Ella Toone will walk down the aisle this summer without the man she credits as the "main reason" she became a professional footballer. The 26-year-old England and Manchester United midfielder is preparing for her wedding months after losing her dad Nick in September 2024, three days before what would have been his 60th birthday. In a new BBC documentary, 24 Hours with Ella Toone, she opens up candidly about grief, processing loss as an elite athlete, and ensuring her father's legacy lives on through the next generation of women's footballers he so passionately supported.
Nick was the kind of dad who would call his daughter every single night after matches, not to celebrate or commiserate, but to conduct what Toone calls a "debrief on the whole game." He and her mum Karen never missed a match, and Nick would record them on TV at home so he could review them again before dialling up his daughter. "He was just obsessed," Toone reflects. "He loved women's football more than he loved watching the men's game. He knew all the players, he was passionate about where I was in my career." Nick was the driving force behind her talent, taking her up and down the country for club matches and travelling abroad for England games—the kind of foundational support that shapes a champion.
The timing of his diagnosis was painfully cruel. The day after Toone scored in England's 2-1 win over Germany in the 2022 European Championship final, Nick learned he had prostate cancer but told no one except his wife and brother. He kept it secret throughout the tournament. It wasn't until the day after Manchester United won the FA Cup final at Wembley in May 2024 that Toone finally learned the truth. "I feel like every time I won something, something bad came after," she says.
What strikes Toone most in retrospect is how her initial response to grief was to throw herself deeper into the sport he loved. Three days after Nick's death, she was back in training. She started in the first game at Old Trafford despite the raw pain. "I went straight back into football because I knew that's what he would have wanted," she explains. But this relentless push masked a deeper unraveling. It took a calf injury in November to force her to stop—what she now believes "was my body telling me to stop before I would have had a mental breakdown."
During two months away from the game, Toone saw a counsellor, took time to heal with family, and genuinely began processing her loss. When she returned for Manchester United's 7-0 FA Cup win over West Brom in January, she scored with a long-range strike and pointed to the sky in tribute. "Obviously every goal I score now, I dedicate to dad," she says, "but that just felt like a relief." The pressure she'd been placing on herself to perform for her family began to lift.
Nick's dream of creating a girls' football academy lives on through the ET7 Academy, now run alongside Toone's fiancé Joe Bunney, who was also devastated by Nick's loss. As younger players come through the programme, they carry forward the legacy of a man who believed in women's football with missionary zeal—and who raised a daughter who now pioneers the sport he loved so fiercely.