Georgia Stanway's long road to recovery: ‘Low' moments, mentor chats and tattooing

Yahoo

12-07-2025

A small ink etching on Georgia Stanway's leg would catch the eye of her Bayern Munich rehabilitation coach, Moritz Lemmle. Some days it was like playing spot the difference as the midfielder had added yet another tattoo to her body.
That was because during her recovery from a knee injury in the first half of this year, Stanway tattooed herself. At times, the pain was unbearable.
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'She told me she was so close to finishing one and she didn't want to make a mistake but it was so painful,' Lemmle tells . 'When you start, you have to finish, right?'
Tattooing became her 'zen', a distraction from the monotony of rehabilitation. Her apartment is filled with equipment, including fake skin to practise on. With the brace on her injured right leg, her left leg became her canvas. She has lost count of the number of new etchings scattered over her limb. 'It was the only place I could reach!' she said.
'As soon as I pressed that button, my headspace was fully clear. All I had to do was perfect what was exactly in front of me.'
At the end of January, Stanway felt a sharp pain in her knee during training. She tried to carry on but could not. An MRI scan revealed she had ruptured her lateral collateral ligament in her right knee. The 26-year-old had surgery in Innsbruck, Austria, performed by renowned knee specialist Professor Dr Christian Fink.
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Bayern's physical therapist, rehab coach and doctors discussed the recovery timeline, and she was expected to be out for around four months.
'The good thing was that it was not as long as an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), but it's a severe injury,' Lemmle tells
It meant her domestic season was over. It was too early to talk about Euros availability, but if she was going to be fit for selection, she knew she would barely have played a competitive match in 2025.
Stanway wore a protective brace to stabilise the knee for six weeks, four of which were spent hopping around on crutches. In those first few weeks after surgery, she struggled.
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'There were a few points where Georgia was quite low,' Luke Chadwick, a former Manchester United player and Stanway's mentor, tells . 'It just seemed like the light at the end of the tunnel was so far away.'
In her 10 years of senior football, Stanway has never had a serious injury.
'When the first injury comes, you are not sure how to deal with it,' adds Chadwick, who chats to the player on a weekly basis throughout the year and before and after games during this European Championship, just as he did at the 2023 World Cup.
'She was really upset,' he says. 'She was just doing the same thing every day. She found that quite frustrating.'
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'You can't load the leg with full body weight,' explains Lemmle. 'You can train the rest of the body quite normally, but with the injured leg, you have to be a little more patient in this first phase.'
With both legs, they did some low-load isometric exercises, blood flow restriction training, activated the muscles with electrical stimulus and very light strength training.
There were, in Stanway's words, 'terrible days' and times when she went home and felt a little bit 'low' or more 'emotional'.
The road to recovery can be a lonely place, given you are not with the team on the pitch. 'I think she found that really hard,' says Chadwick. 'She's such an outgoing, bubbly personality and she was missing out on what she loves doing. That really affected her. She loves helping the team, but when you're not playing, you don't feel part of it.'
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But there was a turning point, Lemmle recalls, when Stanway accepted she could not play football.
'Then it got better mentally because she knew the focus was on returning as quickly and as fit as possible,' he says. 'It was very important that she had time for herself to process everything. She found her own way out mentally from this situation.'
Chadwick's role as a mentor changed slightly while Stanway was injured, with more of a focus on her feelings rather than performance.
'It's always a good thing just to be able to open up and be vulnerable with someone away from the football club, the national team, where she can talk about whatever she wants to,' he says.
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Stanway knuckled down, attacked the rehab programme and wanted to be the best team-mate possible. From then on, everything was focused on making the Euros.
Around six weeks after surgery, Stanway had her brace removed, a key milestone. She could drive again, saw the swelling had gone down and was able to go out with friends, a return to some sense of normality.
Despite the initial struggles, Stanway says she found 'a lot of joy' with her routines. It became a day-by-day process rather than looking too far ahead. She would go to Bayern's campus, do her rehab programme, come home and put the recovery boots on. 'Then it would be my tattoo time,' she said. 'I felt productive because I had my schedule.'
After six weeks, Lemmle's priority was to build strength. Her programme consisted of single-leg stability exercises, jumps and landings, as well as reactive drills to prepare her for the next big step — running.
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Stanway had to hit certain levels to prove her knee could cope with the force and load running brings. Lemmle tested Stanway's isokinetic and isometric strength values for her quads, hamstrings, hip abduction and adduction, as well as performing jumping tests. She celebrated the small wins, such as the percentage increase in her output.
'A lot of players have trouble increasing the strength values constantly from week to week to meet the criteria,' says Lemmle. 'These were the biggest moments for her and also for us as the medical team.
