‘We have the quality’: Saki Kumagai says London City Lionesses are ready for the big time | Moving the Goalposts | OneFootball

If you’re seeking a metaphor for the London City Lionesses project, just look around their Cobdown Park training facility. It is a place in flux, a mixture of building sites contrasted against perfect pitches and other areas that have benefited from the first waves of investment by the club’s billionaire owner, Michele Kang.

Keeping up with the team’s incomings and outgoings is as hard as tracking the movement of rubble on site: the arrival of Alanna Kennedy and Katie Zelem from Angel City on Wednesday added to the other 12 new players who have already filed through the doors this summer. London City mean business on their arrival in the Women’s Super League.

Saki Kumagai, the five-times Champions League winner, is one of the few to remain, having been a critical part of phase one of the project, which was to win the WSL2 and promotion. The 34-year-old joined London City from Roma in January and, despite having played in Italy, Germany and France across her 14-years in Europe, the Japan international says winning the WSL2 was perhaps the hardest title to win.

“Yes it was the Championship, the second tier, but it’s actually the league I’ve felt has been the most difficult to win,” she says. “Only one team can be promoted and the nature of the league and the teams in it means you’re not going to necessarily dominate every game. It’s quite transitional football and there are lots of incidents in the games, it’s very stop-start, so it’s not easy to control games.

“At that level you just need to win, it doesn’t have to be the perfect game or most beautiful. The key for us was winning the Championship and winning promotion to the WSL. That was our objective. So we worked game by game and point by point.”

It went down to the wire in May, with London City surviving a late rally against Birmingham, a point enough in a 2-2 draw to earn promotion ahead of their opponents. “The last game of the season was huge, for both us and Birmingham and it was an amazing atmosphere, but we just focused on the game and the job we needed to do,” says Kumagai. “I told my teammates before the game: ‘Whatever happens happens, we just have to do our jobs and then we’ll see where we are afterwards.’ You need a strong mentality to compete in the Championship.”

Kumagai, who won league titles with Lyon, Bayern Munich and Roma, had initially resisted joining the Kang empire. “The club approached me last year but I didn’t think about it, or the possibility of moving during the winter break,” she says.

“I was at Roma and so I initially said no, but then they approached me again and I had six months left on my contract and it was a new challenge, a big challenge. I’d not played in England, or the Championship, and I already knew the Italian league by that point. I liked the club’s ambitions, it was interesting, so I decided to come. The last six months were not easy, but fortunately we could win the Championship and promotion to the WSL, so maybe my decision was correct.”

Comparing the leagues is difficult for the Sapporo-born player. “Each country, of course, is different. I have played in Europe for 14 years and every country has grown in that time, in terms of women’s football,” she says. “Obviously in England it’s changed a lot too, helped by them winning the Euros twice. So, it’s hard for me to compare when they are all changing all the time. The gap from when I first came to Europe to now is very big.”

There are a growing number of Japanese players in the WSL. “It means they get to play with and against non-Japanese players, that helps prepare us for facing players we will meet with the national team,” says Kumagai. “Of course everything is different in England and English football and Japanese football are different. When we come to play in England or Europe we have to work out how to play, how to manage ourselves, how to be on the ball and improve as individuals. In the beginning that isn’t easy.”

As the most-decorated Japanese player to have played in Europe, Kumagai is a trailblazer. Of the legacy she wants to leave, though, she is unsure. “I don’t know,” she says. “A lot of Japanese players and Japanese girls want to play in Europe or in England, and if I’m able to show them that that is possible at the top level and they want to be like me, then that makes me so happy.”

Now London City have reached the WSL, what’s the next goal? “When I came here, I knew the first six months would be all about winning promotion to the WSL, so I would also think beyond that about next season and what it takes to play in the WSL,” she says.

“The objective changes now, of course, but for us it’s not about staying in the WSL, though of course we want to, but it’s about pushing towards that top three or four so the following season we can start pushing for Champions League qualification. We have potential to do that, we have to keep improving but we have the quality.”

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