New era, new belief: Maidenhead United Women eye statement 2026

Simone O’Brien. Photo: Darren Woolley

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Maidenhead United Women are enjoying their mid-season break after a 2025 of much change at the club.

United’s women discovered in June that their manager Ed Jackson-Norris had decided to step down to take up a role at Reading FC Women and a swift recruitment process had to be put in place, with former Premier League striker Dave Kitson coming in as manager alongside ex-Brentford WFC coach Sean Hillier. There was also an urgent need for player recruitment as a number of established names decided to leave the club with the result that some fifteen new payers have made FAWNL appearances this season.

One of the old guard is experienced winger Simone O’Brien who has stepped up as club captain for 2025/26. “As captain, I am really proud of how far the club has come” Sim explains. “It seems cliched to say that, but I am able to pass on what ‘Maidenhead’ is to new players coming in and to current players. The building blocks are in place and we are going to become stronger and stronger and for me to be able to part of that as captain, I am honoured and humbled.”

“Being captain, I wanted to show the girls what I had experienced through Amy Saunders leadership. I hope I can make her and everyone at the club proud. I wanted the girls to understand and have the same belief and passion that when they put on that Maidenhead shirt on and that badge, they know what they are representing. Having players around me that had already experienced that feeling under Amy – (Alex) Dover, Katie (Akerman), Aaliyah (Charles) – on the team it has been a good transition for me to become captain.”

O’Brien has also been impressed with the attitude of the new playing-staff intake in the summer: “The new girls have absolutely brought into it straight away and I think it has made us a really strong group. With the ethos that Dave (Kitson) and Sean (Hillier) have, leading these girls has been amazing. We’ve all bought into it, we all have aspirations as a collective. It is very exciting. We have become very solid in the way we play and how we are off the pitch. I really enjoy it. I feel that I am the captain but also a player in the sense that I had to earn my shirt to start the season just the same as all the other girls. To see the results we are starting to pull off and looking at the table this season at all the surprise results from different teams, it just shows that what we are starting to build is something really interesting for the second half of the season after Christmas”.

United find themselves in the top half of the 2025/26 table despite that summer of transition, and O’Brien summarised the feeling amongst the squad so far: “The season so far performance-wise, when we have performed we have really done ourselves proud in the sense that we have gone head-to-head with the likes of Moneyfields. We have put in some performances that have probably surprised people, but it doesn’t surprise us the way we have been training and working hard. We deserve the good results we have got. In other games that haven’t gone our way we have just fallen short and let something slip to lose some points here and there because they can add up right to the end of the season.”

What can we expect from the squad in 2026? “So far this season we have not hit our full potential” says Simone, who promises “we have a lot still to come after Christmas. With the work Dave, Sean the analysis team and the staff have put in there is so much more to come. Some of our supporters have said to me that they really see the brand of football we want to play. With Dave’s background and what he has learned he is embedding that into us, with Sean’s ability to develop us and design a session following a game, it is a talent of his. He can design a session and embed it in us for the next game. To sum up, we’ve hit the ground running, sometimes we have fallen short, but we have definitely taken learning from it. We are going to be hungry to kick 2026 off with points on the board to compete for the rest of the season, cause some upsets and stop being the team that are looked at as being underdogs. We want to be the team that they are fearful of having to fight us to take three points from us.”