Relentless Bompastor won’t let Chelsea players rest in search for more success

As the warm-ups ended at Leigh Sports Village, Sonia Bompastor asked one of her staff for the score in the Arsenal game. Aston Villa had pulled off a shock 5-2 win, meaning Chelsea needed only a point against Manchester United to wrap up the Women’s Super League title with two games to spare.

In the end, they took all three, with Lucy Bronze scoring in a 1-0 win, for their 17th league win of the season and a sixth consecutive title.

“We were not expecting to achieve this tonight,” said Bompastor, the Chelsea manager. “I was not expecting Arsenal to drop points.”

There was no mention of the score in the dressing room before the game, but that didn’t mean the players were unaware. For a start, Aston Villa goalscorer Rachel Daly had facetimed Chelsea captain Millie Bright in between the matches. But there was still a genuine sense that Chelsea expected to wait until today to win the league when they play at Tottenham. Fortunately someone at least had the foresight to dig out the requisite banners.

When Bompastor arrived in the summer her ambitions were clear. There was no pressure from the ownership for the incoming coach to get immediate results, but she said from the start: “We are here to win every single title, every single game. This is why I came.”

There was a feeling around the club that there had been a drop in intensity towards the end of Emma Hayes’s 12-year reign. That changed very quickly with the arrival of Bompastor, who regularly describes herself as “very competitive”.

That’s not to say it was all serious. Bompastor and her backroom staff began the year with some team bonding at Go Ape, an outdoor adventure spot. There had been significant turnover off the pitch with a number of staff members heading to the United States Women’s National Team with Hayes. Bompastor had brought her two assistants from Lyon, Camille Abily and Theo Rivrin.

A pre-season visit to the United States, complete with bagel-making, basketball and a trip to open the New York Stock Exchange, gave an early glimpse of what was to come as they beat Gotham FC and Arsenal.

The preparation paid off as Chelsea began the season by winning 14 consecutive games in all competitions. Notably they won all three of the equivalent league matches they lost last season – Liverpool away, Manchester City at home, and Arsenal away – within Bompastor’s first two months. They were also scoring for fun, registering three or more goals on six occasions in their first eight matches.

Inevitably fatigue set in as the team headed towards the winter break, with the first slip coming in the form of a 1-1 draw against Leicester City. January brought a training camp in Portugal to recuperate and some expensive reinforcements. Naomi Girma and Keira Walsh were added to the squad for a combined cost of £1.3million.

When Bompastor sat in her inaugural press conference in July, she said that the job was an opportunity to show who she was “as a manager, but also as a person”. Nowhere was that clearer than when she revealed in February that she had been in a relationship with Abily for 13 years, and that the two had four children together.

The decision to talk publicly about her relationship was prompted by the release of her autobiography, where she wrote about it, but Bompastor also cited the open atmosphere that came from living in London. Bompastor and Abily’s children are often at matches.