MY ACCOUNT
Keira Walsh returns to English soil this week as part of a Barcelona side who are looking to overcome Chelsea in the Women’s Champions League.
The England star moved to Spain for a world record fee of £400,000 last summer, along with her international team-mate Lucy Bronze.
With the Supercopa already secured and the domestic league all but won, the 26-year-old could secure an impressive treble this season before the Lionesses’ bid for World Cup glory.
Ahead of the first leg of Barca’s Champions League semi-final against Chelsea, we put Walsh and her glittering career under the spotlight.
Dream career
Every young footballer dreams about their ideal career path but Walsh appears to be living hers out for real.
A Manchester City fan as a child — whose pet fish were named after Shaun Goater and Nicolas Anelka — she joined the club in 2014 from Blackburn, aged just 17.
Across nine years at City, she helped the team to win a Women’s Super League title, three FA cups and four League Cups.
Along the way, the playmaker became a regular for England and was one of the driving forces behind the national team winning Euro 2022.
As a youngster, she modelled her game on Spanish stars such as Cesc Fabregas and David Silva, while her father encouraged her to regularly watch Barcelona play and study their midfielders.
Now it is Walsh that is pulling the strings in a Barcelona shirt and she will be hoping to make a contribution towards the club winning the one title that has eluded her in her career so far.
Barca move
In an interview with LiveScore this week, Walsh was asked if she thought English players moving abroad would benefit the national team.
She said: “Yeah, definitely. You look at Georgia Stanway at Bayern Munich as well. I think having those experiences and bringing them back to England is only going to help.
“Different styles and not just styles but cultures. I think I’ve learned a lot as a person here as well. Like meeting new people, I think is also a great thing to take back into that environment.
“I think when we go back and there’s certain ways that we see the game here and obviously we speak to the coaches at England and try to input that and have different opinions.”
When quizzed on whether the move to Barcelona was a dream come true, Walsh expressed surprise that her career had followed this path.
She said: “I never thought that it would happen. As a kid when I was younger, women’s football wasn’t really a profession.
“When I went to Manchester, I thought I’ll probably just stay here for the rest of my career. I never thought that a club like Barcelona would try and sign me.
“Then after the Euros, that kind of happened and for me it was a no-brainer to come and sign here and experience playing this style of football.”
Chelsea clash
Barcelona have won all 25 games in the Primera Division Femenina this season, scoring 105 goals and conceding just five.
When they met Chelsea in the 2021 Champions League final, Barca won 4-0. Now they have the added benefit of having two Lionesses in their side who are familiar with the English game.
While Bronze was a three-time winner of the competition at Lyon, Walsh has yet to taste European glory at club level.
This season could be her time and with the World Cup on the horizon this summer, the timing could hardly better for Sarina Wiegman’s side.
