Mary Earps: from Spoty winner to PSG bench

If you're in Paris and want to watch the best goalkeeper in the world, you had better like public transport, a tiny stadium and remember that she may not play. Mary Earps has swapped England for a country with an inferior women's football product, and for a team where she is not a certain starter.

Sitting on the substitutes’ bench is not how Earps will want to spend a pivotal season that will involve a duel with Hannah Hampton for the England No1 spot before Euro 2025. And although Guingamp are the sort of opponents against whom PSG can enjoy the luxury of rotation, league games are now as big as it gets for Earps in her debut season in Paris, having moved from Manchester United over the summer.

The Juventus loss, which put the Italian club in the Champions League group stage at PSG’s expense, was a crushing blow. European football is essential to growing the women’s game in France, with signals of the sport’s relatively low profile scattered across its capital. Head to the PSG shops in Paris — either on the Champs-Elysées or outside the club’s main stadium, the Parc des Princes — and the branding is overwhelmingly weighted towards the men’s team. The women’s sections are small and quiet, and asking staff for a Mary Earps jersey draws a blank response. The 2023 Fifa “The Best” goalkeeper and BBC Sports Personality of the Year is not so famous south of the Channel.

“For the people who follow women’s football, she is a big name,” Bruno Hermant, a PSG Women supporter and editor for the Culture PSG website, says. “But for everyone else, I don’t know. I’m not sure that people really know her. She’s not like Jude Bellingham, that’s for sure.”

A club’s superstores alone do not reflect their attitude to women’s football, and corresponding shops in England would also have mainly men’s team branding on show. Yet the absence of an Earps jersey on display feels significant. During her annus mirabilis of 2023, Earps successfully lobbied for Nike to sell her goalkeeper’s shirt in a saga that helped to catapult her to fame.

One year on, her new club’s shops do not stock her shirt and ask customers who would like it to buy a blank goalkeeper jersey and then personalise it separately. This approach jars with her efforts last year.

Campus PSG, where the men’s and women’s teams train, reinforces the feeling that the club’s women’s team are hidden from the public gaze. While the facilities are state-of-the-art, they do not seem suitable for hosting top-flight matches. Nonetheless, PSG Women play the vast majority of their games here, in front of a few hundred people. Last season, United averaged 5,353 fans at Leigh Sports Village.

The tiny stadium is also about 15 miles outside the middle of Paris, and getting there from the city centre on Sunday required a 30-minute train journey, a 20-minute bus ride and a 20-minute walk. Hardly a straightforward journey to attract casual fans.

“They deserve a bigger stadium with access for everybody,” Cédric Jasemin, who has followed PSG Women since 2011, says. “The plan is to build one for the youth and women’s teams, but they need to finish a lot of things at the campus first.”

Remarkably, PSG are one of the stronger women’s clubs in France. They are the main challengers to Lyon, whose pioneering level of investment has led to them winning 17 of the past 18 French titles. Rather than a cause, PSG’s small crowds and lack of women’s branding are symptomatic of women’s football’s malaise across the nation.

France hosted the 2019 World Cup but the tournament had little long-term impact. Players such as Wendie Renard, the captain of the national team, have lamented this failure.

“The French federation have made shit after that, frankly,” Hermant says. “When you compare with the FA after the Euros in 2022, it’s totally different. There is no legacy.

“All players in France spoke about that and said that the federation have made shit. There is nothing. In England there are big attendances and big games played in the biggest stadiums. In France, only three games are obligated to play in front of the biggest stadium, so you have low attendances.

“For the first match day of Arkema Première Ligue [France’s women’s top flight], the biggest attendance was 1,366 people. That was at the Stade de la Meinau in Strasbourg, which has a capacity of 30,000.”

So why is Earps here? Being made the highest-paid goalkeeper in women’s football would have been a pull, while United’s poor 2023-24 season in the Women’s Super League and uncertain direction after Ineos’s arrival gave her good reason to leave.

However, Champions League football would have also been a considerable factor, and that has been eradicated. For this season Earps, who seemed untouchable 12 months ago, faces a fight for playing time at a club battling for relevancy.

“We only have the French Cup and French championship,” Hermant says. “The big games are only the ones against Lyon and Paris FC. It’s going to be a very, very long season.”

The French Football Federation has been contacted for comment.