Molly Bartrip's journey

In July 2021, Molly Bartrip rejoined Tottenham Hotspur, the club where she had started her career as a nine-year-old.

Bartrip was 25 at the time of her homecoming, which she called a “full circle” moment. She had been away from the club for 16 years, most recently at Arsenal and Reading, and hit 100 WSL appearances in April this year. 

However, “full circle” also referred to the journey she’d been on as a person in that time.

In February 2022, half a season into her second stint with her club, Bartrip detailed that journey in depth in a piece for The Players’ Tribune.

The piece, titled ‘Ana’, after the name Bartrip gave to her anorexia, is brave and brutally honest.  She shared her experience of anorexia nervosa, which she was diagnosed with at the age of 14, and severe depression and anxiety, which she was diagnosed with a few years into playing professional soccer.

She says the timing for putting it out was “perfect”. Even so, she was naturally nervous.

“The detail… it’s deep,” Bartrip explains. “It comes from a real place. It wasn’t just about me, it was my family too.

“I remember when I first read it, I was like, ‘whoa, this is actually what happened’. It is almost a life story for me.”

“That was a bit weird, looking back and actually reading it, because I don’t really talk about it as much with my family anymore. 

 

“Women care about what we look like. We have to fuel our bodies a little bit differently...”

“I’m the Molly I am today, not the Molly that I was over 10 years ago.”

Bartrip has only ever had one motivation for sharing such an honest and open piece.

“There’s only ever been one reason for me talking so openly about mental health and that has been to make sure other people don’t go through it,” she says.

Bartrip can’t speak anything but positively about the support she receives at Spurs. She doesn’t like stepping on scales and they don’t make her do it.

“They’re like, ‘Nope. You do what you need to do. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, Molly, don’t do it’,” she says.

The nutritionist that joined the club towards the end of the 2021-22 season has been nothing but supportive.

“She knows my past, she knows exactly what I’m like. I still have weird habits and I think I always will, but she knows exactly what I can do and she supports me with it.”

She says the treatment she has at Tottenham is “a breath of fresh air,” but acknowledges that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done across the soccer industry as a whole to better the levels of research, understanding and support.

“Women especially, we care about what we look like,” she explains. 

“We are not built like men. In that way, we have to fuel our bodies a little bit differently. I think sometimes it is something nobody wants to talk about.