By Simon Hattenstone
When the striker called out racism in football, it ended her international career. Eniola Aluko, who was recently named the technical director at West Ham Ladies FC, after her retirement from football, here explains why the fight (against racism) was worth it in her new memoir ‘They Don’t Teach This’.
Eniola Aluko is one of only 11 female footballers to have played more than 100 times for England. She has scored some of the Lionesses’ most memorable goals, was the first female pundit on Match Of The Day, and is a qualified lawyer, having graduated from Brunel University London with a first class in 2008. But it is as a whistle-blower that she is destined to be best remembered. And, like many whistle-blowers, she has spent the subsequent years being rubbished by those she exposed.
Now she has written a memoir. They Don’t Teach This is a fascinating examination of her multiple identities – British and Nigerian, a girl in a boy’s world, footballer and academic, a kid from an estate with upper-middle-class parents, a God-fearing rebel. But the book is at its best when she reveals exactly what happened after she accused the England management team of racism, and the Football Association of turning a blind eye to it. Aluko does not hold back – and few people from the football establishment emerge with their reputation intact.
Aluko has a small, mobile face with striking features – big, brown eyes and a huge, ear-to-ear smile. When she is unhappy, she makes no attempt to hide it; her glare is as forbidding as the smile is winning. And there haven’t been many times over the past five years that Aluko has had reason to smile.
It all started in January 2014, barely a month after Mark Sampson took over as manager of the Lionesses. Sampson was 30 years old, an inexperienced coach who had never played professional football. At 28, Aluko was virtually an England veteran, a first-team regular and a popular member of the squad who had used her legal skills to champion teammates – notably helping to draw up a new central contract for the team. The striker was also a conscientious player, always keen to improve her game.
Her desire to better herself led to her taking advantage of a new system that enabled players to watch back games and analyse their own performance, while hearing the audio from the management team. After a match against Finland, a 3-1 win for England in which Aluko had scored a goal and made another, she reviewed the footage. Aluko had been pleased with her performance – which made it more shocking when she heard the audio. “The goalkeeping coach Lee Kendall said: ‘Eni is lazy as fuck,’ and: ‘She’s not fit enough.’ Then, when I lost the ball, he said: ‘Oh, fuck off, Eni,’” she tells me. She heard neither disparaging remarks about other players, nor any positive comments when she scored and assisted a goal.
Aluko was confused. She was in the form of her life, with six goals in six games for England. And, more to the point, she says, she had never been called lazy before. “At the time, I didn’t think too deeply about what was being said. I was just like: why is this being said about me on a portal that everyone can access? Then I started thinking about where this has come from.” The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that there was a racial connotation. “Look, lazy is a generic term. Anybody can be called lazy if you’re not tracking back. But if you’re black and you’re called lazy, it’s different. Some words have real context to them, and this dates back to slavery times. In that split second, I’m sure Lee Kendall didn’t think about racial connotations, but that’s what racism can be.”
In 2004, the former Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was sacked as a pundit on ITV (and as a Guardian columnist) after a microphone picked him up saying the French defender Marcel Desailly “is what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick nigger”. Aluko knew Kendall’s comment bore no comparison, but she couldn’t help thinking about it. She started to feel the management team had it in for her, but kept stumm. What Kendall had said was unpleasant, but it would be virtually impossible to prove it was anything more. If they didn’t like her, she would show her worth on the pitch. And she did, finishing joint top scorer among all nations competing for qualification for the European Championships in 2015, with 13 goals.
But the comments continued – now to her face. In November 2014, she told Sampson that her family was flying in from Nigeria for a friendly against Germany. He replied: “Well, make sure they don’t come over with Ebola.” (Sampson denied saying this for a long time after.) Aluko says she laughed nervously but was left reeling. She told her England teammate Lianne Sanderson, but said she wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. She wanted to focus on her football.
At one point, Kendall, a close friend of Sampson, started speaking to her in a fake Caribbean accent. It infuriated Aluko – not least because she isn’t from the Caribbean. “I was often tempted to speak to him in a Scottish accent, despite knowing he was Welsh, just to make the point.”
Then she started to notice other things happening to black members of the squad. In October 2015, Chelsea’s midfielder Drew Spence was called up to the England squad for the first time, for a trip to China. Spence told Aluko that, in a meeting of midfielders, Sampson turned to the newcomer and said: “Haven’t you been arrested before, then? Four times, isn’t it?” Spence was the only non-white player in the room and has never been arrested. After making these remarks, Sampson never picked her again for England; she still has only two caps.
A few days later, the midfielder Jill Scott was feted when she won her 100th cap against Australia – speeches were made, she captained the team, a video message was played from her family. In the same match, Sanderson won her 50th cap – another considerable milestone, normally celebrated with a special shirt – but this was ignored. Sanderson told Aluko she was devastated; with Aluko’s encouragement, she told Sampson how upset she was, but asked him not to make an issue of it in front of the team. The following day, he addressed the squad, said he had made a mistake in not acknowledging her 50th cap and presented her with a special shirt. Sanderson was never selected for England again.
While Sampson did not drop Aluko, he told her repeatedly that he couldn’t rely on her, that she lacked stamina and heart, that she was selfish and didn’t play for the team. After Aluko scored a hat-trick in a 10-0 thrashing of Montenegro, Sampson presented her with the ball, telling the team: “We all know Eni is a pain in the arse, but she did well to score a hat-trick after I gave her the target of scoring five goals today.”
Aluko was still reluctant to draw attention to Sampson’s behaviour. “As black players, you don’t always want to be bringing these issues up. You want to just play football. You know that the accusations of ‘playing the race card’ are going to come up. So I would bite my tongue. I’d see the level of ignorance, roll my eyes and get on with it.”
And so it continued. Aluko says the only thing that kept her going was her desperation to reach 100 caps – and become the first British-African woman to do so. When it finally happened, in February 2016, the occasion was soured by Sampson. She says he refused to give her advanced notice she would be playing, so she could invite her family. Then, on the morning of the match, Sampson told her she wasn’t in the starting 11 because he wanted to field his strongest team. In the end, he brought her on in the second half and the captain, Steph Houghton, handed her the captain’s band. But by then she was inconsolable.
Three months later, in May 2016, the FA invited Aluko to participate in a confidential “culture review” about her experiences as a black woman in the England team. She agreed to a phone interview in which she said that she felt demoralised, and that under Sampson’s management her negative experiences outweighed the positive ones.
Twelve days later, she was visited by Sampson at Chelsea’s ground and told she was being dropped from the England squad for “un-Lioness behaviour” and a bad attitude in the previous camp.
Her parents, Sileola and Daniel, moved the family from Lagos to Birmingham when Aluko was six months old. Daniel returned to Nigeria to pursue a career in politics, while Sileola worked first as a nurse and then for a pharmaceutical company, bringing up her children in England. From the age of five, Aluko was the only girl on her estate who played football. She and her younger brother, Sone, also a professional footballer, spent their free time honing their skills. Until she went to secondary school, she says, she never had a female friend. Her football-playing male friends called her Eddie, because it was a bit easier than Eni and a lot easier than Eniola.
- Adapted from Guardian of London
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