Shekiera Martinez’s family were sceptical when she told them, aged eight, she wanted to start playing football. She was one of four girls and a boy in her family, growing up in Germany, and one of her older sisters had by then given up the game. “I wanted to start but when I told my mum, she firstly said: ‘No, you won’t play for long, you’ll be like your sister,’” Martinez recalls. “And so then I gave her a promise that I would play for longer than my sister.”
Sixteen years later, the West Ham striker has certainly kept that promise. After progressing through her local boys’ team, playing for Eintracht Frankfurt for six years and thriving at youth level for Germany, Martinez most recently collected the Women’s Super League’s Rising Star award for the 2024-25 season after a breakthrough second half of the campaign in which she scored 10 times in 12 WSL games.
No wonder the 24-year-old has a spring in her step as she sits down for an exclusive interview on a smart, black office chair at West Ham’s Chadwell Heath training ground, having ended last season with back-to-back WSL player-of-the-month awards for March and April. Our conversation is happening in the middle of West Ham’s pre-season work – “I’m sore every day!” Martinez jokes, before adding that the intensity has felt really good – but how did the league’s most in-form player at the end of last term spend her summer break?
“I slept really long every day,” she says. “I think I needed it, just spending time with my family, walking the dog and doing nothing after the season because also with the change to [move to] England, it was really nice to do nothing and just chill.”
Last season was life-changing for Martinez off the pitch as well as on it. She became a West Ham player in July 2024, signing a three-year contract, but could not immediately play in England. Martinez became eligible only once she had accumulated enough points for a visa under the governing body endorsement system used by the Football Association for international players, and assembled the points on loan in Germany’s top division with Freiburg. In January, West Ham recalled her.
“It was really quick,” she says. “I couldn’t even say goodbye to everyone [at Freiburg] because I thought: ‘I go back there.’ I [had] always said my dream was to play in England one time. It came quicker than I thought. I was ready for the change and I was really excited.”
Shekiera Martinez dribbles away from Chelsea’s Keira Walsh. Photograph: Tom Dulat/The FA/Getty Images
To say that recall worked out for West Ham and Martinez would be an understatement; she scored nearly a third of West Ham’s goals for the season despite joining midway through the campaign, and ended up as the division’s joint third-top scorer. She was one of only four players – along with Alessia Russo, Khadija Shaw and Elisabeth Terland – to reach double figures but played the fewest WSL games of the top 16 scorers.
“Yes, I was [surprised], to be honest,” she says. “I really had a lot of respect [for the WSL] – I didn’t know it would go so well. The physicality is much harder here than in Germany, I think, [but] we have gym every day so I also got stronger.”
Martinez earned a reputation for being a clinical goalscorer seven years ago, when she was the top scorer at the 2018 Under-17 European Championship with nine goals to help Germany finish as runners-up.
“I’m a 9, I love scoring goals,” she says. “I’m not really thinking when I’m playing football; it just happens on instinct. If it happens, I’m happy, if not it’s also OK for me. I really like the situation when I go one-v-one against the goalkeeper. Sometimes it’s really hard because you have so much time to think.”
Her love for the thrill of scoring goals is clear but she is not a diehard football-watching fan. She loves watching basketball – the professional player Leon Fertig is a good friend – on television but not football: “I don’t watch any football, unless my friends are playing, so I support my friends when they are playing. I just like playing more than watching.”
Another pleasure is walking her dog, an eight-month-old toy poodle named Ruby, who was born just as Martinez moved to the WSL. “I don’t go into the city often so I’m just with my dog in the parks, enjoying my quieter time,” she says. “We’re living behind a park so we thought: ‘It’s the right time to get a dog.’ I love it. She’s my baby.”
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If Martinez continues scoring at her recent rate, she will surely be unlikely to have the summer of 2027 at home with Ruby, because Germany may well come calling for the World Cup in Brazil, but she is not putting any pressure on herself for a senior call-up: “It would be a dream of course but I don’t want to rush myself. I can’t change anything, I’ll just try to play my best and if they like it, they like it”
In the much more immediate term, the WSL season looms on the horizon, with West Ham beginning their campaign away to Tottenham Hotspur on 7 September. After a ninth-placed finish the plan is to “climb up the table” and Martinez says: “If we play like the last half of last season, we can be really good.”
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