In May 2025, Tottenham Hotspur defender Ella Morris was called up for her first senior England camp, a month before Euro 2025. It was the crowning achievement of a young career done the hard way: six years spent scrapping her way up the football pyramid with Southampton before a move to Spurs and the WSL in 2024.
A week into camp, Morris tore her right ACL. In her own words: “Devastating doesn’t even come close.”
It was a moment that, when Morris looks back now, has only made her stronger. She is fit once more, ready to show the WSL what she is capable of.
“I think I came back in a good place after my ACL, I felt really fit,” Morris told The Cutback during Spurs’ pre-season preparations. “Probably, the fittest I’ve been at Spurs in my career.”
The injury with England was the second ACL tear of Morris’s career, having previously torn her other knee aged 17 at Southampton. Despite her experience with the injury and the rehab, it was harder the second time around.
“This time was a lot tougher mentally because I had been able to get to that level that you dream about as a kid, and get that first call up,” she said. “You also don’t know if you’re ever going to get back to the level you were before, so it is extremely hard. But if you’ve got great people around you, you can flip that mindset. You can climb back up again.”
Three hundred and thirty one days after her latest setback, Morris made her return to football in April 2026, coming on as a substitute for Spurs in their 2-1 FA Cup quarterfinal defeat to Chelsea.
A few weeks later, Morris would mark her return to the WSL by helping Spurs finish the 2025-26 season with two 90-minute performances and an 88-minute showing. Spurs went unbeaten in those three matches, recording a 0-0 draw with Manchester United alongside a pair of 2-1 wins over London City Lionesses and Brighton & Hove Albion.
At Spurs, and beyond, Morris has found community and support through other players who have suffered ACL injuries. Teammates Kit Graham, now at Ipswich Town, and Maite Oroz both were in the treatment room with ACL tears last season.
“She [Graham] was one of the first people I called after I did it the second time. She’s come back stronger now, she’s absolutely smashing it. Having someone that I knew had gone through it twice, and developed a bond with – she was massive for me,” Morris said.
“Kit [Graham] and Oroz did theirs within a month of each other. So I was coming towards the end-stages of mine at that point. I just wanted to try, like Kit had done for me. It was similar. She looked out for me, so I just tried to check in with both of them and see how they’re doing. But for them, it’s been brilliant because they’ve had each other.”
Morris has been involved with Project ACL, a group hoping to accelerate research into reducing ACL injuries and increasing player availability, and spoke to them during her recovery. The research is something she feels passionately about, especially as she studies for a degree in sports science.
Going from recovery, to rehab, to the pitch and then straight into the summer off-season, Morris is feeling refreshed, powerful and light on her feet.
“We had a really good off-season program to maintain our fitness. And if anything, from fitness tests, I feel like I’ve actually come back to an even better place. I feel quite good physically. So a lot of the girls might be like, ‘oh no, these training sessions are a lot harder’, and they’ve been hard. But I feel like I’ve been able to match them,” she said.
Morris has always viewed her physical capabilities with a great sense of pride. They are a key part of her game as a full-back and she’s also not alone in seeing relentlessness as an enticing quality. For her and Spurs teammates, being the fittest collective in the WSL is something to aim for in the 2026-27 season.
“I want to get up and down the pitch, be able to do those back-to-back sprints to either overlap, but then also to get back,” Morris explained. “I naturally developed quite a good aerobic capacity when I was younger. It’s just about the training levels that you can hit and how high your heart rate can be.
“During my rehab, they were brilliant with that in terms of you can’t run, so you do a lot of swimming, a lot of upper-body metabolic conditioning and stuff like that. It’s hard work, but it is all worth it.”
Morris’s love of fitness has endured throughout her life. At primary school in Hampshire, Morris was in a running club that used to run laps at lunchtime. In secondary school, alongside football, she competed in cross country and sprinting for the New Forest Athletics Club.
“We would compete sometimes in some of the regional competitions, but nothing drastic. But you could choose between doing the sprinting session or the long distance session. So we mixed it up depending on how we were feeling that day,” Morris said.
Still, football rather than athletics was always the dream.
Now, the dream continues as Morris finishes up the final stages of the pre-season with Spurs. Morris says that England head coach Sarina Wiegman has been checking in on her during her recovery. And while she has set a target to make a Lionesses squad in the future, her main focus is on Spurs and the WSL.
“I know if I don’t play at Spurs, then I won’t get the opportunity to go and get the chance at England. So full focus is literally here. I just want to play, enjoy my football again, and get back to feeling my best, and we’ll see if any more opportunities arise.”
Spurs impressed in their first season under head coach Martin Ho, finishing fifth in the WSL table, four points behind Manchester United in fourth, and 13 points behind Chelsea in third: the final Champions League spot.
Morris is bullish on her club’s ambition to close the gap on WSL’s big four and the European places. She’s all-in on Ho’s style of play – a change from what she has been used to in the past – and believes there is a winning formula in north London.
“We want to keep the ball. We want to be a ball-playing team. So traditionally, maybe I’ve been in teams that would want to hit me running in the channel, so I’d be running onto balls. I’d be chasing them. Whereas in this team, I’m receiving [the ball] in tighter areas. I have to sort my feet. I have to make these tight passes. So again, it just exposes me to different styles of play, which will only benefit me going further in the future,” Morris said.
“If we get the performances, we’ll get the win. So, build on from that last year and finish even higher up the table. Push for those Champions League spots and show everyone that Tottenham are here to compete this season.”