After Stina Blackstenius poked the ball into the back of the Manchester City net to secure a dramatic 4-3 victory and send her team second in the Women’s Super League, it felt, in a strange way, as if Arsenal still might have missed a trick in not taking a moment to unveil Chloe Kelly amid it all.

The 27-year-old England international was signed on loan from City by the London club in the final hours of the January transfer window on Thursday, a saga that began with Kelly linked to Manchester United and ended with her alleging that City attempted to “assassinate” her character as she posed in Arsenal red.

Kelly was not part of Arsenal’s travelling party against City on Sunday, but there was still a sense of theatre despite this. What if Kelly had remained at City and relieved Mary Fowler or Aoba Fujino of clear exhaustion with 10 minutes remaining? And what if City have just made Arsenal’s armoury of excellent wingers even ?

Another question, while we’re here: why did this feel so gnawingly familiar? The scheduling of this fixture was perfectly timed given the Kelly news, but it was also a strong reminder of the reverse fixture at the start of the WSL season. Then Vivianne Miedema’s free transfer from Arsenal to Manchester City was the big story, a match played firmly in the shadow of the Dutch striker, who left north London after seven years following a frayed relationship with former head coach Jonas Eidevall.

Her move to a direct rival was stunning, but the response from fans was equally so. Her final match at Meadow Park had the air of a vigil. Her return to the Emirates was not soundtracked by growls, not even when she attempted a shot from nearly 30 yards out in the opening 15 minutes, then roared in aggravation when she did not execute it. Rather, an eerie gloom sagged atop everything, an acknowledgement that somewhere, something had stopped being right.

The game at the Joie Stadium on Sunday was different. For starters, Kelly was not there. This time, Miedema scored. But the symmetry — one player’s plight magnifying the pre-match narrative — felt significant.

Kelly’s Instagram post on Thursday morning, in which she alleged she had been “dictated” to over which club she could or could not join, became a Who’s Who of not only football but of the 2025 zeitgeist. Interspersed between comments of encouragement from footballing royalty — Keira Walsh, Sam Kerr, Fara Williams, Asisat Oshoala and Ian Wright — were support from reality TV stars Amber Rose Gill and Charlotte Letitia Crosby, British rapper AJ Tracey and TikTok content creator Asher Glean. If you managed to sift through the sheer volume of comments, you would stumble upon the meat of the support: fans of all ages and club affiliations supporting the player.

Women’s football has done enough to distinguish itself from the men’s game, but a difference that is less spoken about is the fan-player culture.

Clubs have often served as the origin point for fans of men’s football, a crest by which you live and die, where players are secondary cast members. While clubs still provide the main origin point for supporters of women’s football, a small but growing portion of new and younger fans are entering the game via individual players. Their personalities, stories and overlapping narratives produce their own gravitational pull, meaning the crux of women’s football’s (still vigorously) pulsing tribalism is not as simple as being from that part of the country, nor are the lines as black and white.

There is friction here. The term “parasocial” is usually used here, an unhealthy blurring of lines. Chelsea’s decision to clamp down on post-match player interactions at the start of this season due to risks to player safety is an example of this.

Yet, there are also upshots in this shift in fan-player dynamic, not least the influence on women who allege mistreatment or misconduct by employers. Historically, such allegations would be considered with suspicion, even derision, the woman’s words dissected and analysed for holes, the woman subsequently dragged back through them. Kelly’s posts were met with nothing of the sort. Rather a full-throated, almost blind faith in and validation of her emotions at a global level.

It is worth stating here that City were not working outside any legal bounds by being reluctant to loan Kelly out. Kelly is under contract. Where she plays her football is at their discretion, even if City head coach Gareth Taylor no longer views the winger as critical to his vision. Additionally, social media is a game of curation and persuasion. The full story is very rarely told from one angle, but the sight of Kelly warming the bench this season has been discombobulating.

Some might argue that is football. Get over it. Yet there is a dimension of humanity that women’s football fans demand that arguably has gone wanting in the men’s game. Maybe that is down to the latter’s hyper-inflated ecosystem, its player sales that feel laughably untethered from real life or just an unspoken exhaustion with things like and not

Miedema was taken off after 65 minutes, having worked tirelessly to drag her new club back to level terms against her former one. Arsenal fans, as they did five months earlier, applauded. Call it callow or romantic, but in a game in which political and social advocacy is baked into the DNA, maybe it should come as no surprise that this was the case. Or that fans and fellow players saw Kelly’s post and stood up cheering, ready to embrace a woman in an industry that too often fails to do so.

One high-ranking official from a WSL club spoke to — anonymously to protect relationships — about the swelling power of The Fan and how there is both fear and fascination for it in the upper echelons. Harnessing it is an obvious win. Yet Kelly’s post and the fallout from it suggests the power is increasingly resting with the players and the fans who champion them.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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