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Why is the following so important to Leyton Orient women's team's fans?

Here's an interview conducted by "The Athletic", a magazine which now takes the role of the sports pages for the New York Times newspaper, one of the world's most prestigious and revered news and editorial portals. It tells of the matters discussed between the NYT and Stephanie McCaffrey - who needs no introduction here.

Despite being the driving force behind the organisation which has brought Orient's women's team to a place of huge potential (plus scoring a few goals on the way), there hasn't been universal acceptance in a few quarters that her methods have produced an entirely positive outcome. We invite those people to read this interview in order to acquaint themselves with the motivation, the actions and the current situation in order to take a considered position based on the facts. It's a bit long and wordy but, if you have misgivings about where the club and it's women's team are at the present, we invite you now to take the time to read it through.

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Steph McCaffrey: From the US women's national team to being Public Enemy No 1 in England’s lower leagues.

By Megan Feringa - Oct 25th/2025.

Peak brunch time in Hampstead, London, and former USWNT forward Steph McCaffrey stands amid the chaos of avocado toast and hungry, unseated Londoners with her life in both hands: a miniature red poodle named Mabelline cradled in one, an iPhone clutched in the other.

The 32-year-old is mid-voice note, plotting the final touches to Racketeer, Europe’s soon-to-be largest pickleball and padel facility, her latest venture with Pickle Pop, the Los Angeles-based seven-figure pickleball business she co-owns with her wife, Erin Robertson, winner of Season 15 of the U.S. reality TV show Project Runway.

Simultaneously, she is fielding text messages about the next day’s FA Cup play-off match for Leyton Orient Women, the seventh-tier team she both plays for and chairs following the “significant investment” by McCaffrey Football Group, a women’s sports investment firm owned by McCaffrey’s mum, Gina, and co-founded with her dad, James, a 1986 NBA draftee with the Phoenix Suns and minority investor in Orient.

It’s because of her association with the east London club that we’re meeting: to discuss how McCaffrey managed to convince 13 of Orient’s current 16-player squad to drop down from the second, third and fourth tiers into England’s amateur seventh tier. Known as the Greater London Women’s Football League Premier Division, it is described by the FA as a “grassroots league that is the entry level for clubs and leagues to play 11-a-side football”.

Upon spotting The Athletic, McCaffrey mouths an exaggerated “sorry”. A hungry couple nearby is told the wait time is next week but McCaffrey clearly has strings to pull. Suddenly, we are being pulled through a small corridor before emerging to find a small table being assembled for us. Staff emerge to say hello. They give Mabelline a pat. They request updates on Racketeer’s opening (“November! So soon!”) and when the Women’s Super League, England’s top flight, will finally come calling (“Tier five first!”).

McCaffrey may be a VIP but she wears it lightly. “I just try to treat everyone with respect, talk to them like they’re human,” she says. But it’s that courtesy, and approachability, which many Orient players The Athletic spoke to for this piece cite when asked about why they decamped to the seventh tier.

Not everyone in the English women’s game is enjoying the Orient story. In fact, many in the lower leagues consider Orient — with their 76 goals scored and one conceded in seven matches across all competitions — Public Enemy No 1.

One opposition club, according to Orient head coach and CEO Jason Stephens, wrote to the English Football Association at the start of the season half-joking that the seventh-tier season might as well be called off after Orient’s summer recruitment.

A player on a rival team, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their position, quipped to The Athletic that they’d be better off accepting a walk over (a forfeit) as it would only consign them to a 3-0 defeat, rather than the double-digit drubbings Orient have been doling out. This season’s results read more like a bingo card than football scores — 13-0, 14-0, 14-0, 13-0, 5-1, 10-0, 7-0, 8-0 — and each one prompts grumbles on social media that Orient are effectively ruining the league.

Many clubs in the seventh tier are independent of an affiliated men’s side and have climbed their way through the pyramid system organically, only to discover their pathways blocked by teams with bigger bank accounts.

