The training pitches at the City Football Academy sit quiet in the mornings before the women’s team arrives, the sprinklers ticking in arcs across the grass, the Manchester sky doing what it does. Inside, the walls are lined with photographs from the men’s decade of dominance. The women’s section has been smaller, tucked away, aspirational in a different sense. When Andree Jeglertz walked through those doors for the first time in the summer of 2024, he saw that. He saw what was there, and what was not.
Manchester City Women are WSL champions for the first time in a decade. The sentence is simple enough to type. The work beneath it is not.T2, Sky Sports
Jeglertz arrived from BK Häcken in Sweden with a reputation that preceded him, though not in the way English football usually measures these things. No Champions League final. No major domestic treble. What he had was a pattern: teams that played with structure and without fear, and players who left his care better than they entered it. The CV was Swedish enough to make the appointment feel sideways to those who judge managerial hires by the colour of their passport. Inside City, the thinking was different.
The squad he inherited was talented. That was never the problem. Khadija Shaw scored goals the way rain falls in Manchester, reliably and without being asked. Lauren Hemp had pace that bent defenders out of shape before they understood what was happening. Yui Hasegawa ran midfield with the calm of someone who had already worked out the answer. But talent alone had not been enough. City had contended, repeatedly, and fallen short, repeatedly. The gap between contenders and champions is not tactical; it is temperamental. Jeglertz knew that.
His first meetings, according to those inside the building, were not about shape. They were about standards. The Swede walked into the dressing room and asked his players to define what winning looked like, not the celebration, not the trophy, but the daily condition of it. The answers, initially, were vague. That was fine. He had expected that. The exercise was not about being right; it was about making the players articulate a commitment they had only ever felt in fragments.T2, Sky Sports
The training sessions changed. Not in duration, but in density. Jeglertz shortened the intervals between drills and demanded precision inside them. A passing sequence that might, under a previous regime, have been repeated until it felt comfortable was repeated until it was automatic. He spoke, according to staff, about the difference between a team that hopes to win and a team that expects to. It sounds like motivational wallpaper when written down. In practice, inside a building where the margins between Arsenal, Chelsea, and City have been measured in single points for three seasons, it was something closer to a contract.
The man-management is where the work became personal. Jeglertz did not manage the group as one unit; he managed it as fifteen individuals who happened to share a dressing room. Shaw needed to be challenged directly, spoken to with the same directness she brought to her finishing. Hemp needed space to find her own rhythm, a manager who understood that her best football came when she was not overcoached. Hasegawa needed tactical clarity, a framework within which her intelligence could operate without interference. He gave each of them what they needed, which is the oldest coaching trick in the game and the one most managers get wrong.
The results came. City did not start the season like champions; they started it like a team remembering how to be one. There were draws early on, moments where the old hesitations surfaced, where a side used to falling short behaved as though falling short were a possibility rather than a probability. Jeglertz addressed those moments in meetings that were, by all accounts, honest without being brutal. He did not shout. He asked questions. Why did you stop running there. What were you thinking in that moment. The players found, quickly, that it was harder to disappoint a man who was curious about your decisions than one who was angry about them.
The tactical shape evolved across the season. City played with a back four that was, at times, closer to a back three in possession, the fullbacks pushing high, the centre-backs splitting wide, Hasegawa dropping between them to create numerical superiority in the build-up. Shaw operated as a fixed point, occupying centre-backs, pulling them into positions they did not want to be in. Hemp and the wide players rotated, fluid, interchangeable, the kind of movement that only works when every player on the pitch trusts the system and the players inside it.T2, Sky Sports
The defining stretch came in February and March. Four consecutive wins, three of them clean sheets, against sides that had beaten City the season before. The performances were not spectacular. They were controlled. That was the point. Jeglertz had spent six months teaching his players that control was not the opposite of ambition; it was its foundation. A team that controls a match controls its own narrative. A team that chases it writes someone else’s.
The title was won without drama on the final day, which felt, in its own way, like the fullest expression of what Jeglertz had built. Drama belongs to teams that are surprised by their own success. City arrived at the last fixture knowing what they needed and doing what they had done all season, which was enough, and which had become, over nine months, the only thing they knew how to do.
Jeglertz, on the touchline after the final whistle, did not look like a man who had won the WSL for the first time. He looked like a man who had expected to. That is not arrogance. It is the quiet confidence of someone who saw the work before the reward, and who understood, from the first day in that building, that the only thing separating this squad from a trophy was the belief that they deserved one.
The photographs on the walls at the City Football Academy will need updating now. There is space for them. There always was.
