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.
“Football is the most powerful brand we have to effect change,” says Campbell, who retired from the FA on Friday after eight transformational years as the director of women’s football. She initially told Glenn she would “do a few days a week and be gone in a couple of years” but soon found herself immersed in the job full time. “One of the good decisions we made, I think, was, he [Glenn] asked: ‘Did we want a women’s department?’ And I said: ‘No, I want someone in every division of the FA who has the women’s game as their No 1 priority, and then I’ll pull them together as a women’s unit, a sort of matrix management system, so that everybody in the FA buys into the women’s game.’ That’s where it started. I’ve been grateful to work with tremendous people.”
Listening to Campbell in a changing room at St George’s Park it is evident her passion for girls’ participation is as strong, if not stronger, than her joy at the Lionesses’ Euro 2022 success, and she feels the latter “added rocket fuel” to the former. She can point to recent figures such as a 56% increase in women and girls playing football since 2020 and an 88% rise in female coaches in the same period. Yet perhaps the decision to appoint Sarina Wiegman as England’s head coach – a recruitment process carried out with the chief executive, Mark Bullingham, and technical director, Kay Cossington – will prove to be the most crucial taken since Campbell arrived.
“When we realised Phil [Neville]was going, we started that search, and Kay said to me: ‘There’s this brilliant woman called Sarina Wiegman …’ We knew we needed the best coach. The players were ready. They wanted so much to win. We wanted to enable them to do that. Technically, tactically, she was a proven winner.
“One of the first things we said to each other when we first talked was, we’d both been PE teachers. She realised how important school was and the bigger picture. We had a shared belief that, if we could create success at the top, we could generate something really exciting.”
On 31 July 2022, a nervous Campbell could not stomach food before England’s Euros final meeting with Germany. It is noticeable after open training sessions that the Lionesses often line up for a hug with Campbell if they see her pitchside, and her bond with the squad added to her matchday anxiety. “People have often asked me: ‘Was it enjoyable?’ And my answer is: ‘No.’ It was absolute agony!” Campbell recalls. “When Chloe [Kelly] scored that goal I did have a temptation to take my top off and run around the royal box doing the same thing but I thought it might not go down too well!
“There’s a picture of me sitting on the podium [after the game] and I was thinking: ‘There’s 87,000 people in here and God knows how many are watching on television – I wonder how many lives we’ve changed today? I wonder how many girls we’ve lit a light in today?’ It was like watching Super Saturday at the Olympics.”
A year later, England’s next major tournament would be a rather different experience for Campbell. Shortly before the Lionesses travelled to Australia, where they reached a first World Cup final, she found out she had cancer. She is in remission and in good health, but talks here publicly for the first time about what she endured then.
“They discovered I had cancer cells on my face and my back. I either had to delay treatment or start treatment and not go – that was the choice, and I chose to delay it. Mentally you start to think of the worst possible outcome. We all do it, don’t we? So I was beginning to feel very vulnerable and very unwell. The hard bit was not knowing what was going to happen to me. Everybody who gets any treatment or prognosis that has the ‘C’ word in it has the same reaction. You immediately think you’re going to die. You think: ‘How long have I got?’ I was listening to Chris Hoy recently, the way he spoke about stage 4 cancer and how courageous he is. I wasn’t that courageous. I wasn’t that strong. I found it hard.
“But all of us have massive challenges in our lives at different points and what brings you through in the end is your sheer determination that you just want to live a little longer to do more. It feels like I’ve been given another chance to do more.
“Watching the World Cup, I loved their [the England team’s] grit. That will to win, that defiance, it was there in abundance, sheer grit. I was proud of them and it was great to watch them, but I was a little bit introverted in the sense that I just wanted to get home and get sorted. So when I got home [from Australia], I went straight for treatment and – touching everything around me – I seem to be on top of it. For the moment, it’s clear, I just have to have it checked every couple of years, but I’m fine.”
Campbell says she doesn’t mind little changes such as having to wear a hat when gardening even in the winter, or tweaking her diet slightly – smiling, she insists she will still eat her favourite food, chips – and is looking forward to more walks with her playful dog, a German wirehaired pointer, among the deer and woodland in rural Leicestershire.
However, even aged 76, she says: “I’m not finished. I think I’ve still got too much energy to just park myself somewhere. [But] I wouldn’t step away if I didn’t think it [women’s football] was in great shape. I’m proud of the team I’m leaving behind and I’m really excited about Sue Day as my successor; she’s fantastic, she’s going to be awesome.
“Is there more to do in the women’s game? Massively. I wouldn’t want anyone to think: ‘It’s done.’ We’ve made a great start. If it was a 400m race, I’d say we’ve got out the blocks well, we’ve got up the back straight and we’ve still got the top bend and the home straight to do, because that feels like where we are. We can contribute so much to girls’ and women’s happiness, let alone their physical and mental wellness, through sport.”
Campbell says there are dozens of people she would like to thank at the FA, and cannot speak highly enough of the team behind the scenes trying to change the game. “I never understood that inbuilt thing in society that constrains girls into thinking they can’t rather than they can. I hope I’ve changed a bit of that for some girls. They can be whatever they want to be. Why can’t girls play football? We’re here. Now help us be as good as we can be.”
