As a child, Alex Scott gathered her Winnie-the-Pooh teddies on her bed. “Am I going to be all right?” she asked them. She loved her teddies, told them about her day, cuddled them for comfort. Eeyore had particular resonance. Something about the way the manufacturers had captured the character’s woe in his downcast expression allowed her to look at him and feel the true depth of his sadness. She imagined the story behind it. It helped somehow as she tried to block out the sound of her father’s tearing rage against her mother in the room next door. “Because I grew up in an environment where we didn’t show love. So, I got that feeling from my teddies.”
I lift my hand to interject with a question and Scott misunderstands this as an unwelcome gesture of sympathy. “No, it’s all right,” she says with a flick of panic. “I hate the idea of people ever feeling sorry for me. Because that’s the thing, I’m OK. I’ve done all right. I’ve come through things. I’m not a victim. I’m a survivor. So, like that thought you just had of, ‘That’s so cute,’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m all right. I’m good today.’” Actually, I was thinking of the way children create worlds to self-soothe, but I am struck by how on guard she is against pity. Alex Scott does not want pity.
On the face of it, she certainly has done all right. Aged eight, she was spotted by an Arsenal talent scout playing with the boys in the football cage, a fenced concrete pitch, next to her council block in Poplar, east London. She was the kid with the cautious smile, known round the estate as “Ronnie Scott’s little sister”. It was 1992, the same year her father, Tony, left, taking everything, including the family television set. She seized the opportunity, took the bus to training several times a week and slogged her little guts out. Fast-forward through 30 years and it’s a fairytale. She captained Arsenal’s women’s team, played for England, accruing 140 caps, took a degree in broadcast media, and segued, seemingly with ease, into her dazzling career as a pundit. In 2017, she was awarded an MBE. In 2021, she became the first female presenter in the 46-year history of Football Focus, BBC One’s weekly TV football look-ahead.
Then, six months ago, Scott published an extraordinary memoir, How (Not) to Be Strong. It told the story of her traumatic childhood. She is still experiencing the turbulence that followed. Was it difficult for her mother, Carol, when the book came out? “Oh my gosh!” She shakes her head like I don’t know the half of it. “Because do you think we ever spoke about this as a family? Now, all of a sudden, I’m sharing this with the world and she has read stuff in my book she didn’t know that I was seeing as a kid; what I went through, the feelings. So, it was all so raw.” The conversations have started, but: “Yeah. It’s in stages. [Mum] had to shut it all off. I think talking more is the next step. But,” she pauses, “what’s that quote about taking the horse to the water?”
More on this later. I can hear her Football Focus voiceover in my head – “We’ve got a lot to get through today.” There’s the forthcoming World Cup in Australia to discuss, the issue of investment in women’s sport, and the pay disparity for female footballers. She notices on the table at the photographic studio where we meet a picture of her friend and former Arsenal teammate Leah Williamson on the cover of the Guardian’s Saturday magazine. It’s devastating that Williamson can’t play in the World Cup because of an ACL injury, she says. Striker Beth Mead has the same injury and has been “trying to fight her way back in time. But, look, this isn’t a new thing.” The ACL injury – a tear or sprain of the anterior cruciate ligament that attaches thigh and shin bones – is endemic in women’s football. “It’s a shock to people who have not been involved in the women’s game because they haven’t seen how this has been a problem for years.” Scott blames the lack of research and investment, insubstantial medical support, poor treatment facilities, even the shape of the women’s boot, which until now was designed for men.
Nike are coming out with a boot that takes into account women’s physiology, she says, but: “It’s not just football, women’s sport needs to be treated more seriously. It’s always going to be a fight for the next generation. It goes back – well, how many years? We used to have hand-me-down kit, baggy kit. There was no kit designed for women. Now, at least, it’s slim-fit, which helps them move faster. But we’ve got a l-o-n-g way to go.”
She speaks deliberately, with broadcaster’s practice, holding my tape recorder to her mouth as if it’s one of those yellow foam cubes on BBC Sport. She is mesmerising to look at, not least because she is still in photoshoot makeup, skin glowing, eyeliner like calligraphy. On the morning we met, five European sports ministers, including the UK secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Lucy Frazer, released a joint statement critical of the failure of national broadcasters and Fifa to reach an agreement on televising the forthcoming World Cup (a deal was finally agreed earlier this week). It was an extraordinary situation – for the men’s game, television rights are sorted years in advance. Scott took umbrage at my suggestion that the fault lay with the broadcasters. “It’s Fifa demanding more money from broadcasters; saying that they need to respect the game, when I know for a fact that they do.” Now it is settled Scott expects to present alongside Gabby Logan.
