My life as a footballer’s wife
Julie Neville tells Katie Fitzpatrick about family life with the former United star
JULIE Neville is celebrating 20 years of marriage to Manchester United treble-winner Phil, and she’s opened up about her daily routine in a frank interview with the M.E.N. on Sunday.
The mother-of-two says that she and women’s national football team manager Phil both have defined roles in the family home.
Julie, who gets up at 4.45am every day to work out in the gym, does the cooking and cleaning around the house and says her husband has never even made her a drink.
“I do all the cooking at home. Phil doesn’t know how to cook but I like it,” she told us.
“We were recently 20 years married and people ask ‘what is the key to it?’
“We probably complement each other, we’ve both got very defined roles.
“I always want him to feel free to go off and take any jobs he wants or do what he wants and go where he wants when he wants, and he knows that I’ll look after everything at home, whether that be the kids, the houses, business or whatever that is and I love cooking and cleaning.
“I love looking after the family. And it’s not a role because I have to do it, it’s the role that I choose and I really love that.”
The Nevilles have been married since December 1999 and have two children. Their son Harvey was born in 2002 and their daughter Isabella was born in 2004.
Their home in Hale boasts a games room with Phil’s football memorabilia, a private cinema, a fully-equipped gym, an indoor swimming pool and spa area and Julie has her own dressing room.
The kitchen, where keen cook Julie perfects her recipes, includes a fridge stocked with nothing but drinks.
“I’m pro-equality and the equality in our family is that we each have roles that we enjoy,” she said.
“He can go off and do his thing and provide for our family and I’m happy doing what I do at home.
She added: “I do all the cooking which is why we’re all healthy because Phil can’t cook. He doesn’t know how to cook anything.
“We’ve been married 20 years and we’ve been together 23 years and he’s never even made me a drink, honestly.
“He’s not capable. He’s just never learned. He just doesn’t know how. It’s not that I think he wouldn’t do it if he could he just doesn’t know how to do it.” Julie, who previously worked for her family’s construction business, met t Phil at a friend’s 21st birthday party.
The couple didn’t see each other for six months after chatting all night, but Phil told a friend that he’d just met the woman he was going to marry, and Julie says she’s accepted that she comes a ‘close second’ to his lifelong love of football.
She said: “I think the thing I’m most proud of is h his work k ethic.
“Philip told me quite soon after we married that he loved me very much but I was a very close second to football and I’m not insulted by that in any way. He literally, eats, sleeps, lives football.”
However she says Phil would admit that his ‘one misjudgment’ over putting football first was the dramatic day d their h daughter d h was b born and dh he went to training, leaving his wife in the delivery room.
Julie ended up haemorrhaging badly and their baby’s heart stopped beating.
“I was in quite a bad way at his point, thinking ‘oh my god I think I’m dying’,” she said.
“He says that’s the only time probably football maybe shouldn’t have come first.”