The understudies in the ensemble of Les Misérables are not ordinarily interviewed by football coaches. For detail-driven Amy Merricks, the Birmingham City head coach and a lover of the West End musical, they were her prime focus during her Uefa Pro Licence dissertation on maximising squad harmony and ensuring the fringe members of a squad feel valued.
With three games to go in the Women’s Championship title battle, the time has come for Merricks’ second-placed team to formez vos bataillons as they fight with London City Lionesses for promotion to the Women’s Super League, in a race so close it is offering theatre-worthy drama. But four years ago it was very hard for anybody at Birmingham City Women to feel happy, understudies or not.
The lack of provisions from the club’s former owners became so inadequate that the squad in 2021 sent a letter of complaint about insufficient medical support and gym access. Eventually a club that had been founding members of the WSL were relegated in 2022. Then a fire in 2023 at the club’s Wast Hills training ground meant that, even a year ago, when Merricks arrived, the women’s team were based in “three huts” for temporary offices while the burned-out main building was replaced at a site now shared by the women’s team and academy.
Walking around it on a sunny spring 2025 morning, the transformation is astonishing, after the club’s American owners dreamed a dream of WSL football. In the corridors, murals of former women’s team stars such as Karen Carney and Kerys Harrop are interwoven with those of the academy product Jude Bellingham. A state-of-the-art anti-gravity treadmill resides in the gym, together with hamstring testing kits, and the team meeting rooms have touch screens for analysis. In the canteen, the food is tailored around the team’s training loads and the “carbohydrate code” mapped to their weekly schedule with their full-time nutritionist. Their chef, Alan, goes with the women’s team on away games.
“It’s ultimately about making sure we’re WSL-ready,” Merricks says. “They are the basics for elite performance and unfortunately, in the women’s game, we’ve gone so long feeling that ‘whatever we can get is great’. Here the ownership are absolutely all-in in terms of: ‘What do you need to perform? What’s going to get us ready for WSL and Champions League?’ That’s what this is about.
“They’re absolutely clear that they want this club, women’s and men’s, competing at the highest level, and that’s why I say it’s not just about the WSL, it’s about Champions League. Yes, we’re not there yet, and we say that now and people probably laugh and think it’s just words, and we have to earn the right to get there. But that ambition is very real.
“The transformation [in the past year] has been really been fast-paced and progressive, from the three huts to now. We’re at a pivotal moment in the club’s history and I take my hat off to the people who kept the women’s side going with really limited resources. So many people fought: Christie [Harrison-Murray, Birmingham’s captain], Louise Quinn, Lucy Quinn, they were here when there was nothing, and now they have the support, and it would be amazing if we could get over the line for them.”
The performance analyst, António Adolfo Magalhães, watching the team train from a new stand adjacent to the main training pitch as they prepare to host fourth-placed Durham on Sunday, flies a drone to capture the session from the skies. Meanwhile, an animated Merricks shouts: “Want it! Want it!” as she urges her players on in a drill partly designed at ensuring the ball-carrier has multiple options.
Merricks was appointed in mid-April 2024. The former England Under-19 head coach had spent the previous eight years coaching at Brighton, including three stints as their interim manager, after spells at Millwall and Gillingham and time working in the US. Despite all that experience, she is one of the youngest professional head coaches, at 31.
She describes herself as “obsessive” and a “perfectionist” so, in addition to her Les Mis research, she has watched back through an entire WSL season’s substitutions to analyse the impact of hundreds of mid-game tweaks. “I found myself down a crazy rabbit hole,” she says. “But what I came out with was gold. I think here we’ve got the biggest squad in the league [and] everyone has played their part.”
On her A licence coaching course, she was the only female candidate. When she moved on to her Pro licence she was joined by two other women – the England Under-23s coach, Gemma Davies, and the Northern Ireland manager, Tanya Oxtoby – among a 30-plus group, and because of that Merricks feels a duty to women everywhere.
“I’m always thinking: ‘We are showcasing what we can do in the female game.’ When I was young and wanting to come on this journey, Hope [Powell] was around and Emma [Hayes] [but not many other women], so I feel a responsibility to open doors to others.
“I believe in creating a dynamic and fluid team; I want us to play with purpose on the ball and I want us to be organised and aggressive without the ball. Part of my ambition is to showcase the women’s game in the best possible light, changing the perception that there potentially is around female coaches, female footballers and the female game.”
That was something that Birmingham City used to lead on. They were the 2012 Women’s FA Cup winners, WSL runners-up in the breakaway division’s first two seasons and even Champions League semi-finalists in 2014.
If they win their final three games they will be back in the top flight because they host London City, whom they trail by two points, on 4 May in the final act. Merricks knows that what a difficult task awaits before then, though. “Every week people are surprised by a result,” she says, “so you can’t think too far ahead. That’s been our philosophy from day one. Let’s just focus on ourselves. We have three left. We want to prove a point and we want to get this club back where it belongs.”