Rachel Daly: My game in my words
If you ask WyScout what Rachel Daly’s best action is, the world’s largest digital football video and data scouting platform will tell you it is her header versus Brighton & Hove Albion in January 2026. Daly, grappling hardest, springing highest, perfectly judging the cross so that the ball bounces below Brighton ‘keeper Chiamaka Nnadozie. It is simple, almost too easy.
Quintessential Daly. WyScout is not wrong. Yet, the irony of Daly’s decade-long professional playing career is that, so often, her most obvious best action is one she is not always actually in the position to do.
The Aston Villa forward can claim an almost intimate understanding of every position: forward, winger, second-striker, wide midfielder, deep-lying midfielder, left wing-back, left-back, left-sided centre-back. During her first season at St. John’s University in New York City in 2012, Daly’s head coach played the 18-year-old everywhere, including goalkeeper, during training sessions (Daly was redshirted her freshman year due to academic eligibility rules).
“I was literally filling in everywhere,” Daly laughs, sitting in the player’s lounge of Aston Villa Women’s Bodymoor Heath training complex alongside The Athletic . “I had conversations, told him I didn’t really love left back, it wasn’t my preferred position. He watched me in training.
” Daly smiles. “He was like “yeah, you’re a striker for us. ” Daly commemorated the decision with a hat-trick on her debut, in a 5-0 win against Fordham in August 2013.
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