The day after her father died, Ella Toone was back on the pitch.
Nick Toone had spent decades driving his daughter up and down the country for club matches and travelling abroad for England games. He recorded every match on television so he could call her hours later for what she describes as a "debrief on the whole game." He loved women's football more than he loved watching the men, and would walk into any pub and talk about both.
"He was probably one of the first people that really saw potential in me," says Ella, now 26. "Me and dad were all about football, that was our thing that we had together."
So when Nick died in September 2024—three days before his 60th birthday and five days after Ella turned 25—she returned to training the very next day. The following match at Old Trafford, she played.
"I went straight back into football because I knew that's what he would have wanted," she says. "I started the first game at Old Trafford, it was really difficult, but I felt like that's what I needed to do in that moment. I needed to play, I couldn't just be sat around moping about, thinking about it all the time. I knew he would have been there and been watching."
Nick's diagnosis had come the day after England beat Germany 2-1 in the 2022 European Championship final, though he hadn't told anyone except his wife and brother—he didn't want anyone worrying about him. Ella only learned he was ill the day after Manchester United won the FA Cup final at Wembley in May 2024.
Through the grief, she's leaned on fiancé Joe Bunney, who she calls a "rock" for both her and her family. Bunney, whose own football career was derailed by a car crash in 2019 just a week after signing for Bolton Wanderers, has taken on something unexpected: fulfilling Nick's dream of creating a girls' football academy. They launched ET7 Academy, where standards "go through the roof" when Toone comes to watch the young players.
"Nick absolutely loved it, seeing these young girls come through and playing football," says Bunney. "It was almost like he was reliving Ella's life again. That's where my passion came from."
Ella calls the academy "part of dad's legacy." She beams when talking about her fiancé's work. "I think his hard work goes unnoticed but definitely not by me."
This July, Ella will walk down the aisle with her uncle Dan in place of her father. There will be a cap on what would have been Nick's chair. Alessia Russo will serve as maid of honor. And while tables will be full of footballers, she's keeping football itself away—no songs, no match-watching on her wedding day.
She once told her father she was never getting married or having children. "I look back and I think, 'why would I not do that?'" she says. "He would love me to do those things."
The pitch remains her refuge, and her father's dreams live on in every young girl who steps onto the ET7 Academy's fields.