Ella Toone: Lionesses and Man Utd midfielder on grief, football and her wedding

Toone knew that hours after every match, she would always get a phone call from Nick.

He and her mum, Karen, would always come to watch Toone’s matches, but Nick also recorded them on TV so he could have another look when he got home before calling his daughter for a “debrief on the whole game”.

“He was just obsessed,” says the 26-year-old. “He loved women’s football more than he loved watching the men’s game. He knew all the players, he was passionate about where I was in my career, the team that I had, the way we were playing.

“He would go into any pub and talk about women’s football and talk about me.”

Toone adds her dad was “the driving force” behind her football, taking her up and down the country for club matches and travelling abroad for England games.

“Me and dad were all about football, that was our thing that we had together,” she reveals. ”He was probably one of the first people that really saw potential in me.”

The day after Toone scored in England’s 2-1 win over Germany in the 2022 European Championship final, she had no idea her dad had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer as he had only told his wife and brother.

“He didn’t want anyone worrying about him,” she explains. “He wasn’t well throughout the tournament. I’m finding out more and more about it now that he’s not here.”

It was not until the day after her Manchester United team won the FA Cup final at Wembley in May 2024 that she learned he was ill.

“I feel like every time I won something, something bad came after,” she says.

Nick died three days before his 60th birthday – five after Toone turned 25 – in September 2024. The following day she was back in training.

“I went straight back into football because I knew that’s what he would have wanted,” she says.

“I started the first game at Old Trafford, it was really difficult, but I felt like that’s what I needed to do in that moment. I needed to play, I couldn’t just be sat around moping about, thinking about it all the time. I knew he would have been there and been watching.”