Aluko I cried my eyes out when team-mates turned against me
Eniola Aluko explains to Oliver Brown why mobbing of manager she called out in racism row hurt the most ‘I have a real issue with a lack of fairness and justice. It stirs me to point where you see a different side of me. I was destined to be a person to
For Eniola Aluko, the bleakest moment came not when Mark Sampson dropped her from the England side on the pretext of “un-lioness behaviour”, or even when he told her to make sure her Nigerian relatives did not bring the Ebola virus to Wembley. It came after a 6-0 qualifying win over Russia at Prenton Park – a match she refused even to watch, choosing to go shopping instead – when she learnt that her former team-mates had
mobbed Sampson in a clear signal that they were taking their manager’s side, not hers.
Even though Aluko’s complaints against Sampson in 2017 had triggered an official investigation, leaving her with an £80,000 settlement from the Football Association, her peers had apparently chosen not to believe her.
“That was the lowest part for me,” she reflects. “I remember sitting in my car, crying my eyes out. I was deeply, deeply upset.
“It wasn’t so much the celebration as the timing that I thought was shocking. Celebrations are calculated. I don’t believe this was spontaneous. It was premeditated. That means the team have decided, ‘We’re going with the line that Eni Aluko is not one of us’. In a context of me calling out racism, they were effectively saying, ‘We don’t care’. That’s what it represented to me.”
Did she confront the players subsequently, to establish why they acted as they did? “Yes. We had a difficult conversation. They were being told I was a liar.”
Aluko is adamant that she does not want her years on Earth to be rendered purely through the prism of her fight with Sampson and the FA. To that end, she has a book published tomorrow, They Don’t
Teach This, documenting in forensic and often moving detail her 102 England caps, her doublewinning season at Chelsea, her quest for acceptance on a Birmingham council estate, and her struggle to embrace her hyphenated identity as a Britishnigerian. But even she acknowledges that the past two years, marked by much anguish and eventually a sense of vindication, brought into sharp relief everything that had gone before. As a child, Aluko was smitten with Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird. It became not so much her favourite book as her guiding text through life. It was Atticus Finch, the moral hero of that great American novel, who compelled her to study to be a lawyer, graduating with first-class honours at Brunel. Famously, the book builds towards the climactic courtroom scene, in which Finch defends a wrongly accused black man and exposes the rancid prejudice of his Deep South community. It is no coincidence that in structure, Aluko’s book builds inexorably towards the set piece of her testimony to a select committee at Westminster, in which she spells out her treatment within Sampson’s England team.
“The book was introduced to me at school, but I took it beyond school,” says the 32-year-old. “It just resonated with me, the idea of Atticus speaking up for somebody who couldn’t speak for himself, in an environment with so much hatred and racism. I have a real issue with a lack of fairness and justice. It stirs me, to the point where you see a different side of me. I was probably destined to be a person who could speak for others, try to change the status quo. That’s what lawyers do.”
Sampson, for his part, has accepted that his actions towards Aluko remain a source of enduring regret. Aluko, for all that she argues strongly in her book that Sampson marginalised her from the outset, deeming her a disruptive influence, insists that she no longer bears him any ill will.
After a period as a pariah in the game, he has joined the coaching staff at Stevenage.
“Honestly, if I bumped into Mark tomorrow, I would genuinely say, ‘Fair play. Move on with your life’. I never set out to destroy anyone, or to get him sacked. I set out to change a culture that was damaging, not just to me but to a few other people of colour. There are four people I can point to: Anita Asante, Lianne Sanderson, Drew Spence, me. All of us said something against the grain – and none of us played for England again. That says it all.”
While Aluko is prepared to make
her peace with Sampson, she is not so forgiving of the systemic problems that still plague women’s football in this country. Although it has been an unforgettable summer, with more than 10 million viewers watching England in the last four of the World Cup, progress is not measured by TV audiences alone. Take the diversity question: of the 11 men who lined up for England against Croatia in last year’s World Cup semi-final, five were from ethnic minorities. In the Lionesses’ equivalent fixture with the US, this figure fell to two. It is but one manifestation of a serious imbalance.
“I’m not going to say somebody should be picked just because of the colour of their skin,” Aluko says. “But in a country like England, which is so multicultural, there are either not enough people of colour playing the women’s game, or they’re not getting picked. I prefer to see a team that reflects society a lot more. Since I left the team, it has got worse.”
It seems apt to point out that when the 12 members for the Women’s Super League board were unveiled last month, not one was from a black, Asian or minority ethnic background. “There’s enough talk about diversity and inclusion for there to be more respect given to the topic. We have to be better with that.”
For as long as she can remember, Aluko has looked to football for a sense of belonging. Growing up in Redditch, she found that it was a swift path to acceptance among the white boys of her estate. Indeed, the only bullying she encountered tended to be from Caribbean girls, who would call her “African
bhuttu”, patois for a person perceived to lack sophistication.
Inwardly, she toiled with a crisis of identity. At first, her defence mechanism was to reject the name of Eniola, demanding that her friends call her Eddie. When she paid her first visit to Abuja, to see her father, Daniel, inaugurated as a Nigerian senator, she was not allowed to inform her grandmother of her love of football, only to say she enjoyed the more delicate pursuit of tennis.
“The expectation in Nigeria was that I would go on to be an economist, a pharmacist, a politician,” she explains. “My extended family had traditional views, and they couldn’t reconcile these with the concept of women playing football. It was also a societal issue here: people thought female footballers were all butch lesbians with shaved heads. How did I fit into that? It was a pressure I didn’t know how to navigate.”
Not that Aluko’s mother, Sileola, ever sought to clip her wings. Bringing up two children as a single parent, while her husband pursued his political ambitions in west Africa, she saw in Eni’s first trial for England a symbol of affirmation, a staging post on the long and tortuous road to British citizenship. There was only one problem: Sileola, as a woman who placed great emphasis on the importance of appearance, dictated that her daughter should turn up for the trial in a pencil skirt, collared shirt and suit jacket. It was not an experience that the young Eni, when she saw her future team-mates arriving in tracksuits, would easily live down. “It was absolutely mortifying,” she laughs.
As she forges a fresh chapter at Juventus, facing up to the last year or two of her playing days, Aluko is determined still to have a significant role in the sport. She has completed a masters in administration under the aegis of Uefa, and hopes soon to secure a post as a sporting director. As befitting her own eventful past, she is brimful of plans for how she can make a difference. Take her attitude towards the leadership of Baroness Campbell, the former chair of UK Sport and now the FA’S head of women’s football. “People like Sue are very experienced, but how much can they really relate to a black girl from Birmingham?” she asks. “There needs to be a fresher, younger approach.”
Aluko, one senses, can scarcely wait to start this next phase. First, however, she has a book to talk about, a memoir that serves in many ways as a powerful form of catharsis. Such is the force of her religious faith, she is now convinced that the entire ordeal with the FA was the product of destiny. “It was like going through a divorce,” she says. “I thought, ‘Hold on, I’ve played for you guys for 11 years. Why are you hanging me out to dry like this?’ Why had it gone from a good relationship to a publicly adversarial one? I think that the whole episode was meant to happen to me. Certain doors have to shut for others to open.”