Leah Williamson keeps a playlist for every game she plays. She sends the list over to the kit manager who makes sure it’s playing in the changing room when the team arrives, whether it be Arsenal or England. “I love how music makes people feel, and how you can connect with people – most conversations I have with the girls come off the back of music,” Williamson says.

“I like it because when you think back to key moments, you always remember the music that was playing.” On the night of the UEFA Women’s Euro 2022 final, the list included Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul”, Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much”, and Céline Dion’s cover of “River Deep, Mountain High”. It’s an eclectic mix spanning ages, genres, continents – less so than the ones she makes for herself, because this one has to please 23 people. But the key to this whole playlist, the one track it could not be without, is “Does Your Mother Know”, by ABBA.

“It’s become a massive song for us,” she grins. “We played it before one of the warm-up games and Ella Toone, for whatever reason, went a bit crazy for it. She went out and scored, and then afterwards she was like, ‘Can we have that before every game?’ I went, ‘Yeah! You continue to score, I’ll play what you want’.”

Toone went on to land the first goal in England’s 2–1 victory over Germany, bringing home the first major trophy for England since the men’s team won the World Cup in 1966. A sold-out crowd of nearly 90,000 were at the final at Wembley, with a further 17.5 million watching on the BBC, which doesn’t count the crowds spilling out of pub doors, all eyes glued to their screens. Among the countless tweets that Williamson saw after the final were hundreds of pictures of little girls too small to know the magnitude of what just happened: one, in a pink princess dress, stood at the TV screen transfixed by Leah Williamson’s face just inches from her own. This was the tweet that got to Williamson. It marked a change.

“I’ve got loads of inspirational people I’ve always looked up to, really strong women, who don’t necessarily play football,” she says. “I didn’t want to be them, and I didn’t want to do what they did. But they still inspired me to be me. And I think that’s the point: that little girl doesn’t have to want to be a footballer, she just has to grow up knowing that she can do what she wants. We’re doing something that still feels like we shouldn’t, almost, until this summer.”

Read more at British GQ.