The Manchester City full-back Kerstin Casparij grins when her girlfriend, Ruth Brown, is asked whether she can keep up with the elite athlete when they go on runs together in the off-season: “Yes, I can slow down for her,” quips Brown, remarkably straight-faced.
Life is good for Casparij and Brown. They have bought a house in Manchester which, bar the new sofa hunt, they have nearly finished decorating; their cats, Kiwi and Mango, have got to grips with the stairs after moving from their flat and have picked out their favourite window sills for lounging on; and they recently completed the cooperative video game It Takes Two. When we sit down over coffee in London, they’re arguing over who has to deal with the giblets when they cook for Casparij’s family on Christmas Day and are getting ready to host their families together, for the first time, on Boxing Day.
Casparij’s new contract to 2027 ensures a happy work-life balance will be maintained and she was motivated, too, by a sense of unfinished business in her third season there.
“It was quite easy to be fair,” she says. “When Gaz [manager Gareth Taylor] initially spoke about it, I was instantly like: ‘Yeah, let’s get that done then. Let’s get that over the line.’ I wasn’t really interested in going anywhere – I just didn’t feel like my time at City was over yet. I feel like I still have a lot more to achieve. I want to achieve with the club but also, I feel I have a lot of space to grow, and I think City is the perfect place to do that.”
There is a love for City and a love for the city. “It just feels like home,” she says of Manchester. “I have just bought a house in Manchester … I feel so comfortable and at peace in Manchester.”
Why? “It’s the environment, it’s very relaxed, and it’s the people. I’m a northern girl from the Netherlands, and I can relate to Manchester’s northern feel. Add in the values of the club, the team that we have and the staff and the people around the club and it’s just very like a very big family. Coming from abroad a few years ago that’s what I needed to come into.”
Taylor has said Casparij has what it takes to be the best “right-back in the world”. When she arrived from Twente in 2022, Lucy Bronze had recently departed for Barcelona, leaving huge shoes to fill. Casparij had been only recently converted from being a midfielder.
“I’m such a completely different player now,” she says. “When I first joined, I’d only been playing right-back for under a year. I changed my position at the beginning of that season. That was obviously a lot of work to do for me, but Gaz has been so good. It’s not always nice, he’s a bit of a freak, he loves football, he’s obsessed with football, but he’s been challenging me and pushing me every step of the way.”
When Taylor perches high in the stands for a more tactical view during the first half of matches, instead of being in the dugout, the players feel trusted, Casparij says. “We know what we’re doing, we train every single day, all the principles are drilled into our brains. If you wake us up in the middle of the night and you ask us what to do in what situations, we know it straight off, right off the bat. That’s what we’re trying on the pitch. It’s all very, very detailed. When you think it can’t get any more detailed, it can … He sits up in the stands and he trusts us. Obviously, if we need a bit of help or if something needs to change, he’ll come down. If we do well, he can just be a spectator and have a good view of the game.”
The final two games before the winter break were far from ideal, a 2-1 loss to Everton leaving City six points behind Chelsea, the leaders, and a 3-0 defeat at Barcelona in the Champions League ending hopes of winning Group D. “Barcelona, they were just immense,” Casparij says. “You could see we might have been a bit tired as well, at the end of the year, but overall we’ve had a really strong first half of the season.”
The end of the year has been hampered by injuries, Alex Greenwood, who required knee surgery, joining a list which includes key players such as Khadija Shaw, Lauren Hemp and Vivianne Miedema. “They’re incredible players that are not easy to replace,” says Casparij. “You can see with the way we play as well, with the men as well, it’s very systematic and we’ve got all these players that fit in these positions so well. If you don’t have a lot of players behind that, it can be quite hard to fill that in. For example, to try and find someone who is identical to Alex or to Bunny [Shaw] or to Hempo is quite hard.
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“The gameplan revolves around the players in those positions. It’s not very weird that we’ve struggled a little bit as a result. On the other hand, we’ve got so much quality still that we should be getting it over the line.”
When it works, it works well. It felt “magical” to play in October’s 2-0 defeat of Barcelona. “We felt a very big need to prove ourselves, being back in Europe for the first time in a long time. We’d been saying that we belonged there, but then we had to actually show everyone that we do. We just enjoyed it as a team. We went out on the pitch and there was no anxiety, no stress, no fear.”
That match feels a little distant, though, and the winter break could not have come soon enough for the injured players and those filling in. “We’re still training and keeping fit, but just to be able to switch off a little bit is a big deal,” says the 24-year-old, “2025 will be a big year, a big summer, hopefully. So, to be able to recharge a little bit, look forward to the new year and see my family, is quite nice.”
The summer will be big, with the Netherlands, the 2017 winners, drawn in Euro 2025’s “group of death” with the holders, England, plus France and Wales. “Fun,” says Casparij. “We’ve got a lot of players playing for very big clubs and a lot of players playing in the Champions League. I back us all the way but it definitely won’t be an easy job.”
For now, Casparij can focus on cooking her first Christmas dinner, bracing herself for a New Year’s Day swim in the Lake District with Brown’s family and hunting for her Panini sticker.
