It is fitting that the best word to describe a player who defies convention as much as Rose Lavelle isn’t really a word at all. Or, at least, isn’t yet. We will doubtless see it become so at some point, on the annual list of new entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, at that time of year when prescriptivists point at words like “mankini” and “emoji” and weep for the demise of the English language.

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The word is “GIF-able”, meaning a player who produces moments of skill likely to spawn/be best appreciated in the form of bitesize stop-motion videos that you can loop and share across the web to your heart’s content. The word has become synonymous enough with the World Cup winner that a Google search of “Rose Lavelle GIF-able” returns 2,160 articles. It is catching on but it has some way to go before it rivals the actual number of GIFs you can find of Rose Lavelle doing GIF-able things on a football pitch: 378,000.

Rose Lavelle is GIF-able, then. She is also, at 25, perhaps the most technically accomplished player in the Women’s Super League, a World Cup Bronze Ball winner, a fleet-footed and dexterous midfielder just as likely to twist out of trouble like a snake-hipped contortionist as she is to glide off every which way, like a pull-back-and-go toy car. More terrifying is the speed at which she does all this.

Those who will watch Lavelle for the first time on Sunday, as she turns out for Manchester City against Everton in the first of the season’s two FA Cup finals, will feel she is women’s football’s best-kept secret. She is box-office, highlights-package gold.

Casual followers of the women’s game, who were at their most engaged during last summer’s World Cup, might recall Lavelle’s dizzying performance against England in the World Cup semi-final: specifically, her nutmegging Millie Bright when the game was less than five minutes old (there is a GIF of this, of course) as Lavelle lightly whirred away and proceeded to shrug off Demi Stokes. Her goal in the World Cup final, a drive from inside the area after a typically gamboling run, put the US out of sight after an hour. Those well-acquainted with the game will already be able to tell you all about her, and how important she could be for Manchester City.

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The irony of a player who has caused so much trouble for England on the international stage is that Lavelle owes a great deal of it to an English coach. Neil Bradford, a former Bristol City player, coached Lavelle between the ages of 8 to 18. Lavelle had tried out for her local club but had made neither the first nor the second team. Bradford — who was also the director of a recreational soccer company called Say Soccer, which ran coaching seminars and workshops across the US — established a new team in a new league and extended an invitation to Lavelle.

“I had a best friend on the team, Maggie, and he kind of challenged us against each other,” Lavelle tells The Athletic. “We had this fun little rivalry where we’d go home and I’d be like: ‘I can do this many juggles, and I did this.’ Then she’d come back and be like: ‘Well, I did this.’ There was this little competitive competition going on, but it was all fun and so enjoyable to me that it’s a reason I still love the game as much as I do.

“He was always challenging me with different tricks and things to do on my own in the backyard, so I was just constantly practising, juggling and getting a tonne of touches on the ball. Eventually, he didn’t have to tell me to keep doing it because I just loved it on my own. He’s the biggest influence, I think, on my game in that sense.”

The approach worked particularly well for a player who, as young as nine, was already consciously cultivating her own style of play. “I’d watch games, see someone do something and I’d go: ‘Ooh — I like that.’ Then I’d watch another game and I’d be like: ‘Ooh — I like that.’” She sounds like a kid flicking through a catalogue and circling their Christmas presents. “I was kind of picking little pieces from a tonne of different people’s games.”

She was also, without realising, harnessing psychological techniques she still makes use of today. “When I was little — and this is kind of nerdy of me — and I was doing it in my backyard, I was doing it like I was in a game. I’d pretend that I was going up against people, up against a defender, because that was just the fun way to try out new tricks. I was unknowingly visualising myself doing it in games, and that really helped.”

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Part of Bradford’s remit was teaching coaching drills to parent volunteers. He enlisted the help of Lavelle’s mother Janet, what she recalls as her “teeny, tiny, $100 digital camera” and his star player.

“He would like to have a video of Rose or some of the kids he actually trained doing some stuff,” Janet explains. “He wanted her to do some seven-point juggling thing and I got the video, for a PowerPoint that he would do before his coaching seminars. It would be a brief, 40-minute classroom session and two hours out on the field, where he would go over stuff with coaches. Neil was just truly gifted because all the little girls loved him. A drill didn’t feel like a drill — it was a game.”

She considers offering an impression of Neil, then laughs, apologising. “I suck at a British accent. Mine turns into I don’t know what, so I’m not even going to try it. But Maggie would have 100 juggles. She’d come in and tell Neil, and Neil, with his British accent, would go: ‘OK, Rosie — Maggie got 100, so you’d better get 120. Maggie got hers with just her feet — you need to do that.’”

