Vivianne Miedema: Arsenal legend

I have been watching Arsenal Ladies / Women since 1996. I have seen Marieanne Spacey, Kelly Smith, Kim Little, Jayne Ludlow, Julie Fleeting, Lianna Sanderson and Rachel Yankey in their respective primes. I haven’t seen a better player in an Arsenal shirt than Vivianne Miedema.

When she signed in the summer of 2017, I was aware of her exploits with Bayern Munich and how highly she was regarded in the game. Super charged by her talents, Netherlands had just won Euro 2017 on home soil and the crowning talent of that team was coming to Arsenal. I immediately requested to interview her.

The media picture was slightly different then and the interview was easy enough to get. I knew about Viv the player, though the extent of her talent would still turn out to be in excess of what I expected. In the interview, conducted after a pre-season friendly against Everton at Meadow Park, I got an insight into the character Arsenal fans would grow to love.

Her international teammates Danielle van de Donk, Sari van Veenendaal and Dominique Janssen were already at the club upon her arrival. I asked Miedema how much their presence was a factor in her deciding to join Arsenal. ‘That wasn’t so important,’ she said in a manner that I would soon come to recognise as very Viv Miedema. ‘I went to Bayern when I was 17 and I was alone there so I knew I would be fine going somewhere without any Dutch players.’

I was already beginning to build a picture of a player and a person with a fiercely independent streak. Demonstratively undemonstrative, she never left you in any doubt as to what she was thinking. Her range of facial expressions passed into Arsenal meme folklore. I stopped her in the Meadow Park mixed zone for an interview in the pouring rain after a 4-0 win over Brighton in September 2019. I sheepishly held my umbrella towards her and thinking I had interviewed her enough times to have established a vague rapport, I asked, ‘do you have one minute?’

‘I’d rather go inside to be honest,’ she shot back before reluctantly huddling under the umbrella. That week she had been omitted from the FIFPRO World XI despite shooting Arsenal to the title and breaking the Netherlands goal scoring record before her 23rd birthday. I asked her about it. ‘It’s just a popularity contest and I am not on instagram or twitter very much. I don’t really give a shit about awards but I think it’s a joke,’ she said before making her way to the dressing room.

We’ll come back to her football in a minute but Miedema struck a cord with fans as an anti-star, a player who wasn’t afraid to say when she wasn’t feeling it, who openly rejected the importance of trinkets like Player of the Year awards and Golden Boots- all of which she collected with something close to an air of reluctance.

In November 2019, when she went down holding her calf in the final minutes of a Conti Cup game over Charlton, I asked Joe Montemurro about the severity of the injury. ‘It’s a Miedema calf injury,’ he joked, unconcerned. I interviewed her a few days later ahead of a big WSL home game against Manchester City. ‘How is the calf, Viv?’ I asked, eyeing the ice pack cradled around it as she sat. ‘It hasn’t fallen off….yet,’ she sighed. When that City game arrived 48 hours later, Arsenal won it 1-0. I’ll let you guess who scored the winner.

She rarely celebrated goals but smiled broadly when she made assists, her fierce independence and her teamwork coalesced into something unstoppable. During the 2018-19 season, when Arsenal won the league, Miedema enjoyed what must be regarded as the best individual season any player has turned out in the WSL’s history. I took to having ‘1-0 Miedema’ in my Twitter drafts unironically.

She broke the WSL goal scoring record in 2020 but remained steadfastly untouched by the achievement. She overtook Ellen White to break that record. When the WSL instagram account published a fun cartoon of her celebrating breaking the record in front of White, she took issue with it in the comments section, remarking, ‘how about *applause emoji* @ Ellen White’?

It would be wrong to describe her brilliance as effortless because that is scarcely true at the elite level, but there was always that overriding impression that she could play at a 50% tilt and still be the best player on the pitch. Her build, tall but lean, is perfect for a striker and under Montemurro, she was given license to drop deep and join in with play while the likes of Nobbs and van de Donk ran beyond her into the area, benefitting from her craft (and the fact that it took three defenders to try to stop her).

As the years advanced, she gradually seemed to shed that sense of reluctance in the spotlight and began to speak openly on subjects like mental health, the overloaded football calendar and became a source of inspiration for LGBT fans with her easy openness about her relationship with Beth Mead. Miedema is also a patron of the War Child charity in Netherlands.

Football wise, there has been a sense of tactical drift away from the player. Jonas Eidevall favours an intense style of counterpressing football with a physical, box filling striker that runs a little counter to Miedema’s very Dutch, more fluid style. Her ACL injury in November 2022 and the resulting complications, which rumble on, have seen a Miedema-less Arsenal become a familiar occurrence when previously it was impossible to imagine a line-up without her.

Her willingness to be vulnerable about her injury showed a person that had retained her sharp honesty but revealed a player becoming more comfortable with the spotlight and intent on finding ways to use it for the greater good. ‘I won’t be telling you I’ll come back stronger or that I’m looking forward to spending however many months in the gym. It will be tough with plenty of difficult days,’ she wrote when revealing her diagnosis.

At her best, Miedema was a force of nature on the pitch whose forthrightness and unwillingness to be anything other than unabashedly herself won her countless fans and admirers. On the opening day of the 2018-19 season she scored four goals in a 5-0 win over Liverpool and it’s one of the best individual performances I have ever witnessed.

And what of her record breaking six goals and four assists in an 11-1 victory over Bristol City in 2019? (She was subbed off on 65 minutes). I wrote an article about that performance here. I spoke to Viv after that game and asked her about her omission from the Ballon D’Or nominees list. ‘I don’t know, fine, I am not going to the ceremony…It doesn’t do much for me.’

In women’s football, individuals matter more than in men’s football for they are often the hook for people to uncover and adopt the sport. Miedema brought scores of supporters to Arsenal and even by the neon standards of Arsenal Women, Miedema’s Gunners legacy burns bright.