Brighton’s Katie Robinson: ‘I want to be playing with and against the best’

The Brighton forward Katie Robinson has had a big 12 months, but it has not always been straightforward. There was the huge high of making Sarina Wiegman’s England squad for the World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, but there have also been lows, as Brighton have dealt with managerial upheaval.

Despite this tumult, the 21-year-old has caught the eye of several clubs and, with one game remaining in the Women’s Super League season, against Arsenal, a big summer lies ahead.

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“I want to be playing with and against the best players at the highest level,” says the winger, whose contract expires in June. “So, for me, the next decision is really important. I want to challenge myself to play at the highest level and it could be that a new challenge is the right thing to do.”

Making such a big decision isn’t easy. She has so much of her career ahead of her and finding an environment that will nurture her matters. “I kind of forget sometimes that I’m still young, but I think this next decision is really important for me, making sure I find the right environment, the right coach and things like that,” she says.

Robinson is used to making bold moves. Born in Newquay in Cornwall, the young forward was plucked from the playground by a family friend who ran a boys’ team. She played with Newquay Boys and Godolphin Boys until she was 16, as there were so few girls’ teams in the region.

“I played with the boys at a grassroots level and did a bit of county level with the girls. There were positives, it allowed me to develop different sides of my game,” she says. “It made me a bit tougher, having to deal with the things that come with playing with boys, the parents and all those kinds of things. But playing with and against boys has helped me get to the place I am today.”

Many of her teammates and their parents from that time are still family friends, but at 16 she stepped away from the security of her local environment in order to continue her development, joining Bristol City’s academy. That meant a move away from home to live with a host family.

“It was definitely tough to make that decision to move,” she says. “I guess it was forced by the realisation that I was going to have to do it to take the steps I wanted to take as a player. I wasn’t alone, all my family knew that I had to take that step, I’d just turned 16 and I was moving away to Bristol to live with a host family, which at that age is certainly not an easy thing to do. But if I hadn’t made that decision, I wouldn’t have achieved what I have so far, so I’m really glad that I did, that we did.”

She had to set emotions to one side and grow up fast, rapidly getting her opportunity in the first team. “I have such good memories from my time at Bristol,” she says. “I loved it and I was lucky enough that the manager at the time, Tanya [Oxtoby], got me into the first team pretty quickly, I think I made my WSL debut in October having joined in the summer. That time was so important, to get first team training, be around that environment and find out what it takes to be a professional that early on was crucial.”

After two seasons in Bristol the forward declined a contract extension, instead choosing to sign her first professional deal with Brighton. Recruited by Hope Powell, Robinson never actually played under the former England manager, an anterior cruciate ligament injury suffered in training in September 2020 sidelining her for the season. She joined Charlton on loan once she returned, for the remainder of the manager’s tenure.

Since the departure of Powell in October 2022 the club have been through two stints with Amy Merricks as interim head coach, very brief spells with the German coach Jens Scheuer and later Melissa Phillips in charge, and now have the academy coach Mikey Harris in the role in the interim.

“It’s been four years, but after I joined I did my ACL so I was out for that whole first season and that was really difficult,” she says. “You’re excited about joining this team and then that happens, again at quite a young age, at 18, but that injury helped me so much in the end, I went on loan at Charlton and got the game time I needed to then come back to Brighton in a really good place.”

She returned from the loan spell playing with confidence and freedom. “I wasn’t worried about anything, I just played my football to the best of my ability. That showed in my performances in the games that season, and I just felt really confident,” she says.

The call from Wiegman to tell her she had made the World Cup squad, as its youngest member, was a surprise, despite her impressive gut-busting drives for Brighton. “Sarina phoned me, it was an amazing moment and one I probably didn’t necessarily see coming,” she says. “I knew I was having a good season but it still came as a bit of a shock, especially given the few years I had prior, the ACL included, I didn’t quite think that was going to happen.”

That experience of training alongside some of the best players in the world gave her a taste for it. Now, she wants more.