Lucy Bronze on ADHD, Fifa, and her mission to grow the game on and off the pitch

Lucy Bronze does not stop. Her brain runs a hundred miles a minute. She does not need traditional entertainment. “I’m not good at watching TV – I can’t sit still,” Bronze says, sitting sort-of still, on a bench shielded from the wind, overlooking Chelsea’s training pitch at Cobham. “Someone recently asked me what I listen to in the car and someone else jumped in and was like: ‘Lucy has her own podcast going on in her own head.’ I don’t listen to music, I don’t listen to podcasts, I just have a million thoughts going on.”

Bronze’s late ADHD and autism diagnosis help it make sense, but her mum had always suspected she might have one of the conditions, so it wasn’t a surprise. “Naomi Girma said to me: ‘I’ve never met someone who trains so hard in the gym with zero music on; it does not make sense.’ I was like: ‘It’s literally in my head, I don’t need anything else.’”

Walking her dog, Nala, is the main thing Bronze does to relax, but otherwise she is “just involved in so many things, different businesses, PFA boards, stuff for Fifpro and Uefa at the minute. There’s obviously a lot going on behind the scenes and I’m just keeping up to date with things like that.”

“Things like that” are hugely rewarding and Bronze gets pleasure out of elements that could seem tedious but contribute to the wider game and its growth. “I love growing-the-game stuff, but it’s emotionally draining as well,” she says. “Myself and Kim Little are on the PFA players’ board and we speak to each other a lot. We’re in quite similar positions as older players who’ve lived so much of the game and want to give so much back and we feel like we’ve got so many great ideas to help so many people and that there’s so much to be done but you just want to do it all tomorrow.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to keep pushing and pushing but I do enjoy it and I feel like I’ve got endless energy so it does help that I’ve got like all these different avenues to push myself.”

Recently, that has involved being vocal about Gianni Infantino’s rogue and scuppered plan to sell off the World Cup, and his tenure as Fifa president. At the start of the month the defender backed the threat of a European boycott of Fifa competitions, regardless of what it meant for her football ambitions, telling the New Zealand Herald: “It’s for the future of the game and not just for me today and tomorrow.”

In a press conference on Tuesday before Chelsea’s 5-2 victory over Real Sociedad in the first leg of their Champions League qualifier, Bronze explained why she had shared the social media post of the former France defender Mikaël Silvestre, who is on Fifa’s players’ voice panel, which said “change is necessary” at the top of the game. “The football comes first no matter what, no matter who’s in charge, who’s playing … and it feels like now is a good time for players to speak up.”

A summer with no major international women’s tournament has given Bronze time to focus on some of the issues she is most passionate about. “I’ve been trying to go to Colombia for four years to do stuff with refugees,” says Bronze, who was asked to help with fundraising for the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency) during Covid and has been involved since. She says, with a wry smile: “Sarina [the England head coach, Sarina Wiegman] is the one who’s always blocked it because she said that she didn’t want me travelling there before a tournament and getting jet-lagged, especially before the World Cup in Australia. She blocked it then and she blocked it before the Euros because we didn’t have a lot of time. She was like: ‘Lucy, it’s not a good idea for your body.’ So, that’s been planned for a long time.”

The trip to Colombia, which according to the UNHCR is facing a humanitarian crisis and has about 2.8 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants and seven million people who are internally displaced, was worth the Wiegman-enforced wait.

“It was crazy,” she says. “I had had a bit of the background explained to me beforehand. A lot of people don’t necessarily know so much. I guess now that there’s been the earthquake in Venezuela people know a bit more, but it’s generally not spoken about as much because it’s Venezuela to Colombia compared to like, Ukrainians to wealthier countries like England or Germany.

“Being on the ground and especially around kids was special. They don’t know why they’re in that position and it’s not their fault, it’s just the life that’s been put in front of them and they just make the most of the smallest of things. It was a tiring time, emotionally and physically, but it was powerful seeing so much good work being done too.”

Experiencing the resilience and joy of children in the worst of circumstances is “really moving” says Bronze. “At the same time, when we went to leave, there were kids saying: ‘Take me with you,’ which is really devastating.”

Bronze went with shirts, including some from Girma. “There was a refugee girl there who was the captain of this football team which was all boys,” says Bronze. “Nay’s [Girma’s] parents were refugees too. So I told this girl Nay’s story, and this kid’s face just lit up. I showed her pictures of Nay playing for America and I gave her her shirt. This girl was so excited because while it’s not someone in the exact same situation, it’s someone whose family had to rebuild their lives and she could see her own life in it and how amazing she’s doing now.”

Helping people on and off the pitch gives Bronze energy. There is excitement for the new season with Chelsea’s changed and young team under Sonia Bompastor after a high-energy pre-season.

“I feel like it’s taken Sonia till now to do everything she’s wanted to do behind the scenes, in terms of her staff and putting the trust into her staff to do the things that are part of her vision,” Bronze says. “There’s been a hard transition and balance to find what makes Chelsea so good and so dominant and so ‘Chelsea’, while also evolving and adapting, because that’s what you have to do.”

That hampered them last season, Bronze thinks: “The first year everything kind of went smoothly. As things started to change, we were so desperate to win because we are Chelsea – we need to win – but at the same time, it was about [how] we do that while evolving and I think that’s maybe what we struggled with in the second half of last season.”

There have been big changes off the pitch too, with all Women’s Super League games to be played at Stamford Bridge, starting with Aston Villa next Saturday, and cup games at Kingsmeadow in Norbiton, south-west London.

“It’s a statement of intent on the future of Chelsea’s women’s team,” says Bronze.

“Chelsea have been this dominant team on the pitch but now we need to dominate in every aspect. Not just in winning the league six times in a row – that is fantastic – but we need to win the Champions League, we need to grow as a team, we need to grow in the way that we play and the people that we bring in and we need to have a stadium that represents that ambition. Everything contributes.”