At 23, Lucy Rushton broke into English football’s boys club. Now she’s building the Bay Area’s women’s soccer team
LOS ALTOS — Lucy Rushton, fresh out of a master’s program in sports performance analysis, arrived at her 2007 meeting at Reading Football Club looking for a job with her hometown team.
Nick Hammond thought she wanted an autograph.
The 23-year-old Englishwoman didn’t look much different than many of the kids who would approach Hammond, a former goalkeeper for Reading who spent some time in the English Premier League.
“There were not a lot of females in that area (of data analysis),” Hammond, then the club’s director of football, said by phone this week. “It’s the truth…I thought it was a young girl asking me for an autograph. And then she introduced herself as Lucy and it put me back a bit. But we started chatting.
“Two hours later, I thought to myself, ‘She’s perfect.’”
Fifteen years later, Rushton still can’t believe her luck that a sport once run entirely by men, most of whom once played at the highest level, gave her a chance to begin a career that eventually led to her hiring at D.C. United in 2021, when she became the second female general manager in major men’s American professional sports.
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Now she spends her days and nights building a roster for Bay FC, an expansion franchise in the National Women’s Soccer League preparing to kick off its inaugural season at PayPal Park in March.
Since her hiring in June, she has been traveling the globe searching for the world’s best players as she hopes to put together a team that can immediately contend in the NWSL.
Tuesday alone she made five trades to acquire players just before the rosters locked ahead of the expansion draft, taking place Friday evening. The two expansion teams, Bay FC and the Utah Royals, will have 12 rounds to select players who are left unprotected by other clubs.
“We just left a meeting together and I actually asked the question, I said, ‘When do you sleep?’” said Albertin Montoya, the longtime club director at Mountain View Los Altos whom Rushton hired as the team’s inaugural head coach. “I thought I didn’t need much sleep and she has me beat. She’s non-stop with phone calls, talking to agents, players, traveling to identify players, working on deals, managing the staff…”
Putting together the Bay FC roster has been a dream job for Rushton, who said it would’ve never been possible if Hammond hadn’t taken a chance on her 15 years ago.
“For him to take that opportunity on a female at that time, when I look back at it now, it’s a massive risk and a massive gamble for him,” Rushton, now 38, said last week. “I’m forever grateful he did it. It was an opportunity for me that, god knows where else I would’ve gotten it.”
As a child, Rushton’s days and nights were consumed by kicking the ball in the garden with her brother, Tom, then taking it in the house until her mom made them put it away, then taking it to the park to challenge other kids to a game of two-on-two.
At school, she’d get changed in the girls’ locker room for gym class and then switch sides to play soccer with the boys.
“I held my own,” she said. “All I knew was football. I wasn’t part of the cool gang or the pretty gang, I was just the girl who played football.”
But Rushton knew she’d never have a career as a player. There were hardly any youth teams for girls at that time.
Instead, she studied the game, earned a master’s degree and found her first job at Watford Football Club. After six months, Hammond called her up for an interview at Reading.
The challenge: convincing “old school” football guys that a young woman could teach them something.
“She looks young, but you’ve got to trust me, she’s got it,” Hammond told his peers.
Rushton was hired as an analyst at 23, making her one of the youngest (and one of the only) women analysts known to be working in English football at the time.
“Suddenly gender is not an issue when you’re providing objective feedback,” she said. “You’re providing data. It’s not about opinions. That’s often the problem when you’re talking about women in football, the perception of opinions.”
At Reading, Rushton “fit in seamlessly,” Hammond said.
“She was brilliant at what she did,” said Brian McDermott, a former Arsenal player who managed Reading for most of Rushton’s time at the club. “Absolutely brilliant at what she did. I’ve always said that to her. She got on with everyone.
“Being a woman, I just don’t know, I can’t even comprehend what that was like for her. All I know is how well she did at the job.”
In her seven years with her hometown club, she helped Reading win the EFL Championship and gain entry into the Premier League.
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In 2016, Rushton got a call from an industry friend who was starting a Major League Soccer expansion team in Atlanta.
She was offered a job as the head of technical recruitment and analysis with a chance to build a roster from scratch.
“I faced criticism from people in England for choosing to leave,” she said. “But it was the best decision of my life.”
In her first year in Atlanta, the club made the playoffs, becoming just the third expansion team in league history to do so.
The next year, Atlanta won the MLS Cup.
And in 2021, D.C. United hired her as its general manager.
“I’ll be honest, there is never any chance, in my opinion, that a female would be hired in a (similar) role in English football,” Rushton said.
Her stay in the nation’s capital lasted just two years. Her values didn’t align with ownership’s. Her lesson learned: Find peers who you connect with.
At Bay FC, she found that in principal owner Alan Waxman, the CEO of Sixth Street Partners, which invested $125 million to start the club.
Traditionally, expansion teams in the NWSL have struggled in their first season. It takes time to recruit the right players, and for a new coaching staff to implement its philosophy.
In this case, head coach Montoya and Rushton are in agreement: They want a fast-paced, attacking team that is creative and entertaining to watch.
“I will tell you the truth, I was blown away when I met Lucy,” Montoya said. “She is incredibly intelligent. She understands the game. When we talked football, we connected on many levels.”
While two- or three-year plans are necessary for most expansion teams, Rushton doesn’t want to wait; she’s hoping to quickly win the hearts of local soccer fans the way Reading once captured hers.
And to offer a reminder to young girls: A career in the sport they love is within reach.
“I’ve never seen women’s football taken so seriously and have people that passionate about it as they do in the Bay Area,” Rushton said. “Everywhere you look there are young girls playing football. I didn’t know that existed…
“It’s an honor to think we get to build something for them.”