Does winning ever get boring?
Take Manchester City for example, winners of four straight English Premier League titles and six of the last seven. No team had ever won more than three straight Premier League titles until the Blues did so to end the 2023-24 campaign.
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So, when that happens, where does the motivation to keep winning stem from? How do players keep themselves hungry after achieving loads of accomplishments?
A different Blues side may have the answer. Niamh Charles, defender for Chelsea in the Women's Super League, is coming off a season in which the club secured its fifth straight league title. Since the league's founding in 2011, no club had won more than two straight.
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But Charles, who played a role in four of those campaigns since arriving to London in 2020-21, explained her mindset as she looks to help Chelsea to a sixth consecutive league triumph.
"Definitely not satisfied, I want to do it all again," Charles said in an interview with NBC. "And I think that's the mindset every year. As soon as I remember the first year I joined Chelsea and then going into the second year, turning up on that first day of preseason, it was literally like, it doesn't matter what we did last year. It sort of wipes away and you start again. And that's what I really like.
"I think we've been really clear that we want to win everything and we know it's going to be really difficult, but for sure, I want to help the team as much as possible in that and hopefully improve and get a lot more out of myself."
Soccer
Charles, 25, has embraced a winning mindset well before becoming accustomed to success in the sport.
A native of Merseyside, England, Charles got her start in Liverpool's youth academy as a teenager, with Everton another club in the mix for her.
Charles carried the idea of goals, but not the ones soccer players are most known for. Growing up, Charles always thought a few steps ahead.
What's the next thing she could accomplish after graduating from the academy? What's the next thing after shining on the first team?
Charles had ambitions of making Liverpool's first team around 16 to 17 years old, but she also had to keep a different factor in mind due to women's football not exploding just yet like it is now.
"I was still in the age bracket of like, I was doing it because I absolutely loved it," Charles said on when she thought she could be a professional player. "And it wasn't necessarily like there was a ton of people that were making a career out of it.
"So I think it was probably pretty late on when I was 16, 17 that I thought, well, I want to make the first team, but I was also making decisions based on education because if that was still [going on], you very much had to do both, whereas nowadays, I think young girls can look and think I can make a career out of being a footballer."
Along with four league titles to her name, Charles also has three women's FA Cups, a League's Cup and a PFA WSL Team of the Year nod to her name on top of winning the Finalissima as part of England's squad. She's certainly made a career as she enters her prime, though she's also entering a new chapter with Chelsea, which opens the 2024-25 league campaign on Friday, Sept. 20 when it hosts Aston Villa.
Chelsea's most recently lost star manager Emma Hayes to the U.S. women's national team, where she immediately won Olympic gold in Paris in her first major tournament in charge.
Replacing someone of Hayes' quality was always a strenuous task, though Chelsea did well to land Sonia Bompastor, the 44-year-old manager coming off three straight Ligue 1 Feminine titles with European powerhouse Lyon in France.
Charles will no longer benefit from the consistency of playing under Hayes, though she's looking forward to absorbing Bompastor's tactics.
"I think Emma [Hayes] had built something over such a long period of time that she was able to be quite tactically fluid," Charles started. "Whereas now for the whole team, it's really important that Sonia's really clear, specifically how she wants to play. And I think she's been really good at that, sort of explaining her game model really clearly and really simply so that we can all get on the same page as quick as possible."
Charles got a glimpse of Bompastor's style during Chelsea's recent U.S. tour, where the Blues beat NWSL side NJ/NY Gotham FC 3-1 in New York before securing a 1-0 result over fellow league opposition Arsenal in Washington D.C.
The preseason tours in the U.S. offered Charles a chance to spend some time in the country, as she's never been able to visit on a personal holiday.
The space and architecture style are aspects Charles has found unique during her tour experiences, as well as how Americans put on grand shows when it comes to theme parks and live sporting events.
And if there was a food item she preferred from the U.S. to England, it'd be something New Yorkers are well-acquainted with.
"When we were in New York, we did a bagel-making class," Charles started. "And I've always loved bagels, but I didn't know it was like this big thing. So, I really enjoyed that, actually, and, like, learning how it was made and like making a good bagel rather than just where we have it in England, it's just a bagel, whereas they're really passionate about it in New York."
