‘Guten Tag. Wie geht’s?” “Sehr gut, und dir?” At which point, Georgia Stanway and I have pretty much exhausted our meagre supply of German. It’s not entirely our fault: as any Brit living in Germany will tell you, it is virtually impossible to learn the local language when everyone is intent on chattering away at you in English. Since moving to Bayern Munich last summer Stanway has been taking weekly lessons, but admits she’s “still waiting for that click”. The coach, Alexander Straus, conducts his team meetings in English. The training ground instructions are in English. The WhatsApp group is in English. Mercifully, so is the rest of this interview.
Still, for a Barrow girl there are times when Munich feels a long way from home. Beans on toast is one example: you can buy baked beans in Germany, but somehow they don’t taste the same to her. The 24-year-old misses her family and friends, even though they do their best to visit. She broke up with her boyfriend because of the difficulties of maintaining a long-distance relationship, even if they’ve stayed on friendly terms. But as she puts it: “I’m quite an independent person. I like my own space.” Besides, she has important work to do.
Bayern may be giants of the men’s game, but in women’s football they have won comparatively little. In leaving Manchester City, then, Stanway was stepping well out of her comfort zone: into the challenge of a new country, the test of a new league, the burden that comes with being a marquee foreign signing, the responsibility of dictating big games. Games such as the Champions League quarter-final against Arsenal on Tuesday.
Ominously for Arsenal, Stanway’s adaptation on the pitch has been a good deal smoother than her adaptation off it. Already this season she has scored seven goals from central midfield, forging a formidable partnership with Sarah Zadrazil, playing a starring role in a 3-1 deconstruction of Barcelona. “I’ve settled quicker than I’ve expected,” she says. “I’ve improved a lot quicker than I expected as well.”
If there was a flashbulb moment in all this, then it came in late October. After a slow start in the Bundesliga and a defeat by title rivals Wolfsburg, Bayern travelled to Benfica in the Champions League. Stanway still hadn’t scored a goal for her new club. On a warm night in Lisbon, they went 2-0 down after an hour. Stanway remembers: “We’re all looking at each other thinking ‘here we go again’.”
Maxi Rall pulled a goal back. But with seven minutes remaining, Bayern were still behind. At which point, Stanway got the ball in the Benfica half and started running into space. Sound familiar? This is perhaps the signature Stanway move: the point at which she sees the gap, breaks the chains, and just goes. Three months earlier, against Spain at Euro 2022, she saw a similar gap and won the game in extra time. Here, 20 yards out, she let fly with her left foot and buried a low shot into the corner. Then in the eighth minute of injury time, she scored an almost identical goal with her right foot. Neither Bayern nor Stanway have looked back since.
What goes through her mind in these moments? Is it a hero complex, a kind of extreme clarity? “I think it’s just intuition,” she says. “You suddenly make a decision and back yourself. I’m a person that doesn’t have any regrets on the field. If I have a shot, I have a shot. I’m not too bothered. Jill Scott instilled that in me at City. Everything you do, you do with full intent. I want to prove myself. I want to showcase every single aspect of me as a person and a player. And in those moments, I can be special.”
We talk a little more about what she and Bayern are trying to build together, not so much a praxis as a mentality. Wolfsburg are currently the dominant team in Germany, with five of the last six titles. They have reached five Champions League finals to Bayern’s none. So what comes first, the winning mentality or the winning? How do Bayern take that final step?
“There’s a very fine line between us and Wolfsburg,” Stanway argues. “They seem to edge it. Not really sure why. If you’re constantly getting beat by the same team, there’s always that block. But it’s one of them where, if we can beat Wolfsburg, the tables will turn. The mentality can flip. At times we need to be nastier. That’s something I say to the girls a lot. Sometimes we’re a little bit too nice to each other, a bit too nice with the opposition.” This may be an opportune moment to point out that Stanway already has seven yellow cards this season.
For now it is Arsenal in their crosshairs, and a reunion with old friends: Leah Williamson, Lotte Wubben-Moy and the injured Beth Mead, with whom she shared the ride of a lifetime with England last summer. Since the draw was made last month there have been friendly greetings shared, dinner plans made. “Hopefully they can stay after the game and I can show them a little bit of the city,” Stanway says. What is Williamson like to play against? “Nasty,” Stanway replies immediately. “You don’t want to be on her bad side. But I love her to bits and she’s one of my closest friends.”
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And so we come to the European Championship: the white elephant in the room, the thing that everyone remembers but is also desperate not to dwell on. There have been books, documentaries, retrospectives. The whole thing has been memorialised so efficiently that the actual memories are hard to discern. Does she ever get tired of being asked about it? “No,” she says. “You don’t get tired of it. But it’s difficult. You don’t really have time to reflect because you’re on to the next thing. If there was anything I would tell myself in that moment, it’s to try and be more present. Make the most of those days.”
Over the years I’ve talked to athletes who achieved great things and then felt almost nothing afterwards: who reached the pinnacle and didn’t know how to feel about it. Did this happen to her? Stanway thinks for a moment. “Because the biggest high of your life, you almost experience a comedown,” she says. “You experience different things at different times. I was fortunate not to experience it straight away because I was moving to Bayern, it was something new, it was exciting. So I probably experienced mine a little bit later, maybe over the Christmas period. You’ve just got to dig a little bit deeper to find that motivation.”
But no longer. There is a World Cup coming this summer, reputations to make and defend, a chance to make new history with a new team. The games against Arsenal will show us just how far Bayern have come; the duels with Kim Little and Lia Wälti will give Stanway an idea of her own progress. These are the sorts of challenges Stanway signed up for, the tests she has always craved. “It’s a difficult one,” she says finally. “But it’s also the most exciting.”
