Marko Milanovic was ambling the familiar path home between grassroots pitches after his local boys team’s match in 2014 when it happened: a perfect diagonal switch from the right wing from a girl no taller than his waist. And there went the then North Toronto Nitros coach’s bag from his shoulder along with his obligations for the day. “I stood there, watching her whole game,” Milanovic, tells The Athletic. The girl: a 10-year-old Olivia Smith, who this week became the most expensive transfer in
The girl: a 10-year-old Olivia Smith, who this week became the most expensive transfer in women’s football with her £1million move from Liverpool to Arsenal in the Women’s Super League. Milanovic, who now leads AFC Toronto in the Northern Super League, would later coach Smith at the youth level.
Former Florida State University women’s football coach Mark Krikorian can’t recall the date, but he remembers Smith. A glimpse of a video, a blur of feet and then, instant omniscience.
“At the earliest possible date we were allowed to by college rules, we had Olivia visit us at Florida State,” he says. “She ended up coming to a camp where she blew my entire staff away by her level of play, her quality. Even at that time – and she was still quite young – I said to our staff she may end up being the most talented player we ever have.”
And there is Joey Lombardi, then a youth development scout with Canada Soccer, who caught the Whitby-born winger flitting down the right wing sometime in 2016, slicing past a handful of opponents two years her senior, cutting inside on her left foot.
“She hit the ball top corner,” Lombardi recalls. And before he could qualify where the 12-year-old’s left foot ranked among contemporaries, Smith struck a perfect cross with her right.
“Two-footed,” he says, laughing. “She definitely caught my attention.”
Capturing attention is something Smith has found a knack for. And that Smith is now the world’s most lucrative women’s signing is destiny’s worst-kept secret. “As soon as she joined the pro game, I knew,” says Milanovic. “We all knew.”
In the past three years, she has gone from North Toronto Nitros in the semi-professional League1 Ontario, to the youngest member of Canada’s 2023 Women’s World Cup squad (18 years old, having already broken the record for youngest senior debutante four years earlier at 15 years and 94 days) to Sporting CP, to Liverpool as the women’s team’s record signing and now to Arsenal.
Reaching into her roots is to discover a small but ferocious girl regularly outgrowing her contexts.
“She was playing two years up when I saw her,” says Milanovic, who coached North Toronto’s girls team in 2015, initially coaching against Smith before she joined his team a year later. “We man-marked her… at under-13s! We had to man-mark her. She wasn’t happy about that, obviously, but that’s how dominant she was at the time.”
In her first year with Milanovic, Smith was the youngest player in a team brimming with multiple Canada youth internationals. Not that it meant anything. “That first season she scored something like 40 or 45 goals in 15 games,” he says.
“You didn’t have to be a soccer person to understand how good she was.”
Since the beginning, those who have known Smith describe an amalgamation of grace and brawn, the instinctive swivel of hips, her ability to transform a small space into a stage of perpetual motion, aided by her taekwondo. There was also her fury: to defend, to give chase, to win back possession. As she matured, so did her versatility. Lombardi points to her ability not only to play as a wide winger, but a No 10, a centre forward, across the front line as key to her move to Arsenal.
“Her quality on the field is very different from many,” Krikorian says, who met Smith as a young teenager when she and her father, Sean, reached out for training tips. “The thing that separated her was that she really does make all of her team-mates, everyone around her, better. That’s a rare quality.”
There was also love. Smith would put herself in front of the television with her dad, watching re-runs of Brazilian Ronaldo, of Pele, of sultry dancing feet, doodling manifestations in her diary: to play for Canada, to be a Ballon d’Or winner, to become a legend.
“I would go to a local field to watch some games,” says Lombardi. “Olivia would be there, playing pickup soccer.”
“She would be so excited before games,” adds Milanovic. “She would be dancing. She couldn’t even wait for the game to get started.
“Every time I coached the boys’ teams, she’d train with my teams. She always asked for more. Even later on, when she went to the National Development Centre, she would always come back, train with the boys. We worried about over-training, because she just wanted to be on the ball all the time. We had to stop her so many times, because she would play all the time.”
Stopping her was easier said than done. That is not to say people didn’t try. As early as six, Smith was told repeatedly by a local club that she could not play at a higher age group. In elementary school, she returned home with bruised legs and black eyes from boys refusing to let her play.
After Lombardi’s initial Smith experience, he kept tabs on the winger, eventually bringing her into the newly-launched Ontario Development Centre in 2018, run by the Canadian Soccer Association as part of the development pathway.
However, after Lombardi’s departure, Smith said, while speaking to The Athletic in November, that she was suspended multiple times for soliciting additional training opportunities during the program’s “off season”, when the coach permitted only fitness training.
