Stoney, who won 130 caps for England and captained Great Britain at the 2012 Olympics, had been in charge of San Diego Wave for nearly three years after resigning as Manchester United manager in 2021.
The NWSL club were a new franchise when she became head coach and she led them to third place and then top spot during the first two seasons.
They twice reached the semi-finals of the end-of-season play-offs, which crowns the league’s champions, but her third season had not continued on the same trajectory with just three wins after 14 games.
She saw the job as a long-term project. She had experienced a painful spell apart from her partner, Megan, and three children – twins Teddy and Tilly and youngest child Willow – when she first moved to the US but they had eventually resolved their visa issues, enabling them to be reunited, and set up their family home in California.
“It took 22 months to get them out there, we were 22 months apart, we weren’t even out there a year [together] and I lost my job,” she says.
“If I’m honest, I didn’t think I deserved to lose my job either, so that made it even tougher, with the successes that we had, we just had a little dip. It wasn’t even anything major.
“So to be treated in that way, after everything that had been done and sacrificed and everything that had been achieved, it was really, really hard to swallow on a personal level, but it was more what happened to my family.
“I have three young children, they were nine and six at the time, they didn’t have a home. So that, for me, is inexcusable to do to a family.”
The day her children were supposed to be back at school in August in San Diego following their summer break came and went, so Stoney took on home-schooling herself.
It was a period she describes as “one of the hardest times in my life”.
She says: “It did make me question if I wanted to stay in the game because if the game chews you up and spits you out like that, after everything that we had sacrificed to be there, and after what I had achieved in a short space of time, and what we had achieved as a club, it did make me question the game.
“I got offers quite quickly after the announcement and I said no to all of them, whether they were right or wrong, because I wanted to take time. I needed to make sure I sorted our lives out.
“My priority was my family [and] how do we get back to San Diego.”
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