barclays Women's Super League Golden Glove, with her dad as her guest. 'You could just see the smile on his face – from ear to ear,' she says. It didn't stop there.
Hampton went on to win the FA Cup Final with Chelsea in front of 74,000 fans. As the domestic season winds down, Hampton has also been Sarina Wiegman's first-choice goalkeeper for the Lionesses in the lead-up to the Euros this summer. Now that Mary Earps, who helped the team secure their European victory in 2022 and become World Cup finalists the following year, has stepped down Hampton is set to be England's number one.
There's suddenly a lot to play for, but Hampton is surprisingly humble and laid-back, happily doing keepie-uppies while wearing a tartan Burberry shirt and kilt for the ELLE shoot in sweltering 26-degree heat, or spinning a ball about in an empty goal – 'me natural habitat', she jokes in her Brummie accent. With the stakes higher than ever, Hampton admits that she has started to get more nervous ahead of big games. 'I'm normally quite steady, but there have been moments this season where I had much more anxiety than I've ever experienced,' she says, explaining that she'll assuage her ner- ves by texting friends or asking Millie Bright (Chelsea Women's captain) to take her mind off the situation by telling her a funny story or getting her to dance. 'It shifts the focus to going out onto the pitch to enjoy playing like you did as a little girl.'
As the women's game opens up at all levels and attracts more attention, with the number of players and match attendance rocketing after the success of the Lionesses – a 2024 survey by the FA showed that the number of women and girls playing foot- ball has increased by 56% in the past four years, while WSL attendances are up 239% since 2021 – it's fitting that the memory of playing as a youngster is something that Hampton holds on to. 'As a young girl, growing up and having the difficulties everyone has coming through school – with friendships, bullying – football was an escape,' she says. 'You make friends who understand you in a different way, who have the same interests and want the same outcomes in life.' You only have to watch a couple of Bright's TikToks to get an idea of how much dancing goes on in the dressing room: 'It's carnage,' says Hampton, who's the one on the pre-game aux, blasting out '2s n 3s' by LeoStayTrill and Clean Bandit.
But there's another reason Hampton was never meant to be a goalkeeper: she always loved running fast and came to the game as a striker. When she was five, her parents, both teachers, moved the family from Birmingham to Villarreal, north of Valencia in Spain. While Hampton had to wait for her parents to finish up their meetings after school – 'it was a nightmare' – she would play football outside. Shortly after arriving, she was scouted by a professional Villarreal footballer who was doing the school run. What does she think he saw in her? 'I was very fast, and I would always use both feet from the beginning,' she says. 'It was weird, because my parents said I just understood football – no one in the family had ever taught me.' She was invited to trial for the Villarreal youth team: 'I went in full West Brom kit, and a day later I got a call saying, 'We want you in the club.'''
Aged 11, Hampton moved back to the UK and went to the Centre of Excellence at Stoke City Football Club, where she played outfield. Before one of the games, the keeper got injured and Hampton thought it would be fun to stand in for her. An England scout happened to be watching the match and, afterwards, told her coach they wanted her as their goalkeeper. At 12, she became the youngest player to play for England Under-15s. She made her Lioness debut in 2022 against Spain, and played for Birmingham and Aston Villa before moving to Chelsea, whose manager Sonia Bompastor says Hampton 'fits perfectly into my game model. She brings a lot of confidence to the squad with her composure on the ball'.
For Hampton, there are still several barriers that need to be broken down in women's football 'to make it easy for the next generation to play, push the game to another level and help try to minimise the scrutiny that you get from fans comparing the men's and women's game'. She says that there are far more allies in men's football than people expect: 'It's going in the right direction for sure, but obviously things can always be better.' At the last World Cup, Spain's victory was tainted during the medal ceremony when forward Jenni Hermoso was forcibly kissed on the lips by Luis Rubiales, the then head of the Spanish football federation.
'You're looking at the other side of that now,' says Hampton when I ask what she thought of the incident. 'She won the case.' Earlier this year, Rubiales was found guilty of sexual assault and fined almost £10,000. 'It shows that women are starting to have more power, not just in football but in society in general,' she adds. 'What Spain accomplished in that World Cup was incredible. For it to be dampened by that situation was hard to see, and hard for Jenni, but you then had the whole international football community gather around and support however they could.'
Up until four years ago, football was an escape that Hampton had always loved. Things changed dramatically when she was 20 and playing for Aston Villa – 'It shifted into something completely different' – and her career almost ended before it had really had the chance to take off. Around that time, a story surfaced in the media suggesting that Hampton had been dropped from the England squad and Villa games because of 'attitude problems', claiming that it was unlikely she would be selected again under Wiegman.
'Media scrutiny gets to you more than you realise,' says Hampton. 'At a young age, I was likely exposed to more of it than most people are in their entire career, and I wasn't ready.' She says the stories were untrue, but she wanted to call it quits: 'It was harder to find that fight in me to prove people wrong, but somehow I managed it. I had all my friends and my fam- ily around me at the time to guide me in the right direction and keep me going. It's worked out for the best – I've got a lot to thank them for.'
It's clearly a period that still weighs on Hampton's mind, and one that forced her to grow up quickly – it's easy to forget she's still only in her early twenties. She ensures she stays positive off the pitch by doing things she loves outside of football. On her rare days off, she'll cycle to Richmond Park, close to where she lives, on her road bike. As you might expect, Hampton's casual cycling trip isn't any ordinary ride: 'I get myself in trouble sometimes with the coaches at Chelsea because I go too far or too fast… There have been times when I've done 64km.' She's also a whizz at languages, taking Italian lessons every week with her teacher Paolo, and has made it her mission to learn conversational phra- ses in every tongue spoken in the Chelsea team, from Norwegian to Japanese: 'I could see how happy it made people when I spoke their language.'
The more time I spend with Hampton, the stranger I find the story about her attitude problem. She strikes me as kind and warm-hearted, something that Bright confirms: 'As a person, she's so caring and loving – she would do anything for any- one. She's someone who you want to have around.' With her clean sheets this season, and her steely reserve and focus, Hampton is also a player who fans will want in goal for the Lionesses this summer. As Bompastor tells me: 'She has all the qualities to become the best goalkeeper in the world.' Does she feel additional pressure going into the Euros? 'There's pressure on everyone… It's going to be more competitive than anything [we've experienced before]. We know that if we can prepare ourselves the right way, then we can put on a good show for everyone – that's what we're aiming for.' Another perfect opportunity for Hannah Hampton to exceed expectations.
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