Before Alessia Russo was scoring for Arsenal and England, before Keira Walsh was pulling strings for Chelsea, both were simply kids on a grassroots pitch somewhere, playing for the love of it. During this year’s UEFA Grassroots Week, four of the women’s game’s biggest current stars opened up about exactly where their journeys began, and why they’re now actively giving back to the level of football that made them.

Four Champions League Stars, One Shared Starting Point

Arsenal’s Alessia Russo, Chelsea’s Keira Walsh, Bayern München’s Pernille Harder, and Barcelona’s Ewa Pajor have reached the very top of European women’s football. All four have set up their own initiatives specifically designed to create more opportunities for young players and inspire the next generation coming up behind them.

Russo was direct about what shaped her decision to give back. Grassroots and school football, she’s said, is where she genuinely fell in love with the game, a formative experience significant enough that it directly inspired her to set up the Alessia Russo Foundation.

Walsh has framed her own motivation around access and fairness, saying she wants young girls to have the same chances she’s had. Harder’s advice to young players leans on the value of experience itself, encouraging them to dream big and drawing on her own career to help the next generation know what’s actually possible. Pajor has been quietly running grassroots football camps in Poland for five years already, driven by a simple, direct goal: giving girls a genuine place to play.

Russo’s Work Goes Beyond Her Own Foundation

Russo’s grassroots involvement runs deeper than a single foundation. She’s also an ambassador for Starling Bank’s “Kick On” initiative, a genuinely practical scheme aimed at tackling one of grassroots women’s football’s most persistent problems: funding.

Kick On works by matching 2,000 business sponsors directly with local grassroots women’s teams, while also subsidising kit costs for underfunded clubs. Russo has spoken candidly about knowing players in her own youth who dropped out of football entirely, not through lack of ability, but because of a lack of funding or opportunity in their specific area. Her stated ambition is straightforward: every girl should have access to a local team genuinely backing the sport, regardless of where she happens to live. The initiative is also backed by former England international Jill Scott, whose Manchester coffee shop is sponsoring a local grassroots team directly.

The Bigger Picture: UEFA Grassroots Week

These individual stories sit inside a much greater continental effort. UEFA Grassroots Week ran from 23 to 30 September 2026, held alongside the European Commission’s Week of Sport, and is specifically designed to spotlight the coaches, volunteers, and programmes that make football accessible across Europe.

This year’s edition leaned heavily on supporting the people behind grassroots football directly, rather than just celebrating participation numbers. A structured online coaching environment now splits learning by player age and stage, covering five distinct groups ranging from five- to seven-year-olds all the way through to adult football, giving grassroots coaches genuinely tailored guidance rather than one-size-fits-all material.

UEFA’s wider grassroots partnerships have continued expanding too. Through EA SPORTS FC FUTURES, UEFA grassroots experts have helped build a free online library of practical training activities covering passing, dribbling, defending, and finishing, alongside a newly launched Fundamentals of Grassroots Coaching eLearning course aimed at helping coaches create safer, more inclusive environments for young players.

Why This Matters Beyond a Nice Story

It would be easy to read stories like these as simple feel-good content, successful athletes reflecting fondly on humble beginnings. But there’s a more substantive point underneath it. Every one of these four players represents genuine, direct evidence that investment in grassroots women’s football produces real results, not just participation numbers, but athletes who go on to compete at the very highest level of the European game.

Russo’s Kick On initiative in particular offers something more than inspiration. It’s a concrete funding mechanism addressing exactly the kind of dropout risk that research into UK grassroots football has repeatedly flagged. A young player who might otherwise have quit the sport due to cost or access now has, at least in principle, an actual path to staying involved, directly shaped by someone who nearly faced that same risk herself.

What This Means for Grassroots Clubs

For clubs running or hoping to start a girls’ or women’s section, schemes like Kick On are genuinely worth investigating, not just admiring from a distance. Local business sponsorship matched specifically to grassroots women’s teams is exactly the kind of funding route that’s historically been harder for women’s grassroots football to access compared to the men’s game, and initiatives backed by current elite players carry a visibility that can make outreach to local sponsors noticeably easier.

More broadly, these stories reinforce something worth remembering every time a grassroots club wonders whether its work actually matters beyond the immediate community it serves. Somewhere on a grassroots pitch right now, in a Sunday league, school club, or weekend camp, there’s a chance, however small, that the next Alessia Russo or Ewa Pajor is already playing. That possibility is exactly why investment at this level, from funding to coaching to simple visibility, genuinely counts. Four of Europe’s best players spent a week this September saying exactly that, in their own words, rather than leaving it to statistics alone to make the case.