‘It crushed my confidence. I’ve never got over it’: Karen Carney on online abuse – and how Strictly is rebuilding her

The qualities that made Karen Carney an unstoppable winger on the football pitch – her speed and attack, and the sheer relentlessness of both – are more of a hindrance in the ballroom, for some of the dances at least. As the emerging star of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, she has had to learn to slow down, stand up straighter, to be softer, and it’s taken a lot of hard work. On week eight, she had just performed the American Smooth, and her pro partner Carlos Gu was tearfully describing Carney’s work ethic. Who could watch her trying to hold back her own tears, chewing on emotion like a particularly tough bit of gristle, and fail to see a woman who was giving it everything? It was Carney’s dream to be on Strictly. The former England footballer, now TV pundit and podcaster, has just made it through week nine, performing an astonishing paso doble at the all-important Blackpool week, and something will have gone very wrong if she doesn’t reach the final. The show has been struggling this year – a man described as a Strictly “star” was reportedly arrested in October on suspicion of rape, and the announcement from its longtime hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman that this will be their final series has been destabilising. But Carney says that for her, it has been an overwhelmingly positive time. “There’s a team spirit within the cast. Behind [the scenes], the team can’t do enough for you to have the best experience.” Whatever happens, she says the show has already changed her. “I feel like I’m being rewired,” she says. “For 30 years, all I’ve done is football. When you retire, that’s really difficult. I’ve been able to show who I am, and remind myself of who I am as well. I’ve never been so happy. I’ve never smiled so much.” To survive in football – she retired in 2019, before the women’s game was as celebrated as it is now – and as a female pundit, Carney has had to steel herself. “I’ve pretty much been told I shouldn’t really play football, and then I shouldn’t really talk about it. So you have to be really resilient, maybe play a character that has to fight, whereas – which I think I’ve been able to show on Strictly – I’m quite soft and pretty sensitive. I’m a gentle human being. Sometimes, sport doesn’t allow you to show that.” Carney burst on to the show with a leaderboard-topping jive. “It was a lot of kicking – you’d hope I’d be good at kicking,” she says. But the Latin styles and the slower ballroom dances have been difficult. As a child, Carney was diagnosed with Scheuermann’s disease, which causes a curvature of the spine. She has always had to overcompensate for her lack of full mobility, though she didn’t need perfect posture for football. She didn’t quite realise how much of a challenge it would be on Strictly, where the “frame” is vital. “It is really hard for me to get in frame. I physically can’t do it, but we’ve worked so hard on everything else around it to give me a fighting chance.” The work has paid off. Carney’s Argentine tango, performed in a flat cap to the Peaky Blinders theme song (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Red Right Hand), in honour of her home city Birmingham, will surely become one of Strictly’s all-time greats. *** Carney is in the car on the way to training with Gu, to start work on their “couples’ choice” dance for this weekend. The song – Born This Way, Lady Gaga’s anthem of self-expression, joy and diversity – is meaningful to them both. Carney loves its opening lyrics: “My mama told me when I was young / ‘We are all born superstars’”. Her mum, she says, “never told me not to follow my dreams. That line epitomises everything that she told me.” As a child, Carney danced before football took over. She was the youngest of three girls. Their dad was a firefighter, and their mum still works for Sainsbury’s, a job she has had for more than 30 years. She credits her parents for her work ethic: the graft that got her a place on the England squad, a broadcasting career that was initially well out of her comfort zone, a master’s degree and MBA (despite, she says with a laugh, being “not academic at all” and having dyslexia), and several 10s on Strictly. The family supported Birmingham City, and Carney’s sister, Sarah, loved football – she became a referee and coach, but she would have loved to have been a player. “In terms of athleticism, she’s far more talented than me,” says Carney. “But being 12 years older, if it was hard for me to play, she had no chance. She never had any opportunities.” As a girl, even in the late 90s and early 2000s (she is 38), Carney had to justify her love of football. “I got told I shouldn’t play. I got bullied for it, really.” It was harder to deal with as a teenager. “You can understand why, in women’s sport, there’s such a drop-off [at that age]. The overriding thing was I had support from my family, and my coaches, so I was able to stay in it, and I was so obsessed with football.” Her mum always had a ball and red plastic cones in the car, “so wherever we went, I was able to play a game with someone or do some skills.” At 11, Carney joined the then quaintly named Birmingham City Ladies, and at 16, she left home on a scholarship to go to Loughborough College, where she boarded with other children who were gifted at sport. At 17, she made her England debut. “It was my dream to play for England, to play with Rachel Yankey and Kelly Smith, and I got to do it.” Soon afterwards, she joined Arsenal Ladies, winning the top trophies that season including the Women’s Premier League and the women’s FA and UEFA cups. Around that time, Carney’s mother – now regularly seen cheering in the Strictly audience – was ill. Football was, she says, “a big distraction for me”. It must have been a lot to go through, so young. “I lived away from home, my mum was ill, and football and studying for my A-levels, it was a lot,” she says. “There’s a little fighter in me somewhere.” She would have to draw on her resilience again a few years later