Mary Queen of Stops abdicates her England throne

Mary Earps’s England career died as it lived: impossibly grand, deeply dramatic and with her at the centre of attention. She might argue there are 35 more inconvenient days to retire – every one between now and Euro 2025 – but that’s negligible. For the ever-understated Sarina Wiegman saying “I am disappointed”, read “I’ve only considered throttling her a couple of times”.

It’s easy to dismiss Earps’s decision as an all-time headloss, a generational strop with massive backfiring potential, which of course it is. Had Wiegman promised her another summer as No 1 and part-time national treasure, she would have stuck around. For all the surrounding noise, whatever the “many dimensions to this decision” she alluded to, that is the underlying truth.

Earps will know goalkeepers often change mid-tournament. She will know her usurper, Chelsea’s Hannah Hampton, could get injured in a freak accident this evening, and that alternative candidates Khiara Keating and Anna Moorhouse are uncapped. She will know this decision could damage her commercial partnerships and will kibosh her national reputation, at least in the short term. She’s done it anyway.

Plenty will consider this very public attempted strongarming incongruous with Earps’s public or footballing persona. In 2022, she told The Sunday Times: “If you are not mentally tough, you will not make it as a goalkeeper because the sport is too brutal.” Is retiring five weeks before a major tournament, as the emotional centre of one of the favourites, an act of mental toughness?

Quite possibly, actually. When she was dropped by Phil Neville in 2020, with four goalies picked ahead of her, she spent a day sobbing on the kitchen floor. At 32, it’s understandable she didn’t want to go through that emotional trauma again. Among the milquetoast platitudes of her announcement was the line “In the end, all you have is all you are – your character”. Sometimes having the self-awareness to know your boundaries, to know what you can and can’t cope with, is the best you can do.

Earps clearly has significant anxiety and self-doubt, considering retirement before Wiegman became England manager in 2021. “I felt like my glory days were in the past and I’d lost my ambition”, she said in Wiegman’s book ‘What It Takes’. The Queen of Stops would not be the first or last athlete to use a brash aura of invulnerability as a defence mechanism. The best way to become invincible is often just to believe you are. From Euro 2022 to losing her place late last year, reality has been whatever Earps wants it to be.

She leaves England as Euro 2022 champion and Fifa women’s goalkeeper of the year 2022 and 2023. An MBE, she was the first women’s player to get a Madame Tussauds waxwork. In fighting Nike over selling her shirt, she took on one of sport’s biggest brands and won.

Her World Cup final penalty save will remain one of English football’s eternally iconic moments, as will the ensuing “Sweary Mary” paroxysm (sidenote: Earps must be the only English women’s footballer with two common nicknames). Appreciating you cannot enjoy the positives of Earps’ incorrigible main character energy without the negatives is crucial to understanding her decision.

And to suggest retirement will mean an Earps-less Euro 2025 would completely misinterpret her motivating force. She appeared on the BBC’s FA Cup final coverage earlier this month as a pitchside vibes merchant and (unsuccessful) good luck charm for her former Manchester United teammates. Expect a bidding war for the punditry services of one of the most outspoken figures in football, who also has 1.2m TikTok followers and 786,000 on Instagram, maybe even a newspaper column.

There’s a fair argument that 2023 winner Earps is the most personable Sports Personality of the Year since Freddie Flintoff in 2005. She only has to look at Jill Scott’s post-retirement transition and transformation to imagine a world where the Earpsing possibilities are endless. Even while still at Paris Saint-Germain, there is little chance she will fade from view.

Among the many income streams which facilitated Earps’s retirement is her clothing brand, MAE27 – named after her initials and club number. Two slogans embroidered into the t-shirts and hoodies are “be unapologetically yourself” and “it’s never too late to be exactly who you are”. We’ve always assumed we know exactly who Earps is. But what if we’re only just finding out?

Picture by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images