From postie to Tiktok influencer
The idea of undertaking 10 months of gruelling rehab might seem daunting, but not to Siobhan “Shiv” Wilson. This is her zone. As an online fitness coach whose workout videos have attracted one million followers on Tiktok, there are few places she would rather be than the gym.
“It’s weird, because if it was going to happen to anyone, the best person for it to happen to is me, because I love being in the gym anyway,” the Birmingham City defender says of her knee injury. “I said to myself, ‘If you want to be in the gym so much, here you go, you’re going to have to be in there multiple times a week now’. I like to see the transformation so, when I look back now and think that I couldn’t even squat, I couldn’t even walk, compared to where I am now, ‘I’ve done it’. I’m finally feeling like a footballer again.”
Wilson is closing in on a return to match fitness after taking the recovery in her stride, but what happened to her body in the 20th minute of a home fixture against Southampton on April 2 last year was still brutal.
“I was dribbling with the ball, I shifted the ball onto my left foot and, as I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, my right knee buckled. I heard a pop and I knew straight away that I’d done something. I thought, ‘My knee is not supposed to go there, it’s never gone in that position before’,” the Jamaica international says at Birmingham’s Wast Hills training ground.
“I’d done my ACL [anterior cruciate ligament], MCL [medial collateral ligament] and meniscus, so I couldn’t have done it any worse, to be honest. I had to have three surgeries in one: an
ACL reconstruction, MCL reconstruction and I had to get my meniscus drilled back down, because it came out from the root.
“At first, it was as if I’d lost my identity a bit, because I love being active and I love playing football, so to go from that to not being able to walk, drive or do anything normal for about a month, your mind doesn’t know how to deal with it. Simple tasks like getting up to get changed, going to the toilet – it’s so sudden, to be sat there not being able to do anything. And you’re not involved in team stuff, so, mentally, it’s horrible.”
Putting in the hard graft has been worth it for the 29-year-old, though, as she has just signed a new contract with the Women’s Championship club.
“It’s massive. The club holds a special place in my heart,” she adds. “Plus, you see in a lot of places, when players are coming towards the end of their contract,
especially with the ACL, this injury will happen and then they’ll have nothing. So, for the club to believe in me and put their trust in me by offering me a new contract, I’m so grateful.
“I love all the girls and all the staff here. I’ve been at other clubs where they’ve seen you as just a player, whereas here they do value you on and off the pitch as well, which I love. The club allows players to be themselves and understands we have other things we need to do outside of football.”
It is the things Wilson has been doing outside of football which have prompted a third cause for celebration in recent days, after she surpassed one million followers on Tiktok. It has been a rapid transformation for somebody who was working as a postwoman alongside playing prior to her move to Birmingham to become a full-time footballer in 2022. After coming through the American collegiate system, Wilson played for Spanish side Malaga, Sassuolo in Italy, Charlton Athletic and then Crystal Palace, where she was juggling training with delivering parcels and letters.
“I never intended to be, what do they call it, an ‘influencer’. Before I played here at Birmingham, I was playing semi-pro at Crystal Palace and I was working as a postwoman for Royal Mail, so I was training four times a week, plus a game on Sunday, but we weren’t ‘in’ for as many hours each week, so it wasn’t classed as ‘professional’. I’d work the mornings and I was doing online personal training plans, so I was doing three jobs at once, basically.
“Eventually, I said, ‘Something has to give, here’, because I can’t sustain this lifestyle. I wasn’t going to give up football and I wasn’t going to give up my business, so it was going to have to be Royal Mail, even though that was my main income at the time. I was then posting more on Tiktok simply to get clients [for personal training] and then all of a sudden one video goes viral, something silly like nine million views, so I said, ‘OK, this is a thing now, I’m going to keep doing it’. Fitness goes hand-in-hand with football and I was asking, ‘How can me doing certain things in the gym make me a better footballer?’, and then I became obsessed with seeing things get better. I’m never satisfied. I’d wanted to hit a million and now it’s there I’m like ‘I want two million’.”
Wilson is also finding that her social media fame can help attract new fans to Birmingham’s games, adding with a chuckle: “There’s even a Villa fan who commented on my Tiktok and said, ‘I’m coming to one of your games’. It’s so nice when people come up to me and say, ‘I love your videos, you helped me get back in the gym’.”
She will soon be getting back on the pitch and hoping to aid Birmingham’s promotion push – they are locked in a five-way battle for the single spot to move up to the Women’s Super League. Birmingham are four points off leaders Charlton but have a game in hand. Plus, a million new fans.