A teenage sensation at Arsenal, the country’s first professional footballer while at Fulham, a European champion after returning to the Gunners and a record breaking Lioness to boot, Rachel Yankey’s name is synonymous with women’s football in England.
Born in 1979, the Londoner was a 16-year-old Youth Training Scheme coach with Arsenal FC when she joined Premier Division outfit, Arsenal Ladies, from Greater London League side Mill Hill United.
“I was tipped to play for Tony Milton in the third team and everybody at Mill Hill was saying ‘Don’t sign, come back’ but I suppose you take the risk,” she says. “And I didn’t play for the third team, I played one game for the Reserves and then I was on the bench for the first team.”
The teenager knew manager Vic Akers having caught his eye with her wizardry a year earlier while he was refereeing a Gunners’ schools five-a-side league match.
Yet even with the likes of leading Premier Division strikers Marieanne Spacey and Jo Broadhurst in the senior squad, ‘Yanks’ as she became nicknamed had little idea who her new colleagues were.
But she remembers that having old Mill Hill team mates Natasha Daly, Sarah Reed and, later that first season, Kim Jerray-Silver, in the squad helped her settle.
“Then there was the core of youngsters a bit older than me, like Kirsty Pealling and Jenny Canty, people you just automatically got on with and you just felt part of it,” she adds.
“And Arsenal with its history, you know that you’re playing for a high standard club and you’ve got to step up, so you learn to understand what Arsenal is through the senior players’ guidance.”
Among those influential older players were women like stylish midfielder Sian Williams, who was captain at the time, and attacker and Doncaster Belles legend Broadhurst.
“Sian led by example,” Yankey says. “Jo was really kind to the younger players, I think she was young at heart herself, and she was funny.”
That sense of camaraderie from the top down was essential against Premier Division rivals Millwall and Croydon, not to mention away days to face Everton, who pipped Arsenal to the title in Yankey’s second season as a Gunner.
“When I first went to Arsenal as a kid, there was a definite dislike between Arsenal and Millwall,” Yankey recalls. “Then as it went on, it was Croydon – I suppose many of the players had previously played for Arsenal, so there was a rivalry there.
“[Croydon/Charlton’s] Sammy Britton was a player I’ll always remember and Pauline Cope was a fantastic goalkeeper so playing against her was always a bit intimidating, but also fun because you knew that if you could get the better of her you would have had to have scored a great goal.
“Then I wouldn’t say there was a massive rivalry with Everton, but we never really liked going to Marine, that was a bit of a bogey ground. I don’t think our results there were that bad, but it was in certain peoples’ heads that Marine wasn’t a place we wanted to go to!”
Although still a teenager, Yankey rose to each challenge, playing her part in her maiden season as Arsenal overcame the challenge of Donny Belles to claim their third-ever Premier Division title.
By 2000, she had added three League Cups and two FA Cups to her tally too, but then ambitious Fulham made the nippy attacker an offer she could not refuse – a full-time contract.
Newly promoted to the South East Combination League, Fulham were turning professional, their sights set on reaching the Premier Division in time for the FA’s proposed introduction of a pro women’s top flight in 2003.
“A lot of people said I was crazy, I was playing for Arsenal and dropped two leagues to play for Fulham,” she says. “But it was a great opportunity that I don’t regret.
“The first season in terms of teams we were playing against and the pitches we were playing on, that wasn’t ideal. But what the team did very well was have a focus: to make sure that no matter who we play, we try and be the best we can be.”
Yankey was the first woman in the country to sign professional terms with an English club, with Fulham also attracting other National Division players such as Kim Jerray-Silver, plus Mary Phillip and Katie Chapman from Millwall and Southampton’s Rachel McArthur.
Unusually for the time, the club acquired an international flavour too. Danish central defender Katrine Petersen was already on the books, having joined from Wimbledon in 1998, days when the Cottagers trained in a park and paid £1 subs.
And Fulham manager Frank Morrow’s line-up was bolstered by Norway Under-21 international Lynn Rebecca Mork and fellow countrywomen and Olympic gold medallists Margunn Haugenes and Marianne Pettersen.
Yankey says the arrival of the Scandinavians was transformational. “In that first season, none of us knew what it was to be professional because there was no guidance from anyone else, we were the first to do it,” she says.
But then she remembers how Mork, in particular, helped the group find another gear, with even “simple” games like 4v4 transformed as resting players formed a wall so the ball was constantly in play.