I ask about football’s gender pay gap, and if she thinks male players should take a pay cut so that the women’s teams can be paid more – as male BBC broadcasters did for their female colleagues in 2018. “You need females supporting females in getting to the top, but in all walks of life, you need male allies. I don’t think men are going to say, ‘Well we’re going to take a pay cut.’ But they have a voice to be like, ‘Well, no, the women deserve this,’ and to shout about it. It’s never about batting the women against the men. It’s making sure everyone is in support.”
I ask this in part because to earn money at the start of her Arsenal career, she worked as a “scrubber” in the club laundry. The male players would toss in their filthy kit – shirts, shorts, socks, towels; she’d soak them in detergent and then scrub the hell out of them. Ever cheerful, she says: “It gave me the best lunch every day. I loved the food at the training ground. And I was able to save money.” But she also admits that while watching the kit rotate in the huge washing drums, she’d think to herself: “This isn’t my life. I know that there’s more for me and I’m going to get there.”
Before meeting Alex Scott, I watch clips of her scoring. There she is in her Arsenal red jersey, Pippi Longstocking socks, carving down the wing from full back, hooking the ball and – arm up for balance – pelting it in. Time and again the camera tracks her before she slams in another. She scored the last-minute winning goal in the 2007 Champions League final against Umeå of Sweden. As well as the 140 times she played for England, she played five times for Team GB at the 2012 Olympics. She makes snap calculations that seem like mathematical impossibilities; acts with slicing precision. Then I watch her interviews. She retired from the game in an interview with Jeanette Kwakye at an awards ceremony streamed live by Sky Sports on YouTube. Afterwards she said you could hear a pin drop; the collective held breath of an audience wondering if she’d meant to say that. Even she wasn’t sure she had. It was “off the cuff”, she has said since. Same principle, different sort of goal.
As a BBC pundit, her prefrontal cortex struck again during the World Cup last November. She was feeling sad, she says, about the whole fiasco of the Qatar story: the treatment of migrant workers, the ban on homosexuality. Fifa’s threat to yellow card players who wore the OneLove armband in support of the LGBTQ+ community finished her off. While waiting to do a “pitch-side hit”, she was seized by an idea. “Andy,” she called to the FA comms man. “No one’s told me I can’t wear an armband.” A beat later, Scott was doing live commentary from England’s opening match against Iran, armband secure on her biceps. The moment has been dramatised in Dear England, James Graham’s new play about Gareth Southgate at the National Theatre.
Arguably it was this same impulse that governed her decision to join the BBC presenter boycott in solidarity with Gary Lineker. You will recall Lineker was pulled from Match of the Day for his support of asylum seekers back in March. When it was mooted that Scott would fill in for him, she posted a gif of Bernie Sanders saying, “Nah! Not me” (the girl loves a gif). The following day, she tweeted that she would also skip that week’s episode of Football Focus. “I made a decision last night that even though I love my show … it doesn’t feel right for me to go ahead today.”
She calls these lightning-strike decisions, “going with my heart”. I imagine she doesn’t suffer esprit d’escalier, but she says she suffers a different sort of agony. When she saw the explosion of criticism on social media after the OneLove armband, for instance, she was horrified. “I get emotional when I think I’ve hurt people. It’s never meant. The idea that I disrespected a religion or went against a country, was like – I couldn’t believe that this little armband could create such divisions. My brain couldn’t compute it. I needed to disappear, take some time away. I got consumed by the hatred, by how many people were [upset] because I wore an armband. All I was thinking about was segregation, a whole community feeling left out, pushed to the side, not cared about. I was thinking: I care. I care.” When she returned from self-imposed exile in Barbados, she realised that there was huge gratitude for her stand. “People stopped me and were like, ‘We saw what you did, that was incredible.’”
Scott does not define her romantic orientation: she has dated both men and women, including her first love, fellow footballer Kelly Smith, for eight years. But this was not an explicit part of her thought process, she says. “I didn’t wake up and think, I need to do this because I am part of the community. It was about people feeling like they were not seen. I never want anyone to feel sad.”
***
Alex Scott’s father is second-generation British Jamaican; her mother of Northern Irish and Ashkenazi extraction. Her East End Jewish lineage was revealed to her while participating in BBC One’s Who Do You Think You Are? in 2021. She learned that her great-grandfather fought the police and fascist Blackshirts in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street. She would pass the memorial every day en route to her nan’s house in Wapping to watch Oprah. “I thought, that’s cool. But I didn’t know my family had a whole connection to this mural.”
