‘My girlfriend helped me to fall in love with football again’
Lianne Sanderson tells Katie Whyatt she is still available for England – if the situation is right
Lianne Sanderson remembers how she would “wake up in the middle of the night and just be sobbing”. A player who had never suffered so much as a sprained ankle was, for nearly two years, grappling with the injury all footballers fear: an anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus tear in her right knee that ruled her out of the Western New York Flash’s NWSL Championship win. Sanderson was “there, but I didn’t feel quite like I was there”.
Amid the celebrations, the Lewisham-born England player found herself in something “like a grieving process. I found it difficult to be around my team-mates because I felt like a mess, mentally. On social media, I don’t share all the stuff that happened that was so…” She pauses. “You’re vulnerable when you’re injured like that. Where you can’t walk properly, where you’re bedridden for two months. There are a lot of things where you have to swallow your pride. A huge part of my life had been taken away – football.”
During those pain-riddled nights, she would cry on the shoulder of her girlfriend, fellow Juventus midfielder, Ashley Nick, who “gave up opportunities to play places to take care of me”. When the Flash relocated, rebranding as North Carolina Courage, Sanderson was cut adrift. She felt alone. “I didn’t feel like I had much support from anybody,” she sighs, “especially the club I was playing for.” Nick became Sanderson’s literal and metaphorical crutch.
The pair met in Cyprus while playing for Apollon Limassol the previous year, sharing an apartment with other players. “We just fell in love organically, with no drama involved,” Sanderson says.
As one of the world’s most visible gay athletes, Sanderson, 30, wants to challenge some of the narratives around sexuality. She and Nick both had boyfriends growing up – Sanderson was with a man for four years, “never feeling like I was trapped or that I wanted to be with a woman”. She never had a “sit-down meeting” with her parents about her sexuality.
“Sometimes, when you have a close relationship with your family, they wonder why you didn’t tell them before you did – but it’s because you don’t know yourself. I just kind of organically evolved into the person I am. I’m just myself, and that’s all I can be.” Juventus came calling in January: Sanderson spent seven months rehabbing with the likes of Gianluigi Buffon and Giorgio Chiellini before she was unveiled in July. “Just being able to be in the same space as them and feel respected – Juventus took me in and made me feel like a footballer again.” Nick followed her to Italy two months later.
At Juventus, she plays with Eni Aluko, alongside whom Sanderson appeared in Parliament in 2017 to speak about the Football Association’s handling of Aluko’s allegations that coach Mark Sampson had made a racist remark to her. The FA later apologised to Aluko, while an independent report found that Sampson had been discriminatory but that he was not racist. Neither Aluko nor Sanderson have represented England since; for Sanderson’s part, she will “always be up for selection until I retire”, but admits “certain conversations would have to take place” first. “I’ve not spoken to anybody at the FA since the whole situation happened,” she says. “I’ve seen people and I’ve obviously said hello, but I would have to be sure that the current situation has changed. I’d have to be sure that it’s a protected