It’s all very exciting seeing female footballers do so well; the England team reached the semi-finals of the UEFA Women’s Championship earlier this summer, which is better than the men’s team have done in over 20 years.
But while there have been huge efforts to kick racism out of men’s football, has this applied to women’s football? Not really, Chelsea player Eni Aluko says.
Because, according to the striker, who plays for Chelsea but also works as a sports lawyer, the Lionesses’ manager Mark Sampson, has made racist comments to her.
Aluko told The Guardian about the incident which she says happened around time of the China Cup in 2015: ‘We were in the hotel. Everybody was excited. It was a big game. On the wall, there was a list of the family and friends who were coming to watch us and I just happened to be next to Mark.’
‘He asked me if I had anyone who would be there and I said I had family coming over from Nigeria. “Oh,” he said. “Nigeria? Make sure they don’t bring Ebola with them”.’
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‘I remember laughing but in a very nervous way. I went back to my room and I was really upset. It might have been easier to take if it was about me alone. Lots of things had been said about me over those two years but this was about my family. I called my mum and she was absolutely disgusted.’
It is understood that Sampson denies making the remark. Aluko says that the FA failed to investigate properly by not interviewing all the key witnesses to the exchange and also not properly looking into other allegations. These include a staff member repeatedly speaking to Aluko in a mock-Caribbean accent and Sampson joking to a mixed-race player that she’d been repeatedly arrested.
Aluko, who has played over 100 times for England, and was English women’s football’s highest scorer in the 16/17 season, says she has been the victim of bullying and discrimination and demands to be taken seriously. She was dropped from the team just one week after detailing her grievances in what was described to her as a confidential report, saying that Sampson turned up at Chelsea’s training ground to say she had showed ‘unlioness behaviour’. She says this was ‘retaliation’ and the FA denies this, saying it was her attitude and behaviour that got her dropped.
If that sounds murky, well, Aluko believes there is a wider culture of not celebrating BME female footballers as much as their white counterparts, and dropping decent players who all too often just happen to be BME: ‘There are lots of national teams that are very white, not just England, and I’d hate to say we should be picked because we’re black or mixed race. But are we all bad characters?'
'Are we all terrible players? That’s the question I think people need to be asking because a pattern is emerging here, as clear as day, and my belief is that it’s a culture.’
The whole reason Aluko is talking about it now? Well, she'd been offered £80,000 by the FA to keep quiet about it but has only now found a way of telling her side of the story.
Yikes!
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.