It's hard to emphasise enough just how impressive Chelsea's first season under Sonia Bompastor has been. When Emma Hayes left the club last summer, some predicted that the Blues would endure something of a transition season. Perhaps their Women's Super League title would be up for grabs, that the one trophy they came into this campaign holding. If not, surely they wouldn't get stronger so quickly, so the League Cup and FA Cup were still opportunities for others. And yet, by guiding Chelsea to a 3-0 win over Manchester United at Wembley on Sunday, Bompastor completed a domestic treble without overseeing a single defeat across all three competitions.
A quick glance at that scoreline and one might assume it was a relatively straightforward outing for the Blues. But, just as the players and their manager have been stressing all season long, none of this is easy - even if they continue to come out with results that suggest otherwise. Sunday went into that category; while the scoreline was convincing, it wasn't until the 84th minute that Catarina Macario doubled their lead, with the scorer of that opener, Sandy Baltimore, putting some gloss on things in stoppage time.
It was no surprise that, when asked about Chelsea's dominance after the game, United head coach Marc Skinner said: "I think Chelsea, in games this year, you could've got them. I don't think most teams in the league have maximised that." After all, he had just watched his team in that exact situation, unable to put away a couple of big chances before succumbing to a disappointing defeat.
Skinner isn't the only one to have been in that position through a 2024-25 campaign in which Bompastor has wanted several performances from the Blues to be better, always pushing that higher standard regardless of the result. But, at the end of the day, the wins still came. Chelsea are almost always able to get over the line, able to find a way to win and craft opportunities out of somewhere.
That, though, is to undersell how Bompastor's side played at Wembley. Bar a good start from United, and a few minutes after half-time, Chelsea controlled this final and deserved to win. They deserved to go ahead when Erin Cuthbert won a penalty just before the interval, and while 3-0 might not represent how close the game was, it was well-earned by a team that pushed until the very end - the very end of the 90 minutes and the very end of this season, to sign off with a third trophy from four available and further cement themselves as the dominant force in English women's football.
The next step is Europe. The only blot on Bompastor's copybook this term is the 8-2 aggregate defeat to Barcelona in the semi-finals of the Champions League, that the one trophy that has evaded this team despite its domestic success and, as such, that the one trophy these players, this staff and this club crave so much. It might be a few months until the Blues kick a ball in that competition now, as the summer approaches, but there was still something in this final game of the 2024-25 season that could bode well for their chances of triumphing on the continent in 2025-26.
GOAL breaks down the winners & losers from Wembley Stadium...