'Manchester is where I want to be' says Khadija 'Bunny' Shaw - but it's not that simple for City's star

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A little tired. All that celebrating of historic Women’s Super League titles and Wembley bookings. So as the Manchester City left-back attempted a thrown-in in the 16th-minute of City’s final WSL match away to West Ham United, perhaps we shouldn’t fault her for missing Khadija ‘Bunny’ Shaw running straight at her, smile bared and eyes eager, just a girl hoping to meet a ball at Dagenham and Redbridge FC. Of course no ball came. Ouahabi instead stood with the ball above her head and Shaw’s head, in turn, instantly dropped, disappointment and annoyance wrestling for the real estate of her face. But Shaw remained, feet planted a yard and a half in front of Ouahabi, the West Ham defender assigned the duty of marking Shaw ostensibly having found something better to do than bare witness to this stand-off. Until finally someone — a City staff member, a member of the crowd, a City teammate — shouts to “just give it to her!” And of course it’s hard not to make poetry here, to draw obvious lines between the inability of Ouahabi to recognise the plainly evident move to give Shaw what she wants with City’s hierarchy perched a handful of seats away exhibiting the same inexplicable incapacity to “just give it to her.” If this was to be Shaw’s final match in a Manchester City shirt, then at least the 27-year-old Jamaica international went out in sublime fashion: two goals tucked away from two shots despite an xG of just 1.32, the most chances created (3), the most touches in the opposition box (9). It is a snapshot of Shaw at her best. So seize it. Clutch it close. Don’t let it go. Because of course there’s the real possibility City let her go upon the expiration of her contract, a prospect that has dominated column inches and airwaves for the past week since City clinched the WSL title for the first time in a decade. And so it dominated here, under gathering storm clouds, as City wrapped up their season with a comfortable 4-1 win and painted, momentarily, the grey a searing and deserved cyan. City have been the most consistent team this season, marshalled and unleashed under new manager Andree Jeglertz. On Saturday, the football had a sense of formality, the final dotted line to sign before the long-awaited lift, before every member of the City team was called onto the quickly-assembled lego-set stage at full-time and lavished by the travelling supporters. Eventually came the blue pyro, the confetti, the champagne showers, the spectacle for which we have all been patiently waiting, for which Shaw arrived so prepared, donning champagne-shielding sport glasses as she frolicked alongside captain and long-time teammate Alex Greenwood. Man City are the 2025-26 WSL Champions pic.twitter.com/dw6MXvxIwB — Megan Feringa (@megan_feringa) May 16, 2026 That is until the pair were eventually corralled into mandatory media duties. From which the original programming returned: What about you, Bunny? Will you really leave? Better yet, will they really let you go? “Manchester is where I would want to be, but we’ll see,” Shaw told Sky Sports diplomatically, as every City teammate and staff member has treated the saga when asked. Two schools of thought emerge here: how shameful it is we keep yammering on about this, that we can’t just let City enjoy the present because we keep insisting on the future, forensically examining Shaw’s post-goal celebrations to decipher precisely what she meant by choosing to wink her left eye and not her right and if this is somehow code for leaving, or not leaving? The other school, shared in increasingly bolder whispers in the Dagenham terraces as Shaw totted up her league goal tally to 21 and clinched her third successive Golden Boot, is how shameful it is that City have let it get to this point, that there is even discussion of Shaw being able to join the very league rival she helped dethrone because City’s hierarchy might not meet the terms and conditions others have offered. As The Athletic reported last month, Chelsea have offered a salary of over £1million. Despite Shaw wishing to remain at City, whom she joined in 2021, negotiations have broken down over finer details, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. Free transfers aren’t rare in the women’s game, even at the top, given the relative nascency of million-pound transfer fees and the historic short-term nature of deals. Yet, City have made clear their mission is to forge a dynasty from this season. Appropriately, 19 miles east of their first major trophy lift since the 2021/22 League Cup, City men busied themselves by lifting the FA Cup over Chelsea in what was Pep Guardiola’s 24th visit to Wembley Stadium and his 20th major trophies as City manager. City were not at their best on Saturday. Passes were disjointed. Players pointed to space that others couldn’t see until they did. Goalkeeper Eartha Cummings started her first match of the WSL season. Winger Iman Beney was deployed at right-back. It was a reminder that this is a team full of potential but still getting to grips with each other under new management. The context makes their league triumph all the more impressive and all the more intimidating. But there are key threads undergirding it. Threads that are, for example, six-foot-tall and score 21 league goals in a season, including the two that ensured Saturday’s trophy celebrations were wholly unsullied. And perhaps the least recommended procedural step at this stage would be to pull that thread, a player that is not the heart but at the very least the mouth, the part most directly required for sustenance and survival and enjoyment. To some extent, much of Shaw’s game is not getting what she wants when she wants it. At 49 minutes, Kerolin stormed forward in attack. Shaw made the run across her defender. Kerolin’s head was down and eventually so was Shaw’s, her run stopped, arms flapped against her side. Forty minutes later, Shaw then on a hat-trick and one goal shy of the WSL single-season record of 22, a record she has yet to breach, Sydney Lohmann opted to go for goal instead of laying it off, reducing Shaw to toeing the blades of grass beneath her and pondering what might have been. Because the best are always hungry for more. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms