Dame Sue Campbell, Director Women's Football at the FA

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2020

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

Dame Sue Campbell is the Director of Women’s Football at the Football Association. The women’s game has become increasingly popular recently and last year the England team - the Lionesses - made it to the World Cup semi-finals. Born in 1948, just outside Nottingham, Sue was sporty from an early age, even changing schools to allow her to play football. She became a PE teacher in Manchester and realised how transformative sport could be, increasing self-esteem, motivation and self-belief. In the mid-1980s, after learning about excellence in sport at Loughborough University and playing netball for England as well as dabbling in the pentathlon, Sue became deputy chief executive (and a year later chief executive) of the National Coaching Foundation, which provided education for coaches at both ends of the spectrum, from parent volunteers to elite coaches. Ten years later, in 1995, she co-founded the Youth Sport Trust to set up a sports activity programme for every primary school in the country. It was hugely successful: in 2003 only 23% of school children were getting two hours of PE a week. By 2008, this figure had risen to 95%. In 2010, the coalition government cut their funding. By this time, back at the elite end of the sporting spectrum, Sue was also in charge of UK Sport, where she presided over Team GB's biggest Olympic medal haul in living memory, at the London 2012 games. In 2016, she took her current job as head of Women’s Football at the FA. She has also been a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords since 2008. BOOK CHOICE: The Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela LUXURY ITEM: A photo album CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Music Of My Heart by Gloria Estefan And *N SYNC Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.8	Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast.
0:08.4	Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take
0:13.2	with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:16.3	This is an extended version of the original Radio 4 broadcast and for right reasons the
0:21.6	music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.3	Music Radio Music
0:46.8	My cast away this week is Dame Sue Campbell. As Director of Women's Football at the FAA she's
0:52.2	presided over a blossoming of the sport with the lionesses making it to the semi-final of last
0:57.2	year's World Cup but it was as a PE teacher on Manchester's Moss side that she first witnessed
1:02.9	the power of sport to transform lives when she persuaded a hard-to-reach class to start their own
1:08.2	dance troupe. She's been inspiring and creating change ever since. A sporty child herself she
1:14.4	loved football and played netball for England. Always a trailblazer she became the first female sports
1:20.1	lecturer at Loftbury University, co-founded the Youth Sports Trust and became the chair of UK sport.
1:26.4	Her reward would be to oversee the largest British medal hall in living memory at the London
1:31.6	2012 Olympics. She was awarded her Daimhud in this year's New Year's Honours. She says,
1:37.5	I believe in the power of sport. I felt it. It's in my heart and my head. Kids sitting on that
1:43.2	wayward edge are pulled back by this thing called sport. Perhaps only music and sport can speak to
1:48.8	kids in that way. Plenty of both to discuss today. Dame Sue Campbell, welcome to Desert Island Discs.
1:54.9	Thank you very much. My pleasure to be here. So last summer, six million of us watched the
1:59.4	lioness's first game on TV, lots of pubs up down the country packed with people watching England's
2:04.5	women's World Cup semi-final match against the US. And it wembley in November over 85,000 people
	...

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