Grace Clinton wants to set the record straight. Because she knows how the whole I’m happy in the present, the future is for another day response comes across: cliched. A media copout.
“People probably think I’m lying when I say that I don’t actually know [what the future holds],” the 21-year-old Manchester United midfielder says. “My contract does end [next summer], but I’m really looking forward to this year. I’ve not given any thought at all beyond that. I want to see how my year goes, then we’ll see what happens.”
At a club whose previous two summers have been contoured by the free departures of big names and bigger personalities - most recently Katie Zelem, Mary Earps and Lucia Garcia - Clinton understands this line of questioning is about to become very familiar to her, if it hasn’t already.
Equally, the reply is less PR-trained circumventing, more quintessential Clinton. When handed a ready-made script to laud the importance of the McDonald’s Fun Football Day at Bollington United in north Macclesfield, the young Lioness spurns it. She insists she can speak for herself. Off the cuff, led by gut instinct and her own convictions. No plan, just do.
The philosophy has worked well for Clinton in recent months. The former Everton academy product’s ingenuity and intuition have cut her women’s football’s most exciting young talents, restoring audiences with a jittery fever as they consume matches with her at their heart.
Reaching this space has taken plenty of patience and mistakes. “Five years!” Clinton interjects when told she’s about to embark on her fifth season of professional football since her senior debut with Everton.
Asked what she sees for herself five years in the future, the starlet is frank. “I see a lot more lessons, bloody hell. I see a lot more of those coming my way,” she says.
“But I want to see trophies with United this year. And trophies with England, lots of them.”
She adds: “I think if five-years-ago me saw me now she would just be… really, really happy for me. And she would think I was very strong and determined. She’d be happy with how happy I am. That’s the main thing, be happy.”
Clinton has plenty to be happy about. She has just been crowned the Professional Footballers’ Association Young Player of the Year after a scintillating season on loan with Tottenham Hotspur. Her Lionesses debut was notable for how seamlessly her display left audiences attempting to recall the team without her.
But being within Clinton’s orbit is to suddenly know a different degree of happiness, like being swept over by the colour yellow. Clinton is engaging and strikingly sharp, while somehow perennially being on the verge of a contagious laughing fit. It is not difficult to see why United forward Geyse succumbs to a hug from Clinton on a daily basis.
“She doesn’t speak the most English,” Clinton says of her Brazilian teammate. “Everyday, we don’t even speak. But everyday I go up to her and go like this” – Clinton extends her arms and grins lovingly – “and she just gives me a hug. She hugs no one else. The translator told me she doesn’t hug anyone else. Just me.”
Clinton beams triumphantly, as if she’s just scored a screamer from 30 yards out. By her own admission, Clinton is fiercely competitive. “I want to win every single game,” she says, before considering the children running around the Bollington leisure centre pitches. She jokes: “I’ve had to bite my tongue a few times here.”
Clinton is full of jokes. As we discuss her summer and the trip to Ibiza she took with fellow footballers Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Ella Toone, Maya Le Tissier, Alessia Russo, Jordan Knobbs, Katie McCabe, Victoria Pelova and Teyah Goldie — a collection of women’s football stars so elite, the sheer energy is almost too overpowering for one sentence – Clinton deadpans that “it’s all for show”, before giggling to herself.
“No, it was carnage. We had a party, but we didn’t tell our clubs that.”
The experience is likened to an American spring break. Clinton dubs Miedema and Mead the group mums, while she and United teammate Le Tissier were always the first to catch the morning sunrise – due predominantly to the fact they hadn’t gone to bed.
“The trick is to send the spring break mum home early, then stay out and party,” Clinton says mischievously.
Party mode is officially over for Clinton, who is now at the tail-end of pre-season preparations ahead of her first full season as a Red Devil. The spectre is both titillating and nerve-shredding.
“It was a bit overwhelming for me at first,” Clinton says of returning back to United in the summer. “Because I’m not a new player anymore. I’ve been at the club for a while. I know everyone but coming back and being the player that they might want to utilise a bit more, I feel like a new player, playing with new people and under new tactics. So it’s something that I’m still getting used to now. But I’m hoping that with a long pre-season, we’ll gel together and do well this year.”
Clinton’s first official season coincides with a summer of turbulence for United’s women’s team. News of the women’s team’s relocation to portacabins to accommodate the men’s senior team – whose facilities are undergoing a £50million revamp – arrived shortly after new minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe admitted plans for the women’s first team were still “to be determined”. The departures of veterans Zelem and Earps exacerbated perceptions of a team caught in chaos.