when, signing for Chicago Red Stars and playing for the professional league in the US, she had a knee operation that meant she couldn’t play. She sank into depression. Before long, she was self-harming and addicted to sleeping pills. “I was in a pretty bad way. I think that has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to overcome,” she says. Emma Hayes, who had been her coach at Arsenal and then in the US, urged her to return to the UK, even though she had another year left on her contract. “I came back purely to … save my life, pretty much.” Birmingham City wanted her back, but she told them football couldn’t be her priority while she got better. “They were, like, we know you’re not in a good place, but we will do our best to take care of you.” What helped? “My friends,” she says. “People around me dragged me through and I owed it to them to try and fight, and it’s an amazing feeling when you can get through that. It’s hard to talk about it, and I couldn’t have done it without people [around me].” Eventually Carney fell back in love with the game and finished her career on a high, having played for Chelsea, earned 144 caps for England and played in four World Cups before retiring in 2019. In 2022, she chaired a government review on the future of women’s football. “I knew how difficult it was for my sister. I know how difficult it was for my teammates. It was really important to me to get [the review] right, because I want girls to always have the best opportunities.” Among its recommendations were minimum salaries (this season, Women’s Super League players will be guaranteed a minimum salary of £40,000, still some way off the average £4.7m earned by male Premier League players), improved pathways for talented girls and vastly better training facilities. In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, Carney had to train, alone, in her local park. “So many times dogs nicked my ball, wee’d on my bottle, nicked my cones.” Dog walkers would come over to chat, not realising they were interrupting her training. “And the mud. The mud was so thick.” We’re both laughing, but it’s shocking really. “A lot of us in that [GB] team that I grew up with, we had to go to the local parks and train ourselves because we didn’t have the facilities, the coaching.” How does she feel when she sees how the women’s game has changed? “Proud,” she says. She laughs and says she feels like a “superfan” when some of her Lioness friends come to watch Strictly. “I forget they’re my pals. I look at them, and I’m in such awe of what incredible women they are.” When she watches the games, “the speed is improving, the quality is improving and it makes me so happy that the product is getting better and our female footballers are just thriving.” Does she wish she had been born 10 years later and was playing now? “No, I’m really happy with my career. I’m so grateful and humbled for the opportunities I had. You ask any Lioness, our job is to always make it better for the next generation.” *** When Carney turned 30, she knew retirement was coming, and she prepared as much as she could – female players, especially of Carney’s generation, weren’t retiring with the financial riches of their male counterparts. She hadn’t planned to be a pundit. When she was still playing, Birmingham City offered her some work commentating for their video channel during a period of injury. She says she was swayed by the free ticket to a game, and they were going to pay her; the extra money would pay for recovery equipment. She also wanted to teach herself to think more analytically. “At 26, I knew I was slowing down, and my mindset was: if I can’t beat someone physically, I can tactically out-think them.” Becoming a pundit, she says, “was always to make me a better footballer”. But she found she liked it. Online abuse is familiar to most female pundits, particularly those working in football. Carney, who has worked for Sky and ITV, among others, was already battle-hardened by social media. As a player, one of many abusive posts wished “cancer, leukaemia and rape” on her, which prompted the FA to urge the police and tech companies to act; but her experience as a pundit has been on another level. In December 2020, Carney received thousands of abusive and sexist messages after comments she made about Leeds United. She deleted her Twitter account, and the following year said she’d had suicidal thoughts at the time. Even now, she looks close to tears. “That crushed my confidence. It floored me as a human, completely floored me. I’ve never got over it. I’m more emotional about that than what I dealt with in America. I’ve not dealt with this.” The pile-on felt, she says, “like the whole world was caving in on me. I’ve never experienced anything like it.” But she won’t be pushed out of punditry by people who think women have no place commenting on the men’s game: “The greatest gift that was ever given to me is my love of football,” she says. Still, she is hypervigilant, in her work – “the amount of effort I go to and the research and the prep I have to do is because I never want to make a mistake” – and on social media, where she restricts who can comment on her Instagram posts. When Strictly Come Dancing offered her a place, she thought it might be a way to restore her confidence – and it has. “That’s why I’ll be forever grateful to Strictly, because it is rebuilding me.” After that first week’s jive, she says, “I was blown away by so much positivity. I don’t really think I’ve had much positivity about what I do for a long time, so I was overwhelmed.” It feels good to be away from football for the first time in decades – Gu, she says with a laugh, knows nothing about the game. “If anyone’s going to get confidence out of me, it’s Carlos. Because he’s unapologetically himself, I feel like I can be.” Other people have noticed: one of her former coaches, watching her on the show, told her she was seeing the spark in Carney that she remembers seeing in her when she was a kid playing football. No pressure, just joy, doing everything she had ever dreamed of. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org