Man City star enters race for BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2022

A hero of the Lionesses’ Euro 2022 success, Chloe Kelly has topped off an outstanding year by entering the betting for BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award.

The Manchester City forward enjoyed a monumental year that saw her score the winning goal in the Women’s Euro 2022 final against Germany as the Lionesses lifted the trophy for the first time in front of a record crowd at Wembley.

Though she is an outsider for the award at 66/,1 being one of the leading names for the award is a sign of the strength Citizens star has shown over the last 18 months. Kelly, 24, had suffered a career threatening ACL injury back in May 2021 which put her out of the game for almost a year, ending her season prematurely after a promising start to her City career. She would be ruled out for the bulk of the following campaign and forced out of the Olympic Games later that year.

Forced to watch her team mates fly to Tokyo in an attempt to lift an Olympic gold, Kelly admitted the injury left her feeling “worthless” and even threatened her place in Sarina Wiegman’s Euro 2022 squad as she raced to get fit for the tournament.

Thankfully, she did return to the City side late in the 21/22 season and was named as part of Wiegman’s squad for the home tournament shortly afterwards, making for her first international appearance since the injury in a pre-tournament friendly against Belgium.

The rest, as they say, is history with the image of her waving her shirt around her head after scoring the winning goal in the Euro 2022 final at Wembley now immortalised in English football history. And while she may not win the award, her England team team mate Beth Mead is the currently the clear favourite, and 2022 is a year that showed the City striker’s strength in adversity. Kelly can certainly look back on 2022 as the year she will never forget.