Mary Earps is approached casually—calm, almost too calm—and there’s that little visible triumph on her face. Someone’s sister is a goalkeeper. Cousin. “Themselves.” They’ve saved a goal, maybe two. A penalty. They do the move where you leap to the right but somehow stop it with your left toe, and one of them roars like her. It’s playful, sure. But when Earps remembers it, you can tell it’s also proof.
“All of which could be a total lie,” she qualifies, as she recalls a trip to the shops in Manchester last Friday. Then she digs back into the darker corners of the sport—the days when becoming a goalkeeper wasn’t really a choice. Not the fun kind of hero-worship, where you “regale someone with your heroics in the shop,” but the other, more practical version: being pushed in because you were the only one available, or because your head reached the bar, or because you were late. Even Earps, before the accolades and the spotlight, grew up inside that messy system, when she had to hear things like “have a word with the girls… none of them want to go in goal at the weekend.”
Those days are mostly gone now. Or at least, that’s what Earps insists as she points to the small changes she’s watched happen. She tells Misryoum about the all-weather “Mary Earps Pitch” at Calverton Miners Welfare FC in Nottinghamshire, where in February she spent spare minutes counting heads—33 players in a goalkeeping session on one pitch and 20 doing pick-up games beside it—then counted them again “for surety,” as if the numbers themselves could anchor the whole idea.
Her driving purpose for years, alongside a successful playing career, has been to make women’s goalkeeping feel cool. Not “special” in a distant, intimidating way. Cool like it belongs to you. It’s behind her girls-only clinics in Reading, her academy work at PSG, and the fight (and win) against Nike during the 2023 World Cup over women’s goalkeeping shirts. And it’s now behind her latest venture: KeepHers, a programme in partnership with the charity Foundation 92 that will provide free goalkeeping sessions to girl footballers aged six to 18 in Manchester via after-school and in-school sessions.
There’s a stat Earps says like it’s stitched into her memory: 80 per cent of girls in England still don’t get access to specialised goalkeeping training until late in their careers. She didn’t receive technical goalkeeping training until she was 14, after joining Leicester City’s Centre of Excellence. “It’s not that I’m forcing goalkeeping on everyone,” she says with a short, deprecating laugh. But then the horror lands anyway. “That’s insane. It makes becoming a goalkeeper even harder.” She could talk about it all day—actually, she only stops because she needs to drink water, which feels very human in the middle of all that fire.
What comes next is the part people don’t always see: how personal her “leave the game in a better place” line really is. Misryoum newsroom reported in her tone that she’s aware of how big the world is and how small your own feels inside it. But football, she says, is a vehicle for change. And yes, her public life got complicated—shock retirement from international football just 36 days out from last summer’s Euros, a tell-all autobiography afterwards, and all the reactions that followed, some withering over perceived squad-tension airing, others more illuminating because she was candid about alcohol, body image and self-confidence. There’s an origin story question, and she laughs at how long it would be. Then she catches herself: really, how interesting is her story? Maybe it isn’t the point. Or maybe it is—just in a different way.
Now she’s also steering the angle toward England farewell. Earps is set to attend a tribute from the Football Association before England’s World Cup qualifier against Spain at Wembley on Tuesday night, honouring her retirement last May. The scheduling conflicts explain the gap, she says. But the emotional math doesn’t add up neatly—she came back for PSG’s 2-1 Champions League defeat to Manchester United in November and felt the odd mix of boos and applause.
Tuesday is against Spain, the same team she’s gone to war with “so many times,” and that’s both comfort and pressure. She even mentions Alessia Russo texting her that morning, trying to work out how they’ll see each other with security and all the usual awkward logistics—“How am I going to see her now that we’re on opposite sides?” It’s complicated, she repeats, like the word itself is too small for what she means.
Earps says she hopes it will be “just a special day,” but she admits she’s “not very good at emotional things.” At 33, her quality has ebbed at times—this season she’s conceded 18 goals from an expected goals on target of 13.20, according to Fotmob. Her PSG contract expires this summer, and she plays coy about her next location with an obvious Bond-style joke. Still, she talks like someone who’s not done yet: “Until the wheels fall off. Until the mind and body say: ‘Absolutely not, we’re done’.” And somehow, wrapped inside all that—Wembley nerves, KeepHers plans, the counting of heads at a pitch in Nottinghamshire—there’s this soft intention to creep off one day, after leaving the game in a better place than she found it.
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