The £20-30,000 average annual operating costs in the seventh tier, including any expenses for coaching staff, are subsidised predominantly by pay-to-play player subscriptions and unswerving volunteer energy. Players moonlight as administrative assistants, chief executives and touchline tacticians when not busy picking clumps of grass out of their boots or working 9-5.

It is illegal to pay players salaries below the fourth tier of women’s football in England, according to FA rules. That means the only recompense McCaffrey can offer is travel, medical and match expenses and help with gym memberships (what she begrudgingly deems “the bare minimum the FA let me provide”).

She adds that capital has been invested into infrastructure and staff, such as hiring Stephens, assistant manager Craig Davidson and operations manager Wayne Rothon.

“I want to pay my players, but the FA isn’t letting me. Who is that hurting?” McCaffrey asks. “It’s hurting the players. It’s not helpful for the game. What’s helpful for the game is bringing more capital into it and getting more eyeballs on it and getting me to invest in all these things.”

The FA told The Athletic that players playing in tier five and below can receive payment but “need to be of a non-contract in accordance with HMRC requirements,” adding that similar rules exist in the men’s game “with restrictions preventing the contracting of players at lower levels.”

There has also been some internal criticism, notably from the club fanzine Leyton Orientear, which published an article bemoaning how many of the core players which drove the club from tier nine to tier seven in 2022 and finished fourth in Greater London Women’s Football League Premier Division last season have been jettisoned.

McCaffrey, along with former Blackburn Rovers forward Ellie Thomas-Leek and former Lewes midfielder Lucy Porter, are the only surviving players from last season’s squad. McCaffrey and Stephens maintain that every player was offered a trial ahead of the new campaign but were also informed of the increase in fitness standards and time commitment. According to Stephens, many players chose not to attend the trials.

“I’m a big proponent of the notion that to grow women’s football at that level, it needs investment,” McCaffrey says. “If it needs investment, you have to run it like a professional football club and make hard decisions.”

McCaffrey believes some clubs are making easy decisions. In the past two seasons, Blackburn Rovers and Reading’s women’s team were demoted from the second tier (known as WSL2) to the fourth and fifth tiers respectively after failing to meet player welfare and financing standards. While WSL Football is set to announce new minimum standards for the top two divisions, the standard of resourcing, from expenses to coaching staff to training facilities, in the tiers below, which are run by the FA, remains a divergent tapestry.

Tier three allows players to be on full-time salaries but not all clubs operate that way, with many players still balancing full-time jobs alongside semi-professional contracts.

“The narrative is going to be that players have dropped down for money,” says Stephens. “Really, we were turned by the fact someone wanted to invest in the long term, that there was an opportunity to leave a legacy and change the ecosystem.”

Thomas-Leek rose through Bristol Academy (now Bristol City) and danced the delicate ballet of full-time work and football for her 10-year career in England’s top two flights.

“I’ve gone through the grit and sacrifice to play this game for nothing,” she says. “It feels surreal I’m playing in the seventh tier. But when you find owners like the McCaffreys who care about you as a player, who hire coaches who genuinely care about you individually, who don’t make you stress about doing your ACL, if you’ll be out of pocket because you need to pay for gas or food to go to a game… That’s all we’ve wanted in the women’s game. Just look after us.”

McCaffrey has a dog in the fight. Two, actually. There’s the one that reaches back to the mid-2010s when McCaffrey was a regular starter with the Boston Breakers and Chicago Red Stars, only for her nascent career to slam to a stop in 2018, aged 25, following her diagnosis with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder where the immune system mistakenly attacks the thyroid gland, causing it to produce excessive thyroid hormones, a condition known as hyperthyroidism.

“Realistically, I should have taken a year off to recover, then come back to playing,” she says. “But I knew I was coming back to $35,000 a year for being a starter in the NWSL. If I made the national team, I’d make a bonus, but it was still five times behind what it was now.

“What I’ve settled on is that you can’t make everything better all at once. My North Star is bringing more resources and more money to female athletes. The resources these girls are getting across the board from tier four and below are so ****ed up. Our argument is that women’s football, tiers eight and above, shouldn’t be amateur anymore.”

