BANGOR schoolgirl Mia Moore will be playing her football with Liverpool Women’s under 21 squad next season.
At just 15 years old, the Linfield Ladies midfielder is currently studying for her GCSEs at Bangor Academy but has been identified by the Reds as a star of the future following a successful trial period with the club’s academy last month and is now set to join up with the Merseyside outfit at the start of the next campaign. She impressed during a 13-day spell in the North West, which saw her train primarily with the under 16 side and playing in a friendly match.
Mia, who plays as a number 10 and is the top goalscorer for her club side, somewhat unfortunately cannot turn out for the first team at Linfield, due to her not yet being 16. All that remains now is finding somewhere to live in her soon-to-be new home.
The teen comes from a family of Reds fans and mum Julie-Ann recalled how growing up, she used to tell her she wanted to play for the Anfield club. “They have a space for a central midfielder and they would like Mia to pursue it,” she explained. “A friend of my uncle’s attends the majority of the ladies matches with one of their analysts, so he sort of got the ball rolling. At first, they said that they usually go and poach people for trials but after we sent through her profile and CV, they asked if she would come over,” added Julie-Ann. It’s a sign of just how highly Mia is rated that she has been picked out by the U21 setup, but that hasn’t fazed her in the slightest. “I trained with the U21s once while I was there. It was so much faster and stronger but I enjoyed the experience even more,” she remarked, adding there is one 16 year-old who is involved with the ladies’ first team at present. Liverpool offer an education programme for their young stars, which will see Mia study sports science alongside her playing exploits, with her new schedule consisting of four training days a week and a matchday on a Wednesday afternoon. “My first day back at school in a month was actually on Tuesday,” she said. “I told some of my PE teachers about the news and they were so happy that they hugged me!” laughed Mia.
The move comes almost immediately after she represented the Northern Ireland Women’s U17 team in their latest set of EURO 2023 qualifying fixtures, where Mia completed the full 90 minutes versus Austria and was involved from the start in each of their games against Finland and the Republic of Ireland.
