Georgia Gibson: 'The crowd were singing my name. That feeling… it never goes' | OneFootball

"There was one day, I'll never forget it," says Georgia Gibson, thinking back to a game she played in ten years ago. It took place on a school pitch in Dubai where she spent much of her childhood. There were no more than 40 people there and she remembers noticing a man wearing a cap at the edge of her eyeline. "I had a penalty. I stood up for this penalty, I'm waiting to take it. There's a bit of a kerfuffle. And there was a man stood to my left. I'm looking at the goalkeeper, and the man's standing to my left.

"As I'm looking at him, he's taking his hat off. I was like, 'I recognise him. I think I know who that is - that's Diego Maradona'.

"So I took this penalty. And the final whistle goes. He comes wandering over, and he goes, 'in football, you will do very well'. My mam and dad were looking at us, like, 'what on earth has just gone on?' I had to get a picture with him.

"And I think from that day, do you know what it is? I thought, 'I can push on'. I’m 15, doing my GCSEs, playing against women. A couple of the girls out there playing in that league were ex-pros from over here who had gone out to do teaching or coaching. I was playing against decent players - I'm not playing against people who are doing it for the first time. When I came back, I thought I needed to take the opportunity to keep playing."

She tucked away the spot-kick in front of Maradona and, only half-jokingly, wondered if protocol might require her to bow as he delivered his appraisal of her. It is one of a number of tales she tells with relish from her twin careers in sport, where she has just passed the 100-appearance mark for Newcastle United Women, and teaching. Another concerns the time she became an almost accidental international netballer for the United Arab Emirates. "I didn't take an official cap," she cautions. England may yet call.

Born in Durham and one of five siblings, Gibson is 26 now. When she was seven, the family emigrated to Dubai when her father, Gary, found work in the city. They spent just under a decade there, living inland near Sports City and on the coast by the marina, their days punctuated by trips to the beach. "You can't complain when you live in the sun," she smiles. At Wellington International School, Gibson followed a British curriculum alongside a diverse, multicultural peer group. "I think we had 82 nationalities at school," she says. "In the family, we were all very much from Durham, North East born and bred. But my nephews have got Filipino (blood) in them, my niece is quarter Sri Lankan, quarter Irish, half English. My other niece is Lebanese."

Chances to play sport were plentiful and as a child she tried her hand at everything - rounders, athletics, mini-triathlons. But when her twin brother Ben went to football training, she would go to dancing. "Twenty-odd years ago, that's just how you did it. I remember saying to my mam, 'I don't want to go to dancing!' I had a meltdown, I think. 'I want to go to football!' She was like, 'right, next week, you're going to football'. That was pretty much it."

She enjoyed kicking a ball around with her brother in the garden or kitchen ("which I'm sure my mam was thrilled about") far more than the alternative. "And I was horrendous at dancing," she adds airily. "My older sister was a very good dancer - she actually went off and trained in London at dance school, and I think the idea was, 'you're going to be like your sister'. But absolutely not. I've got the stiffest hips. I used to do shows at dancing, and I'd be looking in the crowd - I'd be that kid waving. I'd be going left when everyone was going right."

Football was a more natural fit and they played together until their mid-teens, with Ben affording her some protection on the rare occasions it was needed. The game became part of her identity in an area where few like her took part. "I was just always known as that girl that played football. School embraced it really positively," she explains. "We were just footy mad, me and Ben. Everyone knew we were Newcastle-obsessed, everyone knew that the minute the school bell rang we'd be off to football training, or off to whatever sport I was doing, and we'd be in the garden until ten or 11 at night when my parents would be like, 'you need to get yourself inside'. That was just who I was and everybody, fortunately for me, was accepting of that."

She trained at the Go-Pro Sports Football Academy - Gibson was playing in their women's league when she encountered Maradona - and, for a brief spell, she was coached by Kevin Keegan. She began playing netball too, primarily as more of a social pursuit, and there is a gentle smile at the mention of her UAE call-up.

"I joined a netball club, didn't think anything of it, was just playing. And then next thing I'm selected to play in the Under-17s European Championships. I was like, 'OK, we'll just go with it'. It was actually back here, in Hull - could have gone anywhere in Europe, and we went to Hull," she says playfully. "I was just like, 'I'm going to go and enjoy it, some of these girls have played netball since they learned to catch a ball'. I ended up getting player of the tournament." The team won too.

After her final GCSE exam, she flew back to Newcastle and noticed an advert for a programme at Gateshead College, allowing her to play football alongside a Sport and Exercise Science BTEC Level 3. Early morning train journeys from Durham in the cold, dark winters crystallised her desire to make the most of her talent and she joined Sunderland, where she tasted first team football as part of a predominantly part-time set-up. After leaving college and graduating from Northumbria University with a Sport Development degree, she decided to act on another long-held desire - to become a PE teacher.

In 2020, at the beach in Tynemouth, Gibson spoke to Katie Barker, who had joined Newcastle United a couple of days previously. "She said she was stuck in a rut, and just needed a change. As I was speaking to her, I was thinking, 'I feel like I'm in this rut - I needed to decide what I was doing with football'." She went home and spoke with her parents and then Becky Langley, "who I played under at university, and I just said, 'I think I need a change'. I was playing at Sunderland, getting gametime and starting games, but I just didn’t feel 100 per cent happy and confident and content there. She just said, 'it's completely up to you - but why would you not want to wear the badge as a fan?' I was like, 'do you know what? I'm going'."

The move happened within 24 hours, but it did not come without concession. "I actually felt like I was almost coming away - like, OK, I've accepted I'm not going to be a professional footballer. But I'm going to play for my club, and I'm going to be a teacher, and that's something I'll be really proud of anyway," she says. "And yeah, the rest is… changed."

It all changed but it is not yet history. Gibson has been a common denominator in four years of unprecedented success for the Magpies. She hit double figures from midfield in three successive seasons and has 59 goals from her century of games. No woman has scored more goals at St. James' Park. It was her goal - a beautifully cushioned last-minute header at the Gallowgate End - that took United to the FA Women's National League Cup final last season, and she was key to the back-to-back, title-winning promotion campaigns in 2022/23 and 2023/24. It is some body of work.

She recalls the buzz at training, and the sense of burgeoning possibilities for her and her teammates, on the night the takeover of the club was completed in 2021. That was also the year that, having completed her training, she got her first teaching job at Newcastle High School for Girls. "I was a little bit apprehensive of how the football would go down there," she says. "The main sports were hockey and netball. It was a private school, all girls, so very traditional sports. But the football just took off.

"They (the students) were like, 'oh my gosh, Miss Gibson is a Newcastle United footballer'. They could relate to me, they could see. So many of them were at St. James' Park for that first game there (against Alnwick Town in May 2022), which was amazing. From that game, the girls were coming in with football tops, pictures, tickets - 'will you sign this? Will you do this? Will you take a picture?' 'Woah - to you, I'm literally just your teacher'."

It took a while for Gibson to understand that to her students, she represented something more than that. Colleagues would ask how she had nurtured that connection with them. "Maybe I'm just one hell of a teacher," she joked. But Gibson held their attention. Students would point out how many goals she’d scored, or discuss the previous week’s game. "They weren't just interested - they were following, they were invested. That's when I felt like I am actually inspiring, and giving them something to be inspired by. It's a huge feeling. Ultimately as a teacher, you're there to inspire, but it's not always necessarily in that way. Normally you're a bit of a mentor, a bit of a guide to go on and do well in life. But they were inspired in the moment."

When the Magpies went professional in the summer of 2023, on the back of a 19-goal campaign for Gibson, it presented her with a career quandary. It was an opportunity she thought had bypassed her but it would mean giving up another dream. She describes her decision to leave her teaching job and transition to professional football as something she embraced after a "difficult two or three months". She couldn't leave immediately - it was term time - and she felt conscious of how much she'd put into her training. Giving it up didn't feel right and she wondered how long she would be a footballer for. She sat down with her head of department. "'You are taking the opportunity, and you will go and play football'," she remembers being told assertively, "'because that is something that doesn't come by very often'."

It was a chance she knew may not come again and she looks back on that choice with satisfaction. "No working life is ever easy," she says. "But every day, you're coming into work - if you can call it that - with some of your closest friends, and when there's a promotion at the end of it, it makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?"

'If you can call it that'? She nods. "I've gone from having a laptop, checking my emails every night, marking GCSE and A-Level work, and maths - I taught maths as well as PE - so having to plan those lessons, to now, when I don't even have a laptop. I don't even have to check my emails. It's great."

This season has been tougher and it is not a fact Gibson seeks to hide. She is yet to start and the first of her two substitute appearances ended with her missing a penalty in the Women's League Cup shoot-out defeat to Everton in October. She has remained while friends and long-time teammates have departed as the United squad has continually been remoulded.

"I think, deep down, you always know that point is potentially going to come," she says. "We've had really heavy transitions of personnel in and out for the last couple of seasons. I personally still back myself. I still see myself as in the mix in terms of challenging to be starting and playing every week.

"But I also know that in terms of the group and the dynamic, I like to see myself as one of the senior players, a bit of a leader. I've been a big part of the recent history of the club so I try to use that every day to advise, to guide, to help people, whether they've been here three months, six months or four or five years. As long as I'm here and involved and around the club, and playing my part when I'm asked, I'm happy."

Her 100th appearance came as an 89th-minute substitute in the win over Birmingham City at St Andrew's this month. It took a few days for some pride to surface and perhaps more will follow. "I would never have imagined the last four-and-a-half years would go the way they have," she says with perspective. What comes next for her is unclear but it is a necessary consideration in a sport where uncertainty is pretty much a given. "Women's football has moved forward massively, but there has to be a 'what next?'" she adds. "There has to be."

But there is a strange kind of security in knowing that her contributions in black and white will not diminish with time. Her 40-yarder against Barnsley at St. James’ Park in November 2022 was "the best goal you could ever score" but last season's winner against Portsmouth in February felt special and she still enjoys looking back at the photos from that day. Gibson is a picture of calm amid the chaos, twisting to meet Barker's cross with most delicate of headers. She put it in the only place she could, in front of the Gallowgate End, the backdrop to some of her finest moments.

"We'd never lost at St. James' Park. I remember looking at the clock at 89 minutes, and I turned to somebody, I don't even know who it was now, and I was like, 'we are not going to extra time'," she recalls. "We were absolutely shattered. We'd put everything in. We'd hit the post, hit the bar, we'd hit everything. I said, 'somebody will score'.

"I'll never forget going back into the changing room, and Anna Soulsby was like, 'I would love to be Georgia Gibson right now'. My phone was going wild. I had to put it on do not disturb. The media you get - 'media want you outside, media want you outside!' I had my mam and dad there - 'where are you at? We want to see you, we're absolutely buzzing for you!' The crowd were singing my name. That feeling… it never goes."