Women’s soccer is booming globally. In fact, by many metrics, it has already boomed: The National Women’s Soccer League already has a $240 million media rights deal, after all. It will surely see a significant increase when the league negotiates a new one in 2027. 

But, as a global soccer fanatic, I can’t help but notice that stateside, most of European women’s soccer is still undercovered, despite its high quality. As such, audiences in the United States may not know how good some international players are until it slaps them in the face during big international tournaments like the Olympics or the World Cup. 

So, let me tell you now: Manchester City’s Mary Fowler is a star. Period, point blank.

At just 22 years old, Fowler already has 62 caps to her name for Australia, which made the semifinals at the 2023 Women’s World Cup — further than the U.S. advanced, to be clear.

In that tournament, she scored a goal, tallied an assist off a pinpoint, through ball and put away her penalty in a shootout with France after that match ended 0-0 in regulation. Suffice to say, big games don’t appear to faze her.

At club level, Fowler has gone from strength to strength. Despite her youth, she took the long way around to the Women’s Super League in England. She began her career at Adelaide United in her native Australia, where she made her debut at 16 years old. A stint in France with Montpellier followed, where Fowler scored 10 goals over a season-and-a-half before City snapped her up. Fowler was still a teenager when she moved to England, giving her plenty of room to grow, and now she’s well and truly exploded. 

Her team might be having a down year in the WSL, having fallen to fourth place — a full 15 points behind leaders Chelsea — but Fowler is having a career year nonetheless. She’s already surpassed her previous best combined goal and assist tally of 10 set last year, scoring six goals and providing six assists so far in 2024-25. 

At her current pace, she’s on track for around 22 goal contributions, which would be an impressive feat considering the NWSL only has 22 matches. Fowler hasn’t even started every single match; she has come on as a substitute in five of her 16 appearances.

As you can ascertain from those stats, Fowler is very much a no-frills, all-business player. That’s not a typical description for young forwards who operate mostly on the wing, but Fowler isn’t exactly a young player. She may be just 22, but Fowler has six seasons of professional experience already and made her international debut at 15. 

For a loose comparison to the men’s side, Fowler has more top-level reps than some high-profile 24 and 25 year olds. She has made 18 more appearances for Australia than the precocious Phil Foden has for England, to use an example from her club’s men’s counterpart.

One can see that end product-centric approach in Fowler’s advanced stats. In expected assists, which measure the quality of chances a player creates for his or her teammates, Fowler ranks in the 98th percentile among positional peers at 0.41 expected assists per 90 minutes played. Her expected goals lag behind that, but we can chalk that up to Fowler spending a lot of time on the wing as opposed to playing as a central striker. 

But often, wingers offer a higher quantity of dribbles, which Fowler interestingly does not. Instead, she focuses more on receiving and playing progressive passes, defined as any pass that moves the ball up 10 yards or into the opponent’s penalty area, excluding passes played in the team’s most defensive portion of the field. Fowler receives 8.5 of these balls per match and plays a further 4.27 herself, which puts her in the 78th percentile in this category. 

Putting all of this information together, we see that Fowler prefers not to hang onto the ball very long. She attempts just 3.3 take-ons — i.e., tries to dribble past a defender — per 90 minutes, which is substantially lower than the roughly five per match attempted by USWNT taliswoman Sophia Smith — a player who operates in similar spaces to Fowler. 

If Manchester City doesn’t start contending for a WSL title soon, it will be interesting to see if Fowler agitates for a move. If she does, Barcelona might be the ideal suitor with the team’s possession-oriented approach. Barcelona leads the UEFA Women’s Champions League with its average of 67.9% possession, nearly ten percent higher than Chelsea in second place. It would be a “the rich get richer” type of move — Barcelona have won the last five league titles in Spain — but Fowler would thrive in that spotlight.

Jack Hallinan is a senior writing about the top wunderkinds in men’s and women’s soccer in his column, “Rising Ballers,” which runs every other Thursday.