Two years ago, the BBC decided to hand control of what is perhaps its most beloved radio show to a series of inspiring women.
Since 2014, the guest editors invited to take part in Woman’s Hour’s takeover week have included JK Rowling, Doreen Lawrence and Kim Cattrall. Next week, this prestigious line-up will be joined by a variety of stars from Angelina Jolie to Mary Berry.
Also among the latest roll-call is footballer Eniola Aluko. It would be a push to call her a household name just yet, but the 29-year-old Chelsea and England striker’s inclusion speaks volumes.
After all, it took until 2011 for the FA to create the first women’s professional football league – the WSL – and it is only in the past couple of years that clubs such as Chelsea have been willing to pay their female players full-time salaries. In the UK at least, women’s football remains a teething toddler of sport.
The hype surrounding the Euro 2016 tournament is a reminder of the gulf in public perception that persists between the men’s and women’s games. And yet things are beginning to change.
Whether it is the fanfare that accompanied the Great Britain women’s team at the 2012 Olympics, the England women’s team reaching the World Cup semi-final last year, or the fact that female football tournaments are now regularly held at Wembley, it seems that fans of both genders are finally sitting up and paying attention.
For Aluko, however, the real validation of her achievements came a few weeks ago. “Clare Balding invited me and my mum to go to the races with her,” she says. “It was amazing – first, because I really admire Clare, but also because five years ago something like that would never have happened.
Nice invitations like that have made me realise how far things have come in the past five years – that people appreciate what you are doing.”
Sitting in Broadcasting House after recording her Woman’s Hour show, Aluko looks chuffed.
“I was just really honoured – really honoured,” she says. “I know the calibre of women that come on the show and edit, so clearly they see me in that light. To be honest, I still see myself as a bit of a baby. I’m still young, I’m still growing, so to be here … well, it’s amazing.”
As with most of her teammates, Aluko’s path was not direct. In between representing England – she was part of the under-21 team before she made her senior debut – Aluko studied law at Brunel University.
For three years, she balanced working as an entertainment lawyer for the likes of One Direction and Frankie Boyle with football, playing both for Chelsea and the national side. Still, it was 2014 before Aluko was finally was able to give up law and play for Chelsea full time – seven years after she first joined the club.
Nonetheless, she seems to bear no resentment over the fact that, for years, she could not pursue a full-time career in the sport she loved – even though her brother, Sone, now a striker for Hull City, was scouted for Birmingham City at the age o eight and has always played professional football.
When I ask if she was ever envious, she shrugs matter-of-factly: “It wasn’t about envy. Professional football just didn’t exist for girls back then, so it wasn’t realistic. And even now there are a lot of parts of my brother’s life – being in the public eye like that – that I just couldn’t cope with. We joke about it a lot actually, and I’m grateful that at least I can still walk into Tesco in my tracksuit without being bothered.
“I think having a back-up plan is never a bad thing. I would hate to be a male footballer and look back on 15 years of my career and think, ‘Oh well, I’ve got a lot a money but what now?’”
Aluko was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Six months later, her parents moved the family to Birmingham, where she spent her childhood playing football in the local parks with her brother and his mates.
“I realised pretty quickly I was better at football than all of them,” she says, with a laugh. “Though back then, that made them all think I was so cool. The boys would all boast about having me as a friend, and it gave me a lot of confidence from a young age.”
Growing up, Aluko’s hero was Eric Cantona (“I used to pop my collar on the field, just like him”). In fact, she was so devastated when Cantona retired from Manchester United that she stopped supporting the team. But it wasn’t until she started secondary school – where she found herself surrounded by girls whose main ambition was to bunk off PE, rather than get there enthusiastically early – that Aluko realised she was “a bit of an odd one out”.
“At that point, a lot of the girls in school thought I was a bit weird, and it was difficult,” she says. “You do get to an age where you want friends who are girls, and you want girls to like you and think you’re pretty or whatever. So it was hard at times.”
For Aluko, the acceptance of young girls playing football is one of the sport’s biggest achievements over the past few years.
It is also something that she sees as vital for a generation whose lives are increasingly shown and viewed through the glossy sheen of an Instagram filter.
“I think nowadays, with social media, everything is about putting out your best, the most perfect image of yourself out there,” she says. “You go through life having failures and you go through life not doing everything perfectly, so for girls this trend is even more dangerous because there are all these insecurities that come with not matching up to the perfect image.”
Aluko shakes her beautiful mass of black curls a little scornfully.
“What sport does is give you those experiences – which are real. You are going to fail in sport, you are going to win sometimes, you are going to be criticised sometimes, you are going to be applauded – so it gives you … well, it’s certainly given me anyway, those real-life lessons that make you bulletproof.”
It is clear that a certain toughness, or emotional armour, has been required to get Aluko where she is today. She took her history A-level on the morning before playing Denmark in the 2005 European championships. In 2012 – after returning from the US, where she had played professional football for three years – she chose to fast-track her legal practice course to enable her to qualify as a lawyer in Britain.
