Footballers' Wives: The Real Story

How to piece together the perfect portfolio

EXTRA August 24, 2008

GLADYS BEREJIKLIAN

HENRY REYNOLDS

LUKE FORD

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August 24, 2008 THE SUN-HERALD

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‘People think that, as a footballer’s wife, you live in an ivory It’s not all gala dinners JODIE ROBERTS Partner of Brumbies prop Nic Henderson. Together for nine years. ‘‘In most ways it’s exactly the same as going out with anyone else who has a career that requires a lot of their time and energy. It’s hardest when they’re away as it means you have to sacrifice and compromise a bit more and pick up a few more of the home duties. At this stage we do have to put Nic’s career first – which is why we moved from Brisbane. Originally it was difficult because all my family is in Brisbane – that’s when you pull together with the other girls. It’s great having that support network. But it’s not all gala dinners and certainly not as glamorous as people think.’’

TARA O’KEEFE Wife of Sydney Swans star Ryan. Have been together more than three years. ‘‘It can be hard during the season when the boys are away every second weekend. But there are positives, the functions we go to and so forth. ‘‘When I go to work every day Ryan goes to training. We see each other on weekends and at night but, apart from that, it’s like everybody else’s relationship – we work and come home. We like to keep things normal at home. ‘‘Living in Sydney is a lot easier because the city doesn’t revolve around AFL, like in Melbourne. Since the boys won the premiership the players have become more noticeable in public. But it doesn’t stop us from living normally.’’

CATHRINE MAHONEY* Wife of former NRL star Andrew Johns. Together for six years. ‘‘Our life together is very normal – an ideal night for us is just spent hanging out with his son Samuel, or having friends over for a meal. We do love a good takeaway and Super Saturday on Fox Sports or Friday Night Footy on Channel Nine. ‘‘I’m lucky that Andrew’s time with Samuel often falls on a weekend as it means we all get to hang out together. The only downside is the constant battle with the TV remote – depending on who gets it first you’ll see TVN, Nickelodeon or UKTV on the screen!’’ * From The Two Of Me by Andrew Johns, with Neil Cadigan (HarperCollins, $35).

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o what is it really like to be the wife of a millionaire celebrity footballer, the kind who regularly rubs shoulders with superstar pin-ups such as Cristiano Ronaldo? It’s all champagne, red carpets, and diamond nights out with Victoria Beckham, right? Sitting amid packing boxes in an otherwise empty house, Paloma Schwarzer can argue otherwise. Right now, life for this footballer’s wife is about moving home from one end of England to the other, finding new schools for her two young children, and wondering when she might again see her husband Mark, the Socceroos goalkeeper, away with his new team on a week-long tour to South Korea. ‘‘People think that, as a footballer’s wife, you live in an ivory tower, paint your nails all day and shop,’’ Schwarzer says. ‘‘That’s so not my life.’’ Paloma, 38, met her future husband in a Kings Cross nightclub in 1994. Far from the household name he’d become by the 2006 World Cup, Mark was then poised to leave Australia to try his luck as a professional in Germany. ‘‘I had no idea who he was,’’ Paloma recalls. ‘‘He was quite pesky but he said to me on that night, ‘I wish you could come to Europe with me because I’m going to marry you one day.’ I told him that you don’t say that to people you’ve just met, but he assured me it was true.’’ A month later, Mark moved to the German city of Dresden to kick-start a professional career in Europe. Paloma, an economics graduate from the University of NSW, continued her own career in banking until a European backpacking adventure beckoned. After a winter washing dishes at an Austrian ski resort, Paloma took up an invitation from Mark to visit – and then stay – in Dresden. ‘‘I knew already that if I stayed it meant putting my own life aside for him,’’ Paloma explains. ‘‘He was single-minded and was never going to give up his ambition to be a professional footballer.’’ Here’s the catch for a footballer’s wife. Their husbands may be financially well-rewarded, but they’re bound to the clubs for the duration of their careers that can last, at the top level, for 15 years. ‘‘It’s always been that way,’’ Paloma says. ‘‘Football comes first. The kids and I do everything ourselves. We don’t feel hardly done by. It’s just the way it is.’’ When Paloma first told her father she’d met a footballer, he replied that

Footballers’ wives often play second fiddle to their husbands’ sporting ambitions, writes MATTHEW HALL.

