While the past calendar year did not yield trophy success for Gareth Taylor’s side, history was made with records broken on both an individual and collective level.
From our biggest away league win to the highest number of Olympians representing one Club, there were plenty of memories to cherish, including Olympic gold for Janine Beckie!
This year also saw Ellen White become England’s all-time record goalscorer – a quite remarkable achievement, as she wrote her name into the history books in style with a stunning hat-trick in the Lionesses’ 20-0 (yes, twenty-nil!) win over Latvia.
Reflect on the year by checking out some of the numbers behind our 2021, including top scorers and biggest winning margins, below…
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Total wins
In 36 matches across 2021, City have emerged victorious on 24 occasions.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of those wins (16) were league victories and Taylor’s side produced a superb run of form in the second half of the 2020/21 campaign to push Chelsea all the way in the title race.
An impressive run of 12 successive league wins equalled the record set by Arsenal in 2018, while we also broke a Club record for the number of wins (15), goals (58) and points (48) in a single WSL season.
Total goals
City have found the net an astonishing 102 times in 2021 with 67 goals scored in the second half of the 2020/21 season and 35 so far in 2021/22.
That averages out at 2.8 goals per game.
Of those 102 strikes, 61 were scored in the league, including successive seven-goal hauls at the start of the year.
We reached a century of goals under Taylor’s stewardship in May – less than a year into his reign – with a 4-0 win over Birmingham.
Top scorers
Ellen White and Lauren Hemp top the scoring charts with 14 goals apiece.
The pair have developed a fruitful partnership in a prolific attacking trident with Chloe Kelly having also starred on the right-flank.
The winger, who is sadly currently sidelined with an ACL injury, bagged ten goals this year, as did her fellow 2020/21 top scorer Sam Mewis.
Special mention to Caroline Weir, who has contributed a superb 13 goals from midfield, including a sensational cheeky chip in February’s Manchester Derby win, which scooped the Nissan Goal of the Season award and earned nominations for the Northwest Moment of the Season and 2021 FA WSL Goal of the Year.
There were four City strikes included in the league’s ‘top goals’ compilation - alongside Weir’s worldie, Steph Houghton‘s fantastic free-kick against Brighton, Ellen White‘s fine first-time finish against Arsenal and Georgia Stanway‘s perfect piledriver against Birmingham were also recognised.
White hot
The year 2021 will certainly live long in Ellen White’s memory.
The City and England striker enjoyed a stellar term for Club and country, as she became a double-Olympian and most notably, the Lionesses’ all-time record goalscorer.
Across her 47 appearances this year in all competitions, she has scored an astonishing 31 goals, including hat-tricks against Northern Ireland, Australia and Latvia – a 0.65 goals per game average.
Lauren Hemp also opened her international scoring tally in the Latvia triumph with an incredible four-goal haul. The 21-year-old made 45 appearances in 2021, scoring 18 goals at an average of 0.4 goals per game.
Largest winning margin
Remarkably, City would net 5+ goals on eight occasions in 2021 and 7+ three times!
Our biggest margin of victory was a sensational 8-0 Women’s FA Cup rout against Aston Villa.
A Chloe Kelly hat-trick (her first for the Club), plus goals from Ellen White, Janine Beckie, Georgia Stanway, Rose Lavelle and Sam Mewis kicked-off our defence of the trophy in emphatic fashion in April.
It was the second successive meeting that we had put the Villans to the sword, having stormed to a 7-0 league triumph in our opening game of 2021 to begin the year on a high.
That January win marked the first time City had netted six first-half goals in the FA WSL, as we became only the second team in the history of the competition to do so since Liverpool led Doncaster 7-0 back in August 2013.
We also bagged seven against Brighton and Hove Albion the following week – fittingly on our seven-year anniversary as a professional outfit – to clinch our biggest ever away league win.
Full stat breakdown
FA Women’s Super League
Played: 22
Won: 16
Drawn: 2
Lost: 4
Goals for: 61
Goals against: 22
UEFA Women’s Champions League
Played: 6
Won: 3
Drawn: 1
Lost: 2
Goals for: 11
Goals against: 6
2020/21 Women’s FA Cup:
Played: 4
Won: 3
Lost: 1
Goals for: 19
Goals against: 4
Continental Cup
Played: 4
Won: 2
Lost: 2
Goals for: 11
Goals against: 7