“You’d need to stay focused because you were still in the game,” she says. “You were a wall, and that got everyone playing at a faster pace and used to demanding more of each other in a constructive way.”
With a goal tally of more than 200, Fulham cruised to the SE Combination title that term to earn promotion into the National League’s Southern Division.
They came up short against Arsenal in a memorable FA Cup Final at Selhurst Park, however, an Angie Banks goal settling matters for the Gunners, who sealed the Treble by winning the League at Tranmere later in the week.
But it was soon the Cottagers’ turn to dominate. Led by Norwegian coach Gaute Haugenes since the summer of 2001, they went on to win the Southern Division and claim both cups.
Yankey was finally back in the top flight and both she and Fulham were unstoppable. They overcame Arsenal in a nerve-jangling penalty shootout to retain the League Cup. Then Yankey scored a worldie in a televised FA Cup Final against Donny Belles, the club they also pipped to the League title.
“We had, under Gaute, a distinct pattern of play,” Yankey recalls. “And a blueprint of if something went wrong, this is how you get out of that situation, which I think you can only really do when you’re full time.
“None of us had been through that before, so it was a learning curve for us. Physically we all changed, but mentally we changed as well.”
Even so, Yankey felt that Fulham were regarded unfavourably by their contemporaries.
“Everyone was judging us,” she says. “You’d think people would have wanted to see women’s football go professional.
“The feeling was that actually a lot of people didn’t want us to do that. It was, for me, a massive positive, but for people from outside of Fulham it felt like there wasn’t positivity.
“It didn’t feel like you were given the credit for being a good footballer or a good professional, it was more like you are Fulham, you get everything, you get paid.”
As things stood in 2003, however, Fulham were still the League’s only full-time team and once it became clear that the professionalisation of the National Division was not going to happen, the Cottagers were downgraded to semi-pro.
Yankey says there was “a sense of achievement” that the players had done what had been asked of them, but they could not blame their parent club for reducing their hours.
“I suppose when the League didn’t go professional you’re like what more can we do, why has this happened, does anyone take women’s football seriously?,” she says.
“The sad thing was that many good footballers decided to give up the game and go into other professions and start a career.
“Myself, I probably lost a lot of love for football because you ask yourself, ‘What’s the point?’.”
Yankey made ends meet by setting up her own business coaching primary school children. She also stuck with Fulham, but struggled with the team’s inevitable drop-off in standard once they were training in the evenings only.
“Mentally it was really difficult,” she says. “I just really didn’t enjoy football to be honest.”
Birmingham City and their manager Marcus Bignot changed that, offering Yankey a paid contract as they geared up to their second season in the top flight – not that money was a motivating factor in her move.
“It was Ellen [Maggs] that was the instigator of getting Marcus to speak to me, but he made me feel like I wanted to play again,” she says.
“I remember first going down there and thinking they have absolutely nothing, no training kit, the pitches they were training on were awful and thinking, ‘this is backwards.’
“But there was such a family vibe and that for me was the biggest reason for saying I’ll sign. I didn’t play football for money, I had my job, I was coaching in schools and I was happy with that and I travelled up and down to Birmingham.”
With ex-Arsenal youngsters Ellen Maggs and Alex Scott joining up too, a side that also included Karen Carney and Amanda Barr finished fourth in the League, reaching the last eight of the FA Cup and the semi-finals of the League Cup.
For her part, Yankey was in such flying form that she was voted International Player of the Year, making Hope Powell’s England roster for the 2005 home UEFA EUROs then enjoying a W-League-winning loan spell in America with New Jersey Wildcats.
But her time at Birmingham ended that summer, when, with the club losing their sponsorship and needing a donation from a parent to remain afloat, they arranged for Yankey to return to Arsenal.
“They probably knew I’d go back there so I spoke with Vic and he was just ‘Come home’ and I just fitted back in,” she says. “And it was back in to those standards of knowing everybody wants to beat you, it’s everyone’s cup final.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Yankey went on to become the first player, man or woman, to earn 126 caps for England, and by the close of her career in 2016, she had seven National Division and two Women’s Super League titles, 11 FA and seven Premier League Cups, plus the hallowed UEFA Cup to her name. As careers go, hers was one of the finest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: With thanks to Catherine Etoe for the interview/written feature and images from Simon Mooney, Gavin Ellis/TGSPHOTO and the FA Online Photo Library.
