England and Arsenal women’s forward footballer Beth Mead has been voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2022.
The first women’s footballer to win the award, 27-year-old Beth Mead was the player of the tournament and top scorer at Euro 2022, where the Lionesses defeated Germany in the final at Wembley to win England’s first major women’s football trophy.
England cricket Test captain Ben Stokes came second in Sports Personality of the Year, with Winter Olympics curling champion Eve Muirhead placing third.
Also shortlisted for the award were seven-time snooker world champion Ronnie O’Sullivan, gymnast Jessica Gadirova, who won the floor world title, and 1,500m athletics world champion Jake Wightman. A public vote decided the winner.
“I’m incredibly honoured to win this award,” said Beth Mead. “I wouldn’t have done it without the girls. The team have backed me. Yes, I’ve won this accolade, I’ve scored a few goals but I wouldn’t have done it without them.
“This is for women’s sport and women’s sport heading in the right direction. Let’s keep pushing girls, let’s keep doing the right thing.”
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Awards
Sports Personality of the Year isn’t Beth Mead’s only award this year, as she was also named Player of the Tournament at Euro 2022, as well as winning the Golden Boot with six goals and five assists. She was also named Arsenal’s player of the season, came second in the Ballon d’Or Feminin and won BBC’s Women’s Footballer of the Year award in 2022.
She made the final three-woman shortlist for Globe Soccer Player of the Year, and was voted third in Fans’ Footballer of the Year, ahead of prominent Premier League players such as Bukayo Saka, Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, and Harry Kane. She was the first and only women’s footballer on the shortlist in the awards’ history. She was voted fourth in Goal 50 2022 for the best female players in the world.
Beth Mead’s international goal tally for the 2021-22 season was 20 in 19 matches, beating the record of 13 scored by Jimmy Greaves in 1960-61. She scored in four of England’s six games at the Euros, including a hat-trick against Norway in the group stage, winning the Golden Boot.
Other winners in the Sports Personality of the Year Awards included England’s Euro 2022 women’s team, who were unbeaten in the 20 matches they played in 2022, winning the Sports Personality Team of the Year award, while head coach Sarina Wiegman won the Coach of the Year award.
Other award winners at Sports Personality 2022
Helen Rollason Award: Rob Burrow
Coach of the Year: Sarina Wiegman
Team of the Year: England Women
Young Sports Personality of the Year: Jessica Gadirova
Lifetime Achievement: Usain Bolt
Unsung Hero: Mike Alden
World Sport Star: Lionel Messi
Presented by Gary Lineker, Clare Balding, Gabby Logan and Alex Scott, the Sports Personality of the Year 2022 was broadcast live from MediaCityUK, Salford. Beth mead attended on crutches, having sustained an anterior cruciate ligament injury playing against Manchester United womens’s team in November. She is now in doubt for the next year’s Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.
In September 2022, Beth Mead became McDonald’s Fun Football ambassador, which aims to give every child, from every background, gender and ability, the opportunity to enjoy football for free. Since May 2022, the Fun Football programme saw a 60% increase in girls signing up following an exciting summer for the Lionesses.
Soon after UEFA Women’s Euro 2022, the England players wrote an open letter to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the candidates in the ongoing Conservative Party leadership election, in which they declared their “legacy and goal was to inspire a nation”. They saw their victory “as only the beginning”. The letter pointed out that only 63% of British girls could play football in school PE lessons and concluded: “We – the 23 members of the England Senior Women’s EURO Squad – ask you to make it a priority to invest in girls’ football in schools, so that every girl has the choice”.
Champion
In October 2022, Mead was nominated for the European Diversity Awards Media Diversity Champion of the Year for promoting women in football.
Beth Mead published her autobiography Lioness: My Journey to Glory in November 2022, with a foreword by Ian Wright and an afterword by Jermain Defoe. It details her early life, her struggles with anxiety and self-belief, career setbacks, her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis that fuelled the best season of her career, finding her best form under the guidance of Jonas Eidevall and Sarina Wiegman, England’s triumphant Euros campaign, and her advocacy for gender and LGBT equality, particularly in football. It became a Sunday Times bestseller and was selected as one of Sports Books of the Year.
Beth Mead’s book for a younger readers, Roar: A Football Hero’s Guide to Dreaming Big and Playing the Game You Love will be published in May 2023.
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