And there’s the second dog: the one that is unabashed in acknowledging there is money to make. McCaffrey, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business after retirement, describes herself as “the most liberal capitalist you’ll ever meet”. It’s entrepreneurship that breathes life into McCaffrey.

“The first thing I googled when I started looking at taking over Orient was what other teams are in tiers five through seven who have legitimate backing?” says McCaffrey, who was introduced to Orient after her father became a minority investor in 2023. “And the answer was none. I was surprised by that. Because I see a clear path to these teams, a 20-time multiple in value over five years. That’s exciting. There’s a gold rush right now going to tiers one and two but true entrepreneurship is investing in things that people haven’t really thought of yet.

“But if all we cared about is money, tier seven women’s football isn’t where we’d start. We’d be in AI, tech, real estate. But none of that has the amazing mission behind it.”

Whether or not steamrolling the seventh tier is in the essence of the mission remains a moot point among detractors. But those within Orient remain steadfast in their mission.

McCaffrey has a five-year plan to reach tier three, an ambitious timeline that she has, characteristically, hashed out to the minute. An under-16s team was launched last season. An under-18s team is being organised now, while funding from the FA to run an Emerging Talent Centre for young girls has been approved.

An undefeated season for the first team could see Leyton Orient skip tier six altogether next season, earning promotion directly to tier five by application if adequate infrastructure is in place. Making it the FA Cup first-round proper where they won 8:0 against Tier Six Farnham Town will only bolster their case — as well as provide a windfall of £6,000 ($8,029).

“The biggest respect we can give to everyone is we play our hardest and be as ruthless as we can,” Thomas-Leek says. “We want to get people looking at us. We want people to notice the scorelines we’re producing. We want people to recognise what we’re doing.”

In an ideal world, Leyton Orient will be competing in tier five soon, with McCaffrey nowhere near the starting XI. She’s working 80 hours a week, finding time in the morning to do “100 jumping jacks in the sunshine” to manage her Graves’ disease. “I’m getting better at padel and worse at soccer every day,” she jokes.

Will hanging up her boots be bittersweet? For the first time in our hour-long brunch, McCaffrey pauses. “I think I squeezed every ounce of talent that I had. Getting capped by the national team was the top. I had to work so hard to hit that ceiling because that was just my talent level. I’m at peace with the career I had. It’s about their careers now.”

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So there you have it! There are unfortunate repercussions of the O's women attaining standards way above their current league opposition but the only alternative would be... not to do it! We are aware of a difficult social situation as we look forward to playing our near neighbours AFC Leyton this Sunday, there may well be another huge score. If there is.... it's not the fault of Leyton Orient or the McCaffrey family football group, it will just be a reflection of the differing ability of the teams. It's not that difficult for the FA to fix! It's also not the only case in the pyramid where teams are winning or losing every game. There's much work for the FA to do.

In order to ask some supplementary questions of our own, we contacted Steph McCaffrey who was happy to reinforce some points as follows:-

" We, in no way shape or form, took the team under the demand or assumption the FA would promote us automatically beyond 1 division after this season - really, that’s an afterthought. Our only goal is to create a positive environment and culture that wins the league we are in, year after year, in our five year plan.
While I will always push for more resources for my girls, I have a ton of respect for, and faith in, the FA to do whatever they feel is best when we hopefully win the league this year. We are more than fine accepting whatever decision they make and look forward to producing an on-field product that makes Orient fans proud and our girls protected and cared for."

This will be our final word on the matter. We’ll continue championing the women’s group and welcoming Orient fans to be part of it — whether you’re already on board or still finding your way. Some may not yet appreciate women’s football, and that’s fine; perspectives evolve. There are others to whom we would point out that the train is moving forward. You’re welcome aboard — or welcome to watch it fly past.

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If you have an interest in and views about the women's team then please let us hear your thoughts and suggestions. You can contact us (anonymously if you prefer) via our contact form on our home page or just simply email us at lofcwomen@yahoo.com
We look forward to hearing from you. We read every message without fail.

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