'When she is happy, you see it. When she is not, you also see it. Rehab is a hard time and there are days when you are not in a really good mood, but she pushed through these days.'
Stanway ticked all of Lemmle's boxes quickly and returned to running on schedule. She started on an anti-gravity treadmill, running at 50 per cent of her body weight. Lemmle remembers her first day back running in late March. It fell on a matchday at home.
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'We met for a rehab session before and we did the first laps around the track,' he says. 'She was really happy, the knee felt good.'
Stanway ran for a couple of weeks on the track before 'the coolest moment', in Lemmle's words, returning to the pitch in late April.
'It was a long slog, but being back on the grass made such a massive difference,' says Chadwick. Stanway and Lemmle worked hard on their own for approximately four weeks, doing running and passing drills on the pitch.
The next step was to gradually integrate Stanway with parts of team training, a small mental push to show how close she was. She would do the warm-up before returning to intense individual sessions with Lemmle. Ever the tenacious player, Stanway found that challenging as she wanted to complete the whole team session.
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Over 14 weeks, Stanway, who kept key dates on her phone, had between 70 to 80 'very, very, tough' rehab sessions. 'It's probably one of the hardest I've ever worked. It was an absolute battle,' she said. Bayern compared her running data pre- and post-injury to be sure she was ready to return.
For Lemmle, it was important to check that she could manage not only the increasing intensity of high-speed running distances and acceleration and decelerations, but also the volume. 'You risk re-injury when you are not prepared for the volume,' says Lemmle.
It was not over yet. Stanway started with a six-vs-six in training but wore a red shirt so her team-mates knew not to physically challenge her. There are a huge number of signals from every direction that a player has to process first, even without the risk of being tackled. Then, slowly, more contact was introduced.
'The team training is a step, but contact team training is a big step, especially with ligament injuries,' says Lemmle.
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Even though Stanway's recovery had gone very well, the rationale was not to rush her back. She watched from the sidelines — and sang with Harry Kane — as Bayern won their third consecutive Bundesliga title and the World Sevens tournament. Bayern had consistent communication with England throughout, updating them on Stanway's progress and, in April, Stanway had a visit from Lionesses manager Sarina Wiegman, team doctor Ritan Mehta, physio Fran Clarkson and performance coach Ruth Waghorn.
She had no fears going into the Euros and felt more prepared than if she'd had a jam-packed season. She said she feels fitter, faster and stronger than ever before and sees her injury as a positive.
'I have test results now that I have not seen in two years,' she said. Lemmle agrees. 'After the rehab, she was the best she has ever been,' he says.
The enforced break from playing allowed her to work on weaknesses in the gym and she entered a different mindset. 'Going in every day for rehab is completely different to turning up every day for training,' she said.
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She celebrated the small wins in the gym, so much so that when she made her return on May 30 at Wembley — playing 15 minutes against Portugal, nearly four months to the day after her surgery — it felt 'weird' and 'underwhelming'. 'It's supposed to be the big comeback you're looking forward to, but it's just the inevitable next step — you play.'
She never doubted her return, only at what level she would come back. 'I've done everything to put myself in that position,' she said in June. 'If I'm ready, fantastic. If I'm not, there's nothing else I can blame.'
Despite only recently coming back from injury, Wiegman trusted her, starting the midfielder in England's 2-1 Nations League defeat by Spain. It was her first 45 minutes in six months, but she was still disappointed to come off. 'She understood why, but she wants to play every minute of every game,' says Chadwick. 'That sums up Georgia.'
Stanway had played 150 minutes in six months before starting against France in England's Euro 2025 opener. Despite feeling good physically, her touches were heavy and her passes loose. 'For some reason, I couldn't do the things I wanted to do, especially in possession,' she said. 'I did what I could to control what I could: my work rate, communication.'
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Stanway was not the only one to have a poor performance. The day after the France loss, the England players and staff had frank and open conversations.
Stanway checked in with Chadwick, too. 'We spoke pretty openly about the meetings that happened within the staffing group and how positive that was,' he says. 'She had a really good conversation with some of the England staff about how she felt after the game and felt it was really galvanising. She seemed in a really good place before the Netherlands game.'
Stanway had a point to prove and did so in first-half stoppage time against the Netherlands in England's second game, scoring with a long-range drive.
Her cathartic reaction said it all. She leapt, punched the air and let out a guttural roar. There was no hangover from the bad night out against France.
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'The performance against the Netherlands under massive pressure just shows what Georgia is all about,' says Chadwick. 'In hindsight, her injury could be a positive, time away from the game to come back and play with even more hunger and desire.'
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Bayern Munich, England, Women's Soccer, Women's Euros
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