Arsenal’s Ballon d’Or win reflects their relentless rise to football’s forefront

For all the shock at neither Mariona Caldentey nor Alessia Russo winning the 2025 Ballon d’Or, Arsenal’s collective achievement should not go unnoticed.

They were named Women’s Club of the Year earlier in the ceremony, with seven players, head coach Renee Slegers and director of women’s football Clare Wheatley on stage to accept the award.

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The players on stage were: Daphne van Domselaar (who placed fifth in the Women’s Yashin Trophy), Steph Catley (29th in the Ballon d’Or Feminin), Emily Fox (25th), Leah Williamson (seventh), Chloe Kelly (fifth), Russo (third) and Caldentey (second). Frida Maanum was 27th, but did not appear on stage.

For the ceremony in Paris, a chartered plane was organised for around 30 members of club staff, with around 25 more player guests meeting them at the ceremony. Viktor Gyokeres, who finished 15th in the men’s award, was present with his counterparts on the red carpet.

“I’m proud to stand here representing a club that has pioneered women’s football for 38 years, since 1987, when we were founded as part of Arsenal in the Community,” Slegers said on accepting the award.

While winning last season’s Champions League played a major part in Arsenal having so much representation in Paris, that statement spoke to a deeper recognition that this award should provide them. Vic Akers was the man who started Arsenal Women in 1987, feeling an obligation to help girls and young women discover and fall in love with the game. Akers managed them for 22 years and won over 32 major honours, including the club’s first Champions League in 2007.

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That laid solid foundations not just for Arsenal, but for women’s football across England at the time. Fast forward to 2025, and Arsenal are similarly at the forefront of progressing the game in this country beyond what happens on the pitch.

In June, Arsenal confirmed that all of their 11 home Women’s Super League games this season would be played at the Emirates Stadium. The women’s team had previously played the occasional game at the Emirates in the years after it was built in 2006, but a more deliberate effort to make the ground their home as much as it is for the men’s team has been constant throughout the 2020s.

After the appointment of Jonas Eidevall as head coach in June 2021, then-chief executive Vinai Venkatesham spoke publicly about plans to increase the support of the women’s team.

A review process had started before Joe Montemurro had left the month before, and some changes that came as a result included investing in better facilities at the training ground and more backroom staff, such as new heads of sports medicine and sports science, nutritionists, operational staff and an individual development coach role. The latter position was held by Slegers before she succeeded Eidevall last season.

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As part of her speech last night, Slegers thanked club owners Stan and Josh Kroenke, Wheatley, and “everyone across the club who strives to give us the best possible conditions to make it possible to do what we want to do. Invest in women. Invest in women’s sport. When we do that, we all benefit”.

Pairing that behind-the-scenes growth with a steadily increasing presence at the Emirates has been essential. Eidevall’s first Women’s Super League game in charge was a 3-2 win over Chelsea in September 2021, held at the Emirates in front of 8,705 people — a stark contrast to the spectators that fixture would attract if it were to be played this weekend.

In the years that followed, Eidevall was vocal about wanting to make the Emirates a permanent home for the women’s team. After a memorable Champions League quarter-final comeback win over Bayern Munich in March 2023, he said: “We want to continue to push, and I get the sense that history is being created quickly in front of our eyes when I see how the attendance and the culture are here at the Emirates.

“Five years ago, if someone had said that Arsenal’s long-term plan is to move to the Emirates Stadium, people would ask: ‘How can that happen?’. Now I think people understand that that might be realistic for the future.”

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A month after that win over Bayern, Arsenal played their semi-final against Wolfsburg in front of a sellout crowd of 60,063. The following season (2023-24), two more games were classified as sellouts, with attendances of 60,160 against Manchester United in February and 60,050 against Tottenham Hotspur in March.

That wish to make the Emirates a permanent home has now become a reality. Ahead of this season, Arsenal announced that they had sold 17,000 memberships (including season tickets and six-game bundles), which was a 12 per cent increase on seasonal memberships bought ahead of the 2024-25 campaign.

This increased support has played a huge part in bringing players to the club. Both Van Domselaar and Olivia Smith have cited playing in front of a full Emirates Stadium as part of why they joined the club. Smith recently spoke to The Athletic about this following a spectacular long-range goal on her debut.

Moments such as Smith’s goal against London City Lionesses — individual brilliance from an exceptional player — are becoming a regular occurrence at the club and have got Arsenal to a point where they can justifiably feel hard done by for one of their players missing out on the individual Ballon d’Or.

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Take Caldentey, for example. It was not just her decisive outside-the-box goal in the Champions League semi-final against Lyon that stood out, but her adaptation to a new league, country and even a new position halfway through the season. As for Russo, she dragged Arsenal into the semi-final with an exceptional display against Real Madrid in the quarter-final.

Both players had stellar international campaigns with Spain and England, too. Back in 2022, Beth Mead finished second in the Ballon d’Or after helping England win their first European Championship. The addition of a Champions League triumph for this year’s candidates maybe should have been enough to get one of them over the line.

But to have that many players at the top table is an accomplishment in itself and should serve as an inspiration as well as recognition of the club’s journey. Much of the groundwork for Arsenal to have such a presence at this year’s Ballon d’Or ceremony had been done well before lifting the Champions League was a possibility. The same collective drive that got them there, both on and off the pitch, needs to be maintained.

Then, maybe one day, it will be one of their players who will be named best in Europe.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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