On Wednesday 24 January, the Club celebrate ten years since our official professional relaunch.
Over 300 competitive fixtures and eight pieces of major silverware later, City continue to consistently challenge for the highest honours on the pitch and strive to break new ground off it.
A prime example of this comes from the Club’s recently announced plans to construct a purpose-built training facility for the team at the City Football Academy, ready to open in 2025.
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And while O’Neill, who took over as Managing Director in December, is incredibly proud of that legacy, she believes this facility will help the Club reach new heights on the pitch.
“We feel like we’ve been pioneers in women’s football,” she explained.
“We were the first to professionalise, we provided fantastic facilities for our female athletes but at the same time, we’re looking ahead now to what women’s football will look like in the next 10 years and where we need to be.
“We’ve just announced the development of our new women’s first team Training Centre… it’s where we feel we need to be in the next 10 years to move the game on.
“We feel we’ve achieved a lot, but where we want to go is consistently challenging for trophies and we always want be in the race.
“We always want to be challenging and the Champions leagues, obviously incredibly important for us.
“It’s now about assessing what we need to do and put in place and where we need to improve to ensure that we’re at the table or at the end of all the big competitions.”
O’Neill takes on the role of Managing Director with a wealth of experience, holding key positions within City’s Boy’s Academy since 2015 and having been interim Academy Director in the latter half of 2023.
With a conveyor belt of talent such as Phil Foden, Rico Lewis and Cole Palmer to name just a few coming through the ranks in recent years and excelling at senior level, O’Neill’s expertise in helping to nurture the next generation of footballers are beyond doubt.
Reflecting this level of success on the girls’ side is a key ambition of both the Club’s and O’Neill’s.
She explained: “[It’s] hopefully something that I can bring to this program. When I started eight years ago, our Boy’s Academy was in a different place.
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“We hadn’t had a history of producing the calibre of and volume of players that we’re now producing. That’s absolutely an aspiration for our Girl’s Academy.
“For us, I talked about the best players, it’s about developing those in house, retaining them, making them better and then adding international and domestic quality as well.
“We’ve obviously just appointed Karen Bardsley to lead our Girl’s Academy, she knows better than most what it takes to play at the highest level in women’s football.
“Absolutely we’re ambitious, there is no reason why our Girls Academy cannot be as productive and successful as our Boy’s Academy with the right support.”