Bradford eventually asked Lavelle to join him in a far more competitive team, playing a year up in a tougher league.

“She was timid at first because she left all her friends behind,” Janet recalls. “At the beginning, maybe a month into the season, she wanted to move back to her old team because that’s where all her friends were. These girls were older and bigger and it was much more competitive than she’d ever played. I said: ‘You have to choose to finish the season and then we’ll go back to your old team next season. You have to finish what you started.’

“At the end of the season, I reminded her: ‘Do you still want to go back to your old team? I told you you could, and you can.’ She said: ‘What? No!’ She didn’t remember that conversation from four months earlier.

“When she was with the under-20 national team she called me, real thoughtful, and said: ‘Sometimes I think, what if I had never met Neil? I can’t even imagine. I wouldn’t be here. It scares me to think that our paths would have never crossed.’”

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Bradford passed away in 2016, aged 44, from cancer. Six weeks before his death, Lavelle scored two goals, and dedicated them to him, while playing for a local semi-professional team during college break.

Lavelle is 5ft 4in but as a child was a particularly slight and diminutive player. Janet jokes that she could go over to the family photo album and Rose will always be among the shortest in the class photograph. Yet Rose was ahead of many other children in terms of her development. She learned to crawl early, before she was even really able to look up, Janet says, so her early years were defined by bumping into walls before pressing forward. As a toddler, she was surprisingly agile and deceptively difficult to shrug off the ball.

“Her preschool teachers said to me: ‘We’ve never seen a kid of her size and her age handle those monkey bars like it was nothing. She’d just swing through them.’ If you tried to pick her up or move her, then you could tell there was a little bit of core there. It always felt like she weighed more than she possibly looked.

“Sometimes, parents would give her brief nicknames: ‘She’s a little gnat — she’s just flitting around you.’ Another parent would call her Tinkerbell because her feet never touched the ground — she just flies through the air with the ball on her toes. They would just be quick comparisons but she just moved differently. She just glided.”

The story goes that Lavelle deliberately and thoughtfully turned herself into a whippet-like trickster to compensate for her lack of size. “I definitely didn’t consciously think of it,” Lavelle says. “It wasn’t intentional but it definitely helped me. I was like: ‘OK, you can’t knock me off the ball if you can’t get near me. It encouraged me to keep improving on that side of my game because I did realise that it was something that helped make up for my size.”

To watch Lavelle’s effortless dominance in the World Cup was, invariably, to wonder what it feels like to run games with that joyful kind of glee. The same could be asked of Lucy Bronze, whose performance in England’s quarter-final against Norway was among the best individual displays of the tournament, but Bronze’s showing was characterised by a bruising athleticism, an exhibition in her vastly superior skill and vastly superior fitness.

The Arsenal forward Vivianne Miedema is the opposite, her natural menace in front of goal rendered all the more terrifying because of the almost comical langour and nonchalance accompanying it. In the middle of the pair sits Lavelle, who will hurtle forward with Bronze’s athleticism but with airy, gazelle-like steps. It makes for an intoxicating combination, giddy moments of skill delivered with gentle instinct and intuition.

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“Any athlete will say they’re playing their best when things are flowing and everything feels really innate,” Lavelle says. “I can always tell when I’m in the zone and when that’s the case. Defenders come at you or it just feels like… I don’t know. It just feels like it’s second nature, like you’re playing what’s on and your body’s just doing things and your mind’s just adapting to it. It just kind of comes to you.”

She pauses, considerate. “I don’t know if I answered that well. When you’re in a rut, you overthink things, or your mind and body are just not on the same page. You’re not reading the game as well, and your mind and body aren’t keeping up in the same capacity. When I’m not doing great, I have to envision what I would do differently in the scenario. It’s like a whole mental piece.”

On form, Lavelle will imagine what she has done and will do, over and over. If a trick goes wrong, she will re-write over it, visually, in her mind’s eye. Most athletes who use visualisation can summon a skill over and over in this way, to replicate physical practice without moving. “I feel like the mental side of the game is really underrated,” Lavelle continues. “It’s an area I don’t think people realise you should work on. In the past three years, it’s something I’ve really gotten into and taken more seriously, and I feel like it has helped me stay even-keeled, consistent. It’s definitely a work in progress, and I think some days I’m better at it than other days and some I’m not so good at it. But it’s definitely helped me so much.”

She has a daily routine, the impact of which has been so profound that she is sure it will “continue to help me throughout my career”. She meets with her sports psychologist either weekly or fortnightly. Meditation is key, and she writes in a journal every day. “When you put it on paper, you close the journal and it’s kind of done with. I feel like I can move on better: I’ve got my thoughts out, and I don’t have to sit with them as much anymore. I can close the book and move on with my day. It’s a time to reflect: how was practice? How did I feel after? How did my day go? It’s just a good way to release all your thoughts and move on. There’s so many different things that you can do to train your mind.”

