Photograph: Fabio de Paolo/The Guardian
When it transpired that eight-year-old Sue Campbell had not shown up to school for a week, despite her confused father knowing she had got on the bus each morning, he decided to follow her. The explanation soon became clear. Unable to play football at the all-girls school she had been sent to, she was getting off the bus at the local primary school, hiding in the bushes and jumping out to play football with the boys at break. “I was very naughty,” Baroness Campbell says. “But the boys I played football with every night in the street were getting better than me because they played every day at lunchtime, and I didn’t like that.”
Unable to pursue a career as a footballer, Campbell went on to play netball for England but frustration at the perception that girls could not play football was burning inside her again when she was later training to be a PE teacher and the course taught her how to teach netball, hockey, athletics and tennis. Which was why, when Martin Glenn, then the chief executive of the Football Association, approached her with a job offer in 2016 she could not resist it, even though she was at retirement age and could have been forgiven for wanting to put her feet up after her spell as the chair of UK Sport during the London 2012 Olympics.
