Simone Magill got her shooting boots on as soon as the WSL2 season started – scoring twice in the opening quarter of an hour as Birmingham City romped to a 5-1 win over Bristol City.
The Northern Ireland captain had finished last season in good form, so was pleased to be back on target from the off.
“As a striker, you want to get off the mark as soon as you can, and to get not even just one, but two, so quickly, that’s exactly what I wanted to get off to, as far as the first game was concerned,” she tells SheKicks.net. “For us to go and score as many as we did, I think that was a really good start for us in the first game.”
She adds: “The biggest thing that I wanted to do was pick up where I left off, really, at the end of last season.”
She did enjoy a holiday during the close season, going on a road trip across the USA with her husband, but Magill also achieved something else in the summer – she finished the PhD thesis on which she has been working for six years.
Her academic career started when she was a part-time player at Everton and took a sports coaching degree at Edge Hill University, and became interested in her dissertation area exploring female footballers’ experience of receiving video analysis. That gave her the nudge to go into a Masters programme and then finally her doctoral area.
“I really underestimated just how hard the jump was from doing a Masters to a PhD!” she reveals. “The year we qualified for the Euros, I physically had no time that I could commit to it, so I paused it for a year.”
And she was finishing off her thesis while in Spain with Birmingham’s pre-season tour.
“The club were amazing. I said to them, ‘This is where I’m at – can you be patient with me and just try and help me out as much as you can, because when it’s done, then I’m free, I’m all yours?’ We got there! That was a massive weight off my shoulders.”
Merricks on Magill: She’s so important
It’s no wonder head coach Amy Merricks is so impressed by Magill.
“She’s so important – such an important person, both on and off the pitch,” she said. “We brought Simone here for her qualities as a player but also her qualities as a character. I got the privilege of assisting Tanya Oxtoby on a Northern Ireland camp before I got this role, and that’s where I first came across Simone, and I absolutely can see why she’s Northern Ireland’s captain. She’s a leader, she’s been working really hard on her own game.”
Merricks also mentions Magill’s “ruthlessness” in front of goal as well as her determination: “She is the type of player that will just run tirelessly for the team, all day, every day, and do all the nitty-gritty stuff.”
Birmingham are, Merricks concludes, “lucky to have her”, adding: “The fact she’s been able to complete a PhD while being a full-time professional player just says a lot about her as a person and her drive and willingness to succeed.”
Simone Magill: I came to Birmingham because of their ambition
There’s still one step to go before she’s officially Dr Magill, though; she needs to pass what’s known as a viva, an interview with specialists in her field of research where they discuss her work.
The PhD is part of Magill’s plans for her future after retirement – although as she is still only 30, that should still be some time off. Her intent is to go into sporting directorship.
“The biggest time when something started to shift was when I did my ACL [in the opening match of the 2022 Euros], and I was out for a year.
“[It gave me a perspective on] how quickly you can be out of the game, and it gave me a year, basically, to think about where do I want to go after? I’ve always had studying in the background and with my PhD and everything, and I’ve done quite a lot of work as a player representative, like working with PFAs and the board at Northern Ireland and various clubs that I’ve been involved with. I’ve always had a passion, I suppose, for improving standards, pushing boundaries, and for me, I took a real interest in this route and this pathway towards a directorship.”
Before that, she wants to get back to the top flight with Birmingham – having already played there with Everton and Aston Villa.
“The biggest reason that I came to Birmingham was the ambition and the drive to want to get back there and to try and be a part of that,” she says. “We came so close last year, and we don’t want to really dwell on that too much, but it makes you even hungrier to want to go and make sure that that happens.”