Not long after, she began writing. It was a way out of a “dark space” she’d been experiencing for six months. Her book opens: “What I have learned over the past couple of years is that I’m very good at disguising when I feel low … I’ve often wondered why, why I feel the need to always be strong. I feel very guilty about my sadness; from the outside looking in, what the heck do I have to be sad about? I’ve managed to have a successful career in two fields I am passionate about. But what’s worse than feeling guilty about being sad is putting on a happy face … [and] pretending to yourself that this is a form of strength.”
From there, the stories flood forth. She recounts how she grew up on the first floor of the Aberfeldy estate, iron grill over the front door. Views from the flat included the gas works, a patch of wasteland and the gridlocked A12. The only play area was a tiny grass square behind the tower block. Her heroes were mostly musicians – Aaliyah, Tupac Shakur – although she loved Venus and Serena Williams. “I think every black child saw a reflection of themselves in the Williams … They set an example and never relied on ‘poor me’ narratives.” Her East End community was tight and protective. No one, however, could shield her from her dad.
Every evening, Tony gave Alex and Ronnie, who was two years older, a couple of pounds for the offie, where they’d pick up his Strongbow and Foster’s, and every evening Alex prayed they could make it through the night without an episode. She lay awake tense and alert to the smallest sound. “Was that [Mum] going to the toilet? Or were those the all too familiar thumps? Could I hear her cries? Or the pleas of ‘Tony, please, no’ before another blow landed? Those noises,” she writes, “will never leave me.”
Of course, it wasn’t just their mother who was susceptible to Tony’s fists. He insisted on absolute control of his children. From his window, he monitored them playing, ensuring they obeyed his diktat never to set a foot off the grass. When their ball rolled into the street, they would get a passerby to throw it back. One day, no one was around. Ronnie glanced up to the window to check his father wasn’t watching, before sprinting to retrieve it. Next thing they heard was their father’s voice: “RONNIE! ALEX! GET UP HERE NOW!” That day there was a special punishment beyond the usual beating. The children were told to gather every toy they owned and post them one by one into the rubbish chute.
Scott relates her irrational hatred of BMWs because her father revered them. How when he bought a flashy new camcorder – the latest thing – he hooked it up to use as surveillance on them. “I’m laughing typing this because it’s so stupidly cruel,” she writes in the book. She tells of the time when, at a party to celebrate her sixth and Ronnie’s eighth birthdays, her father told her mother to get him some lemonade. Carol made the mistake of saying she was in the middle of a conversation. That night Tony beat her so badly that Scott was certain her mother was dead. The next morning: “Her face showed only part of what we knew had gone on; it was that battered even I was scared to make eye contact.”
While all this was going on, Scott’s escape was the football cage. She would walk down to it thinking: there’s more to this world. Thinking: I want to travel; I want to see bigger things. Once on the concrete pitch with the ball in her control, she would imagine she was at Wembley. “And Wembley was filled with 75,000 people cheering my name and it felt special and I’m scoring a goal.” She snorts: “I went on to fulfil that; I don’t think I even allow that to sink in sometimes.”
After 14 years, Carol finally asked Tony to leave. “She gave us our freedom in that sense,” Scott says, “But the fact is, she didn’t give it to herself. Sometimes we think that when the partner leaves, then everything is OK. But what happens next is also important. Mum continued to live feeling trapped and scarred. So did we. Because we didn’t learn to communicate, we couldn’t move on. That’s the next step.”
Tony Scott has acknowledged that his relationship with his family was volatile and he was strict with his children – though in an interview after Alex’s book was published he denied that he had been violent towards his family. She says the last time she heard from her father was in 2019 when she was on Strictly Come Dancing and he texted her for tickets.
Secrecy as a survival strategy was a way of life. As a child, she would use poetry as a form of code in her diary. She had a crippling phobia of extreme weather and devised a plan in which she would save her mother and brother by running to the underpass should a tornado strike. Then it occurred to her that they might be hit by a tsunami. “I always used to think that there wasn’t enough time to get to the big building in Canary Wharf – I know I’m fast, but I was thinking about my mum. How do I get her there in time? I couldn’t work it out.”
I ask if she knows where her father’s terrifying rage came from and she says that is the perennial question for those who have experienced domestic violence. “Everyone, I suppose, is looking for that answer. I don’t think they ever get it. I’m not at a stage where I’m hanging on to that any more.” I ask if her beloved Nan, Tony’s mother who died in 2017, knew about the violence. “Yes, I would say she did. The family knew. Neighbours knew. But when you’re that person who knows, what do you say?” She’s relieved that in today’s world people check in with those they fear are in trouble. “If I ask you, ‘Are you OK?’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m OK.’ But I know there’s something more, I’m going ask you again. Whereas, when I was growing up and people asked if you were OK, even if they knew something was wrong, they were not ready to hear.”
