Eniola Aluko: who is the female footballer with a law degree at the centre of the FA racism scandal?

Eniola Aluko has received an apology from the FA for racially discriminatory remarks made to her by sacked England women’s boss Mark Sampson - Getty Images Europe

 

How many professional footballers would cite the fictional lawyer Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird as an object of obsession during their youth? Presumably relatively few. But Eniola Aluko is not like most footballers.

The Chelsea Ladies player at the centre of the race row currently engulfing the Football Association is not just a striker, a pundit and an eloquent speaker, she is also a qualified sports and entertainment lawyer.

This week she received an apology from the FA for racially discriminatory remarks made to her by sacked England women’s boss Mark Sampson. This came after a reopened independent investigation decided Sampson had told Aluko to ensure her Nigerian relatives did not bring Ebola to a match at Wembley. The ensuing row, which reached a furious crescendo this week,  has sparked one of the biggest crises in the FA’s 154-year history.

So who is the dignified and determined woman at the centre of it? What is the backstory of this brave 30-year-old who has called out racism in her sport, and also accused FA chief Martin Glenn of conduct bordering on blackmail over the withholding of part of her payoff from the governing body until she publicly declared it was not institutionally racist (a claim Glenn has denied)?

Aluko has previously been described as “the Wayne Rooney of women’s football”, but while the comparison may be fair on the sporting front, it is some way off the mark in other respects.

'I just wanted to be one of the boys,' Aluko once said Credit:  Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty Images Europe

Born in the Nigerian city of Lagos in 1987, she moved to Britain in her infancy and grew up in Birmingham, where she started playing football in local parks during childhood so she could continue hanging out with the boys she was friendly with.

“It was an easy way to be accepted in the group,” she has said. They called her “Eddie” rather than “Eni”, so she could fit in. Her Nigerian relatives may have frowned on it,

encouraging her to play tennis instead because football was not ladylike, but her mother’s good sense prevailed and she paid them no heed.

“I just wanted to be one of the boys,” her daughter once said. “And then I realised I was better than most of them.”

Aged 11, she was approached to play for Leafield Athletic Ladies, a local side that offered her the ability to hone her skills, but not a career. For that, she turned to law. Having always had a strong sense of justice and a love of politics, law films - and the Harper Lee novel that gave her her hero - it seemed like a natural choice. And so it was that in 2008 she graduated from Brunel University London with a first class honours degree in the subject.

Eniola Aluko giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee this week Credit:  AFP/Getty Image.

 

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