Leah Williamson, the English professional footballer, admitted that she does not struggle with body insecurities due to her active involvement in sports.

Speaking on the Women's Health UK YouTube channel in 2023, the Arsenal and England star revealed how playing sports protects against the creeping influence of face and body image issues that so many teenage schoolgirls face.

The footballer said, “Being so heavily involved in sport was the best thing that ever could have happened to me going through school.

When I look back now, when I look at the insecurities of girls that weren’t active, I never had those worries, I never had the worry of getting changed in the changing room and not liking my body, because I knew I was strong and powerful.”

She added, “Even if someone else might not have liked the way I looked, to me I was fit, I was healthy, and I looked a way that I was happy with because I knew what I was doing made me happy.”

Williamson said that the self-confidence and health benefits she and her teammates gained from playing football were a primary reason they wrote an open letter to UK Conservative Party leaders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak before they both became Prime Ministers.

According to her, one can build a healthy relationship with one's physical form only by focusing on what one's body can do, rather than on what it looks like.

While Williamson admitted that football helped her enhance her self-confidence, she also once admitted that one of her illnesses motivated her to choose football.

Leah Williamson’s illness encouraged her to choose football

According to the Guardian, when Williamson was only 7, her father told her that if she wanted to be a professional footballer, there was no excuse he wanted to hear.

Even at that time, England had no professional women's football league.

What was more remarkable was that when Williamson was a toddler, her parents thought she might not be able to walk properly because she was born with inward-pointing toes. She said, “If they couldn’t have fixed it, it would have created problems when I started to grow. I would have had to wear braces on my legs.”

After the doctors' suggestions, the footballer started gymnastics at age 2, and for 7 years Williamson followed a consistent routine. From there, her love for football began to grow.

Talking about her family support, she said, “I was brought up never to expect people to say no to me, because if I said I wanted to do something, then I was pushed forward and given as many resources as possible to do it by my family. Mum and Grandma were strong, independent women who just smashed any barrier that was in their way.

Nobody made a point of it when we succeeded where maybe we shouldn’t have. It was made totally normal to me that I’d go to the football with my grandma and my mum.”

However, when Williamson started playing at age 6, she felt like an outsider because there were no female players on the team at that time.

Despite going through all these issues, she stayed consistent and has become one of the most successful football players today.

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Written by

Supradeep Dutta

Edited by

Ashvinkumar Patil