bright

Chelsea captain Millie Bright has retired from football with immediate effect.

The 32-year-old made 294 appearances for the Blues after joining from Doncaster Belles in 2015 and also won 88 caps for England.

The defender won eight Women’s Super League titles with the Blues – including six in a row between 2020 and 2025 – as well as six FA Cups and four League Cups.

But the former England defender has not featured for the Blues since February because of an ankle injury and has decided now is the time to end her career.

‘Representing Chelsea over the last 12 years has been everything to me, but I’m now ready to say goodbye to playing football,” said Bright.

“I’ve given all I can, and I never wanted to fight for any other badge.

‘It is now time, and I’m ready to go into a new era. I’m always going to be Chelsea, but just in a different way.”

This particular run of seven games will define City’s season on all four fronts – losing twice against Real means their trophy prospects have been reduced to three.

That could be down to two on Sunday with a huge clash against the Gunners, who are hungry to rid their tags of ‘nearly men’ by ending a trophy drought which stretches back to 2020.

“On Monday [after Carabao Cup final] hopefully we will wake up and it is a sunny day,” said Guardiola. “It is not crucial, it is a football game, we are going to try to win with a good performance.

“We will challenge against the best team in England so far, the best team in Europe because look at their results in the group phase, they were first and have lost three or four games all season. We will challenge them and we have to see how we are competing against them.”

City were held to a surprise 1-1 draw at relegation strugglers West Ham, which has left them nine points off the pace in the Premier League with eight games to go – and a monumental effort is required to overturn that particular deficit.

And the FA Cup is no formality either, with City hosting rivals Liverpool in the quarter-final on Saturday 4 April after the international break, with league games immediately after against Chelsea and Arsenal.

Guardiola said: “After one or two weeks, we play against them in the Premier League and it is a good mirror to see what we have to do to achieve [like] them. I am old enough to see that one football game is not the big happiness or a loss is the end of the world, it’s just a game.

“In the end, the results have not been good except Newcastle but I have the feeling we are an extraordinary team with many, many, many good things that I love.

“We are still not complete, we are not aware in certain moments and departments, we have to be more clinical but my feeling is it is a question of time.”