That accelerated programme of study meant that Aluko could play in the London Olympics. It also meant that she was spending nine hours every day poring over her books, then several hours training on the field at night. Even Aluko, who appears to take everything in her stride, admits “it almost broke me”.
“It was just a joke in terms of the toll it took on my body,” she recalls. “I was sick a lot because I was just so stressed. And at that point my mum said to me, ‘After the Olympics maybe you should take a break from football.’ I remember those conversations because it was just too much, even for me. But after the Olympics, my love for football reached another level, so I just couldn’t quit.”
The battle for recognition and equality within the sport, in terms of funding and wages, is one fought by female footballers worldwide. The American women’s football team is embroiled in an ongoing wage discrimination complaint against the US Soccer federation after it emerged they were paid four times less than their male counterparts.
That is despite their World Cup win last year against Japan being the most-watched football match in US history – and the fact that they generated $20m (£15m) more in revenue than the men’s team.
The lawsuit is the strongest statement any national women’s football team has made so far, and as far as Aluko is concerned, the issue is pretty black and white.
“I think, good on ’em,” she says. “I think that lawsuit is very embarrassing for the US Soccer federation and hopefully it will prompt some action. There’s always been an argument that women’s football doesn’t bring in enough money, but in America that’s just categorically false. So on what basis were they paid so much less? It has to be because they are women. I know a lot of those girls as well and they are very strong women who know their rights and they know the current situation is just not acceptable. And that will have a knock-on effect on other teams around the world. I think it’s about time.”
Aluko is so passionate about this that one of the women she will speak about on Woman’s Hour is the veteran tennis player Billie-Jean King.
The six-time Wimbledon champion was an early advocate of equal pay and prize money for sportswomen in the 1970s, and still campaigns on the same issues.
Yet when it comes to wage discrimination in the UK, Aluko wavers. The most the majority of WSL players earn is around £35,000 per year. However, she says, the sport is still young and simply is not in a position to command anything even close to the six-figure sums that premiership players demand for a week’s work.
For example, Women’s Super League games draw in an average of 1,076 spectators, compared to the home crowds of 41,546 that flock to Chelsea’s Stanford Bridge each week.
“Hmmm. Well, yes, we are paid less, but that’s because we don’t bring anywhere close to the same amount of crowds, and that’s just a fact,” she says slowly, mulling over the issue. “Look, the reality is that people will pay more for a match when Wayne Rooney is playing than when I am playing. I will never expect to be paid the same as Wayne Rooney, because I am not Wayne Rooney. And there’s no getting around that.
“We’re not women who say we should be given this amount because we are women – we have to get to that point where people are willing to pay those high ticket prices, and then we can command more money. And we do that by winning world tournaments.”
Right now, Aluko’s main priority is challenging the chaos that currently plagues the women’s football league in Britain. She believes that confusion – particularly over the limited number of games and the different days they are held each week (“Even I never know when I will be playing”) – is holding the sport back from engaging a fan base that could one day develop the kind of fanatical devotion associated with men’s football.
“There’s still a long way to go. I still think our fan base needs to grow more and I think there needs to be a lot more consistency in terms of the league and the fixtures. I don’t know who organises the league, but for me it just lacks a lot of common sense.” Criticism from players, she adds, is beginning to mount, though she is not sure whether it is falling on deaf ears.
Aluko is keen to see women’s teams start “pairing” with the men’s games – meaning that when Chelsea take on Liverpool, for example, the women’s teams play against each other, either prior to the main event or after it. Ticketholders to the men’s game would get a discount for the women’s match, as a way to draw them in.
She is also sceptical about the FA’s commitment to throwing its full financial weight behind women’s football in Britain. In fact, Aluko believes that unless the body starts to take risks with funding and promotion, the growing popularity of the sport could begin to level off.
The importance of tournaments such as the 2012 Olympics and the World Cup in bringing women’s football into the national consciousness is obvious. For Aluko, that makes the fact that Great Britain will not have a women’s football team at the Rio Olympics this year – following objection from the home nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – particularly devastating.
“It’s a real shame because it seems that politics have really got in the way of us playing in Rio,” she sighs. “You’d think for something like the Olympics, people would be willing to side-step all those political arguments and just indulge this romantic side of sport – but no, and now a lot of people have lost out on a really amazing opportunity. And it gives all our major European competitors, who will be playing, an advantage for the Euros.”
As is to be expected from someone who has meticulously time-managed her own life since she was 12 years old, Aluko also has definite ideas of what life will hold when her football career comes to an end.
Her dream is not to coach – “I can’t think of anything worse” – but to follow in the footsteps of Karren Brady and sit on the board of a football club, “hiring and firing and all the fun stuff”. Having already negotiated all her own contracts, she also wants to help female footballers who, in their eagerness to sign to a big club, leave themselves open to exploitation.
She even hopes to start a family, though admits her sporting prowess has proved a sticking point in the past: “It is a certain type of guy who’s OK with having a girlfriend who is better at football than him.” We both laugh. Then she assures me she is far from joking. “It is actually problematic,” she says. “Some guys really can’t cope with it.”
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