Alessia Russo's unlikely route from Kent grassroots football to a Euros winner's medal

Alessia Russo scored the goal that is replayed every time English football wants to explain what Euro 2022 felt like. She back-heeled the ball through a goalkeeper’s legs in a European Championship semi-final, and the celebration that followed told you everything about what it meant. What gets left out of that clip is the five years before it, when she left the usual academy pathway altogether and spent three years playing college soccer in the United States before English football saw her as a professional at all.

Kent grassroots, then a different route

Russo grew up in Maidstone, Kent, and started out at Bearsted Girls before moving into professional academy football. It didn’t work out the way most of those stories are supposed to: rather than progressing straight through an English academy into the professional game, she went to the United States in 2017 to play college soccer for the North Carolina Tar Heels.

That is not the standard route into the Women’s Super League, and it wasn’t meant to be a detour. Three years later, in September 2020, she signed her first professional contract, with Manchester United, arriving in the English game as a 21-year-old rather than a teenager.

The moment everyone remembers

Russo already had England caps by the time Euro 2022 arrived, but the tournament is where the country learned her name. In the semi-final against Sweden at Bramall Lane, with England already comfortable, she received the ball with her back to goal, ran onto a rebound, and finished with an outrageous back-heel through the goalkeeper’s legs. England won 4-0 and went on to lift the trophy.

It is the kind of goal that would define most careers on its own. For Russo it turned out to be the first of two Euros.

Arsenal, and a season that won everything on offer

Russo’s Manchester United contract ran out in the summer of 2023, and on 4 July that year she joined Arsenal as a free agent. The move paid off fastest in the 2024-25 season: Arsenal won the Champions League, Russo shared the WSL Golden Boot, and she was named the Football Writers’ Association’s Women’s Footballer of the Year.

Her hometown had already recognised her by then. Maidstone Borough Council gave Russo the Honorary Freedom of the Borough on 29 February 2024, citing the football career that started at a grassroots club in the town.

A second Euros, and an England team-mate’s assist

England reached another European Championship final in the summer of 2025, this time against Spain. Russo scored the equaliser, a header from a Chloe Kelly cross, to send the match to extra time; England went on to win the final on penalties, with Kelly converting the decisive spot-kick. It was the same partnership that had defined so much of England’s forward line for years, delivering again when it mattered most.

The following summer, Russo and Kelly were both appointed MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List, recognised together for the Euro 2025 win.

Still adding to it

None of this required Russo to be an obvious prospect at 17. The version of her story that gets told in three seconds of video, the back-heel against Sweden, is real, but it sits on top of a longer one: a route through American college soccer rather than an English academy, and a decade of adding trophies and honours since.