Lavelle’s work on that front has helped her grow into an uninhibited, less anxious player, to the extent that Janet and Rose’s father Marty were struck, in the rare moments they could see their daughter between matches, by just how lightly Lavelle wore the pressure of life as the World Cup’s breakout star. The US Women’s National Team, after all, is a political and social movement as much as it is a sports team, never more so than last year with Megan Rapinoe as its epicentre. The perfect storm of skill and spokespeople made them the most talked-about team of the competition, with Lavelle’s performances, allied with her team’s status as favourites, putting her on the brink of superstardom.

Lavelle’s hamstring injury meant that didn’t know how often or how long she would play for, Janet explains, inspiring a more level-headed approach. “She didn’t know what was coming the next day, so she was kind of: ‘I’m here, and I’m going for whatever they want me to do.’ She just was joyous to be there, happy to be there, ready to embrace it.

“It was contagious for me because it made me so much less stressed out about it. Every game, you’re praying: ‘Just let her do a job. Don’t let her cost the team a goal. Don’t let her make a mistake that she’s going to beat herself up over.’ That’s how I look at it because I know how responsible players feel, and I know how responsible my daughter feels. I’m nervous for her in the really big games.

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“I do think she’s a perfectionist. She’s her hugest critic. I feel like during college, if she let the team down — and they relied on her heavily — if she felt like she didn’t do her job, then it really took a toll on her, mentally. I know she would not think that of another teammate because everybody is out there giving it their all. So I hate it when they think it about themselves.

“She’s able to deal with it and move on now so that she can keep playing her best. I don’t feel like it happened all the time, but if it did, she’s just someone that would go for a walk and want to be left alone, left to her thoughts and wallow in her own little pity. All you can do is listen, pat them on the back, be the shoulder to cry on and say: ‘Did you put it all out there? Did you give it the best?’ The hardest part of seeing her fail is how she feels about it. It never disappoints me personally. The sports psychology has helped her a lot.”

Lavelle has always been a voracious reader. Janet tells a story of how Rose’s cousin Jodie would come for playdates and the pair would sit in the front room reading, and her daughter’s preferred past time is to “just sit at home with a nice book and a cup of coffee, to get her head someplace else”. She read eight books during the US’s month-long World Cup-winning stay in France. “I think it’s a nice little step away from technology and a little break from reality. I love it,” Lavelle says.

Lavelle read her way through a heady 2019 that saw her named the sixth-greatest player in the world in the Best FIFA Football Awards and named in the 2019 FIFPro World XI. There was the extensive, obligatory victory tour, and there have been endorsement deals, and a mural of her face was unveiled in Cincinnati prior to the tournament. All the while, she has remained unchanged.

“You win the World Cup and you think you’re going to go on some world tour of partying and this and that,” says Lavelle’s agent Remy Cherin. “She wanted to go to Harry Potter World with her best friend from growing up.

“She’s probably within the top four or five people that I love talking about the game with because she’s so intelligent. The way she breaks training sessions down… It’s every little action: if you’re going to force a player, why would you do it one way instead of the other? She has such a high footballing IQ, and I think that’s why everything is instinctive and comes so easily. When she’s watching a game, it’s almost interesting to watch her head go, because of the way she digests it and dissects it. She’s such a thoughtful thinker, and that, coupled with how instinctive she is, makes her the special player she is.”

Lavelle likewise points to the fusion of heart and head. City film every training session and most players, Lavelle included, watch the footage back by themselves in their spare time. “We’re always provided with a scouting report, and you can kind of base a little bit of how you’re going to play off that. But regardless of who the opponent is, I still want to bring my qualities. It’s more just reading in the moment what’s on.”

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There is another factor, Cherin says. “She also fucking works her balls off. People don’t talk about it enough.”

Why did she move to England? “She had been keen to grow as a person and player and we looked at Europe, specifically England, as a place where she could have that experience,” Cherin says. “When the opportunity to get a packed slate of games came up, it was clear now would be a good time. The desire had been there before.”

On Sunday, City’s dainty escape artist will try to win her first English silverware after City overcame Arsenal in the semi-final. “When the game ended and I saw all the girls’ reactions… it’s such a huge deal and so exciting,” Lavelle says. “Seeing that was incredible. After that game, I realised how big a deal it was. I think everything is so heightened when you’re in a final — the intensity is just going to have to be that much better. Definitely playing in a World Cup final helps that.”

(Top photo: Matt McNulty/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)