Not until Lombardi’s return in 2021, when he “made it my objective to get Olivia and her family back involved” did Smith return to the setup.
A year later, after dissolving her initial commitment to Florida State University following Krikorian’s departure, Smith committed to playing for Penn State. However, she sustained a medial cruciate ligament injury while away with Canada’s under-20s, leading to her arriving in her freshman year of college with a knee brace.
The road to recovery was arduous. The battle to reinstate herself in Penn State’s starting XI proved even more so. “I only went to university to play football. So the fact I couldn’t…” Smith told The Athletic last November. “It’s a miracle that someone saw me within those couple of games.”
That’s when Joao Almeida Rosa arrived.
The Sporting CP’s head of women’s football scouting sat in the bleachers of Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, barely believing what he was seeing. “It was not one quality,” he tells The Athletic over the telephone. “It was the amount of qualities that we usually don’t see in the same player.”
Even as Smith’s statistics at Penn State betrayed this, a player operating from the bench, a lone goal and assist to her name, Rosa believed he had stumbled upon a diamond. His remit as a scout for Sporting — the first for the club’s women’s department — was to hunt for the less-obvious talents, a consequence of the club’s inability to compete with top European and NWSL clubs.
Rosa reached out to Smith’s agent, learning about the injury and her slow integration back into the squad under head coach Erica Dambach.
With a scouting video and a sense of certainty, Rosa flew to Portugal. Thirty seconds of Smith’s scouting video was enough for then-Sporting head coach Mariana Cabral (now assistant coach at Utah Royals).
When Smith sat before them in an office at Sporting, they knew their faith was justified.
How do you see me as a player?
What formation do you play in?
What position do you think I can do?
What are the positions you don’t think I can do?
Do you have a nutritionist department?
Will you teach me Portuguese? I want to know Portuguese.
Where do you see me in five years? How can you get me there?
“Even today,” Rosa says, “there has never been a player who asked me so many questions — especially not an 18-year-old.”
Cabral knew, deep down, that Smith was a phenomenon passing through. To watch her set off a run down the wing was to be forced to acknowledge she would not stay long in any space.
This was the same young girl who was determined to return to taekwondo, despite the “torture” of being harnessed into a strap and forced to do kick jumps for an entire class while her peers watched because her instructor (an 18-year-old female fifth Dan Master) did not like her technique.
It is the same girl who urged her dad to turn the family basement into a pseudo-technical skill batcave so she could train during Toronto’s cold, winter slogs: ladders and cones on the floor to perfect her footwork, a table with its legs removed pushed against the wall to perfect her touch.
The same girl who, on the advice of Krikorian, attended Aaron Byrd’s Next Level Training program (U.S. players Naomi Girma and Catarina Macario were both developed there) in Michigan, describing enervating training sessions that brought her to the point of being sick with a wide smile.
The same girl who missed birthday parties, sleepovers, and even her own graduation.
“She’s a very ambitious player,” says Cabral, who watched Smith score 13 goals and provide nine assists in 18 league appearances as Sporting finished runners-up behind Benfica.
“Sometimes she could be doing something really well, then the next minute she’d make a mistake. She’d get really mad at herself. Sometimes she was really demanding. Sporting was a good learning curve for her.
“But I think that’s very important to be a great player and to be one of the best. Talent is not enough. You need to be demanding, not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you, every year, want more. You want to know more, do more, make my team win more. You want new challenges, new clubs, new countries.
“Liv is that kind of player. She won’t be at all bothered by being a million-pound player; she probably doesn’t care. She’s so focused, not on the end results but on the process of getting better, of growing.”
Rosa, Milanovic, Krikorian and Lombardi greet the news that, after just two seasons of professional football, Smith is now the women’s game’s record signing as a practicality.
There were areas of improvement, of course. Rosa and Cabral both point to decision-making, albeit they put that down to North American soccer’s style — more direct and vertical, and more physical in nature – as caveats.
“Probably her understanding of space,” Milanovic offers, admitting that he changed “the whole system” of his under-14s team to allow Smith to play more centrally to learn to read space and play off her team-mates better.
Almost instantly, Milanovic is laughing at the attempt to excavate bones from the performances of a 13-year-old.
“All of us coaches have very little to do with where she is right now,” he says.
“You could see it kind of happening, step by step,” adds Lombardi.
But you could also see the girl, bright-eyed, dancing with anticipation on the touchlines.
“I remember a pre-game team meeting, I left my phone in the room,” says Cabral. “When I went back after lunch, I had about 10 selfies of Liv on it when I opened it. Just Liv, looking funny, doing faces.”
“For me, remembering Liv is just the joy and happiness she brought into the office every time she came in,” says Krikorian. “Wide-eyed, wanting to learn, wanting to get better, wanting to be the best.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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