“It’s going to be weird not having them around,” says Clinton, who knows both well from her time with England. “They were such big leaders and characters in the group. Zel, she practically organised everything for the group at United. Whenever I played with her, she would tell me where to go, where to stand, so I’m definitely going to miss them.”
She pauses, then grins almost wistfully. “But the person I’m going to miss the most is Celin [Bizet].”
From here, Clinton sprints into memories from last season, pulling out a mental photo album of her and Spurs forward Bizet. In Clinton’s own words, the two matched each other’s freak. When presented with potentially apocryphal tales relaid by former teammates and staff of walking into a room at the training ground only to discover Clinton and Bizet staring at each other in total silence, or the two making animal noises from across the room, Clinton releases a cackle of laughter.
“We just knew from the start it would click,” Clinton explains. “We lived in the same house together, we have a player house, so there was three of us, and when we met, we just knew. She was weird, I was weird. It took us about two weeks to realise how cool the other one was. Then we were like okay. Ever since, we spent every second together.”
Texts are still exchanged daily, with Facetime calls scattered in between. Bizet keeps her former teammate up to date with life, training, how the club at which Clinton found her footing and blossomed is getting on.
Clinton, familiar with the nomadic style of the loan system, describes the situation as a break-up. “A friendship break-up,” she says. “I loved Tottenham. I really loved it. Robert [Vilahamn] gave me a lot of confidence. I had the best year.
“But towards the end, I started preparing myself for things that were out of my control. Compartmentalising, you know? Because I knew I was going back. So I had that in the back of my mind. And as a footballer anyway, you go here, there and everywhere. It’s something you have to get on with.”
A few weeks after her departure, Clinton says she penned a long text to Vilahamn, thanking the manager for his guidance.
“We had our clashes like any manager and player, but he would always just give me tips, help me know how to deal with things in the future and that wasn’t just when I left the club but throughout the whole year he helped me with my mindset,” she says.
Vilahamn has been credited with unlocking myriad talent in his first season in the Women’s Super League, some young and raw like Clinton and Jessica Naz, others in a more dormant state, such as Clinton’s former United teammate Martha Thomas. Vilahamn’s secret has been ascribed as simply “freedom”, an explanation which can risk sounding vague and rootless in a world of buzzwords.
“I didn’t get to experience Tottenham without Robert, so I couldn’t speak about the environment before that, but when I went there, the way he held himself, the way he went into meetings, he was a confident guy in what he could bring to us,” Clinton says.
“He oozed that and that gave us confidence in ourselves in return. Then when we got onto the training pitch, he’d always reiterate to us to just keep trying things, keep doing things. He wouldn’t get mad or put too much pressure or put too many rules in tactics. He’d just say, you do you. You be free. That was a really nice thing for me.”
While rumours circulated earlier this year of a lucrative bid from Spurs to reclaim Clinton this summer, she underlines that her present is with United.
“I’ve made so many friends at Tottenham, I met my best friend there and made loads of others. So I do miss some of the people, but I’m making more memories now with United with people like Millie [Turner], Tooney, and I’m meeting new people,” she says, adding that Toone is one of the key players she is most looking forward to playing with this season. “I love the way she plays. We understand each other really well. And I’m going to throw Elisabeth Terland in there. I think she’s a perfect striker for a midfielder to play behind.”
Surrounding Clinton are over 500 screaming kids, begging for autographs, photographs and whatever other physical vestige they can scamper off with from Clinton and fellow ambassadors Rio Ferdinand, Kirsty Hanson, Virgil van Dijk, Daniel James.
“It’s nice to see so many girls playing football,” Clinton says. “It’s something I didn’t have growing up but also seeing young boys wanting to know who I play for, some of them knowing who I am, asking for my autograph. It just shows the growth of the women’s game, and it's nice to see all these kids have access to free football.”
Appropriately, a young girl clad in last season’s United away strip asks Clinton for her autograph. She obliges, penning her name beside the emblazoned TOONE on the back.
“Tooney is the most loved United player ever,” Clinton says with a smile. “When people think about United, they think of Tooney.” One day, could that be her? Clinton smiles thoughtfully. Having operated outside the United theatre last term, Clinton knows the expectations and scrutiny that will be awaiting her in the coming months.
“Rio [Ferdinand] actually asked me over there, what’s the best part about playing for United?” Clinton says. “And I said the pressure. Comments and stuff come from fans, but our real fans, they just want to see good football. That pressure is a privilege. I’m actually looking forward to it.”