Leah Williamson gives us a eureka moment on luck that extends to Man Utd and Arsenal
“We have ridden our luck, but I don’t think we were lucky.”
It’s quite hard, we imagine based on absolutely no personal experience whatsoever, to speak with any great eloquence in the immediate aftermath of achieving something absurdly enormous. But we reckon Leah Williamson has come up with something quite wonderful here after England’s Euro 2025 triumph.
Williamson, who genuinely might already have been the most Spoke Well, I Thought figure in women’s football, repeated the trick later in the same interview with a similar bait-and-switch: “Total disbelief, but at the same time I knew it was going to happen.”
Both those statements appear to contain an unsolvable paradox, yet both in fact contain an essential truth about football, sport and – if you want to be a truly insufferable tagnut of a wanker about it – life itself.
That second quote is really just a variation on the classic ‘name on the cup’ trope. Very obviously, no team’s name is ever on the cup. There is no such thing as destiny. No tournament is pre-ordained. But that doesn’t mean that the feeling of it being so is of no value or consequence.
It can become self-fulfilling. It seems perfectly accurate to say that a huge part of England somehow winning this tournament boils down to England simply believing – knowing, on some level – they would do so. The sheer refusal to accept defeat is a huge part of the reason a team that led for one minute of the 360 minutes of knockout football they played in Switzerland was able to walk away with the prize.
It’s that quote about luck that really grabbed us, though. We’d never really given much thought to the semantic difference between a team having luck and a team riding their luck. But when Williamson said it, we had some kind of eureka moment. Because it’s exactly and entirely correct.
If you’re the sort of person who goes through life without a tinfoil hat on your head, then even giving a moment’s cursory thought to the idea of some teams or some players being intrinsically luckier than others is palpably absurd. It’s just such a childish notion when you think about it at all.
Which is not at all to say luck does not exist, or play a large part in football. Of course it does. But it’s not ever what matters, not really, not by itself. And it’s not really what we’re saying, if we’re all honest with ourselves, when we say a team is ‘lucky’.
Sheer dumb luck is probably more of a factor in sport (and, again, everything else) than any of us would care to admit. But the point isn’t that you had good luck; it’s that you capitalised upon it.
England rode their luck in Switzerland. Again and again. To an almost ludicrous extreme. But what they did with that luck is what counts, what separates them from the rest.
England’s desire, heart, determination, bottle, skill, talent and everything else helped them take the bits of luck that went their way and extract the absolute maximum possible. And like Williamson, we’re not at all prepared to write that off as just an accident. As itself just more good luck.
And once you start down this road, you realise that distinction Williams draws between ‘luck’ and ‘riding your luck’ explains almost everything. There’s hints here of the classic ‘the more I practise, the luckier I get’.
It’s about positioning yourself to be able to capitalise on those moments of fortune that come your way. To be remembered as a lucky side is really just to be remembered as one that made the most of that good fortune.
Who remembers the lucky side that finished third? Absolutely nobody. Nobody is remembering lucky also-rans. Everyone remembers the lucky winners.
When Manchester United were winning every trophy in sight under Sir Alex Ferguson, you’d hear this all the time. Lucky United. Another decision going their way.
But while there may well be plenty of validity in the idea that United and big clubs in general get more decisions, what United under Ferguson were indisputably the best at was making any such good fortune count. Riding that luck.
You see it still, now, with the more out-there of Online Arsenal Fans and their conspiracy-addled nudge-nudge wink-wink asides about the decisions that have gone Manchester City’s way, or Liverpool’s way, or PSG’s way or whatever.
But of course those teams had luck go their way. You know which teams have a bit of luck going their way sometimes? All the teams. Absolutely every one of them. But one fairly obvious difference between the teams that win and the teams that finish second again is that the teams that win have made those moments of good fortune count more often.
We’d suggest that the idea of a team being ‘lucky’ is rarely made in good faith, that whatever – if any – evidence that purports to support the position has been cherrypicked or manipulated. It is, by definition a glib and simplistic narrative designed not just to denigrate the target but to absolve you or your team from responsibility.
It was the referees. It was that ricochet. It was that deflection. It was the unfathomable, unknowable will of the universe itself. It was luck. It was, therefore, Not Our Fault. Being expected to compete against the unfathomable, unknowable will of the universe itself is even more absurd than expecting a team to compete with 115 Charges FC.
But Williamson has got to the heart of it. The lucky teams aren’t the ones that have more luck; they are the ones who make damn sure they make that luck more significant, more memorable. The ones that make it count for something.
Maybe it is better to be lucky than good, but any amount of the former will get you nowhere without a healthy dose of the latter.