Therapy has been her redemption. “I will never stop therapy.” But she feels she was overly effusive about it initially; that her family weren’t ready. “I was like, ‘This is great, I’m healing. Now I need to get my mum into therapy; my brother needs to start speaking.’ I was so positive, like, ‘Talking is great!’ But, actually, not everyone is at the same stage. You can’t force them.”
Meanwhile, Carol, 64, who was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, has slowly begun to open up with stories Scott didn’t know. “I believe that my mum will take that next step [into therapy] soon and start healing further. But she’s got to the place where she knows that [Tony] can’t hurt her any more. He doesn’t have a hold over her any more.”
Ronnie has his own way of showing love, she adds. Progress is in small but significant steps. For instance: “Us all sitting around the table eating our Sunday dinner together. Those family moments.”
Scott’s single-parent upbringing has been cited alongside that of fellow England stars Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling, but she doesn’t believe anything should be read into it. “Some of the Lionesses have come from stable homes, both parents going to the game.” What she shares with Rashford and Sterling is a desire to support family and community. “When you think of the Brazilian players – Ronaldinho, Ronaldo – who made it after playing barefoot in a cage, the first thing they want to do is to be successful so they can help their community, help their family.”
She’s proud of her East End roots. In television, she has experienced class-based discrimination. She remembers the “detailed feedback” from a work placement at Sky, “that said I would never make it as a presenter because my accent wasn’t right”. Despite her talent, the ignorance persisted. While covering the Olympics in Tokyo, she saw a tweet from ex-minister and former CBI boss Digby Jones that accused her of “spoiling” the coverage. “Enough!” the crossbench peer wrote. “I can’t stand it any more! Alex Scott spoils a good presentational job on the BBC Olympics Team with her very noticeable inability to pronounce her ‘g’s at the end of a word. Competitors are NOT taking part, Alex, in the fencin, rowin, boxin, kayakin, weightliftin & swimmin.” She replied: “I’m from a working-class family in east London, Poplar, Tower Hamlets & I am PROUD. Proud of the young girl who overcame obstacles, and proud of my accent.”
She has learned to ignore the online abuse – yes, even the death threats. “I feel quite sad for people who feel that’s what they need to do to get satisfaction. I’m like, ‘OK, that makes you feel good. At least I’ve managed to give you that.’” She laughs. “And you’re not hurting me any more.”
Interactions with her young female fans go some way to make up for it all. They ask her to sign their footballs or their notebooks. Some are too shy to speak, “so it’s up to me to be like, ‘Are you OK? Are you having a good day?’” Others are cheeky. “They say, ‘Can I have this? Can I have that? Can we have your sock?’ I’m like, ‘I need my sock!’” As a Unicef ambassador, she has travelled to refugee camps in Iraq; to Papua New Guinea; and to Rwanda (where she was asked to name a gorilla). The spirit of these kids is always overwhelming, she says.
Scott has exceeded her ambitions and then some, including her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing, which was “hard work, but that’s been my mantra in life”. (She adds that it’s a myth that athletes have an advantage: “Our bodies are built for power; actresses have come through drama school, they know how to move in a fluid, elegant way.”)
Anything missing? “Love. That is an easy answer. I’m at the stage where I am ready to accept love – in all its forms. I’ve been so wounded, I was scared to fall deeply in love. [But] that means I’m missing out.” She worries people will be attracted to her TV persona, as opposed to her. “That’s why I’ve always had my guard up. I used to play this game. If someone asked my name, I’d say, ‘I’m Louise.’ If they said, ‘No, you’re not, you’re Alex.’ I’d be like, ‘So, why did you ask me?’”
So far, dating has come to nothing. She dismisses the story about the member of One Direction with whom she had a brief fling, saying, “I’ll never tell!” Does she use apps? “Oh gosh, don’t get me started. I have tried. I get so embarrassed that I don’t talk to anyone and then delete them again.” It’s in-person connection that matters, she says.
“I’ve never been attracted only to the most ‘beautiful’ person. You have to have more: substance; something that I gravitate towards.” When asked by her book editor if she needed to explain her sexual orientation after the chapter about falling in love with Smith, she refused. “I wrote a story about love. I don’t feel like I ever have to say I am in a certain box.
“Was I surprised that I fell in love with a woman? No, because it wasn’t a woman, it was a person. Actually, I hope we get to a place where people will never have to explain who they are. They can just be. Yeah, underneath it all I am a hopeless romantic.”
• This article was amended on 17 June 2023. An earlier version used the word “physiognomy”, when physiology was intended.
• How (Not) to Be Strong by Alex Scott is published by Cornerstone (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
