Head coach Renée Slegers is focused on the new season, emphasizing consistency and humility as her team prepares for its Women’s Super League opener against London City Lionesses.
Fresh from a memorable Champions League final victory over Barcelona in May, the club enters the 2025/26 campaign as reigning European champions. However, Slegers remains grounded about the pressure that comes with success.
“We always feel pressure,” she stated in her pre-match press conference. “When we play our games, the opposition want to go out and try and beat us. That’s always there and it will be this year as well. In that sense, nothing changes for us, but we have to be very, very aware… we have to be very consistent with everything we do.”
The team’s last WSL title came in the 2018/19 season, with Chelsea having dominated the league by winning the last six championships. To bolster their domestic challenge, the club signed four new players early in the off-season, and Slegers is pleased with how the squad has been assembled.
“It was really important to have a good idea early of how we wanted to build the squad,” she explained. “We did a really good job of being very proactive and early with what we wanted to achieve. I’m really happy with the squad that we have.”
Despite last season’s European triumph, Slegers warned against complacency, pointing to the difficult journey the team navigated to lift the trophy.
“There is zero guarantee,” she asserted. “If you look back at the season we had, there were so many challenges that we had to overcome. A lot of things weren’t perfect.”
She concluded that the experience taught the team valuable lessons. “You will go through different phases in a season… What we learned is that we have a belief in what we do. What we also learned is that we need to be very humble. There’s no guarantee. We just need to understand that what we put in every single day can lead to something.”
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