she was wasting her time. Her parents were even less happy when she announced that, after six months solo travel across Europe, she’d moved in with Mark and was studying German. ‘‘I had lots of discussions on the phone with my parents saying they didn’t bring me up to be a kept woman. They found it difficult.’’ But on a trip to Australia to play with the national team, Mark left the Socceroos’ hotel to visit his new girlfriend’s parents. He took flowers for Paloma’s mother and, over a lamb roast dinner, talked football with her father. ‘‘They were fine after that,’’ Paloma says. Mark’s career was going nowhere slowly in Germany, but in 1996 he received interest from teams in Britain. He signed with Bradford City, in northern England, after spurning an offer from a more glamorous club when Paloma spotted an error in the contract that omitted a zero from his proposed salary. Just 13 games later, Schwarzer joined Middlesbrough, another club in northern England, where he remained for 11 years. Paloma and Mark married at Shelly Beach near Manly in June 1998. True

to form, they spent their 10th anniversary apart. He was with the Socceroos in Dubai while she searched for a new house near London after Mark joined Fulham for the coming English football season. ‘‘We’re never together for anniversaries,’’ Paloma says. ‘‘He is owned 100 per cent by the club but it’s hard to complain. I can’t say that I’m really homesick and that I feel down on a Sunday when everyone is having a family lunch and I’m not. I’m not free to moan because, if I do, the constant answer is that I have nothing to complain about it. [Apparently] I’m minted. But money isn’t everything.’’ When Socceroo Mile Sterjovski left Parramatta Power to join French club Lille, his wife Sharon was told by team officials that she’d be able to work in France. A stranger in a strange land, her own job – it was thought – would give her independence and the opportunity to make her own friends. That advice was later proved inaccurate – she was not allowed to work – but that didn’t curb her enthusiasm for an adventure that’s now lasted eight years. ‘‘We were in France for a year and Mile said maybe we’d stay until he

was 28,’’ Sterjovski, herself now 29, recalls. ‘‘I told him that he no longer had to convince me. I was already over here. You got me!’’ In France, the Sterjovskis would host weekly gatherings for other Australian soccer couples living (relatively) nearby. The guest list included the Emertons (Brett and Sarah) and Culinas (Jason and Terri), who would drive from Holland where their husbands were playing, and the Carles (Nick and Melissa) who were also living in France. ‘‘We would all have a really good time, but when Nick and Mel left to go back to Australia we didn’t see them for years until we were all in Turkey together,’’ Sharon says. Transience is a particular challenge for the wives of Australian footballers. The Sterjovskis have lived in France, Switzerland, Turkey, and now England during eight years in Europe. The whims of clubs and coaches mean that contracts can be easily broken. Friendships, too. Last year, Mile joined Genclerbirligi, a team in Ankara, Turkey. By coincidence, so too did Nick Carle, allowing Sharon to rekindle an on-hold friendship with Melissa. Yet their husbands’ schedules XTRA

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THE SUN-HERALD August 24, 2008

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COVER STORY EXTRA

tower, paint your nails all day, and shop. That’s so not my life.’

‘Football comes first. The kids and I do everything ourselves.’

Sidelined ... (clockwise from left) Cheryl Cole, wife of England footballer Ashley, and Victoria Beckham; Paloma and Mark Schwarzer with Julian, 8, and Amaya, 7; Sharon Sterjovski with son Luka, 20 months. Photos: Reuters, Carl Court, Kirk Gilmour

took them away from their families for weeks. While living in Switzerland, Sharon would often take her young son Luka to play at IKEA (there were few other distractions for young children), but even that option seemed a luxury in Turkey. Although electricity and water were sporadic in the family’s apartment, Sharon was afraid to leave the house. Turkish drivers have an innate ability to turn two lanes into four. She, not unreasonably, feared for her life in Ankara traffic. Pregnant with her second child, she returned to Australia after two months in Turkey while her husband negotiated a move to England. The family has only recently been reunited after spending most of the past 12 months apart. Still, she sees the upside. ‘‘I’ve lived in France and Switzerland and a little bit in Turkey and it’s opened up my world so much,’’ she says. ‘‘As hard as it is in Europe,

you learn from it and you grow as a person. That is the best thing and something we can be grateful for.’’ As Australia celebrated the Socceroos as heroes during the 2006 World Cup, the players’ children just wanted to see their dads. The team was in endless training camps in Holland and Germany before and during the tournament. Just three days were allocated for family visits to the team hotel over a long German summer. ‘‘Leaving the team hotel [after those visits] was horrific,’’ Paloma recalls. ‘‘There would be children crying, looking out the bus window.

Little girls sobbing and crying, ‘I want my daddy!’’’ Paloma had been dealt a tougher lesson several years earlier. Pregnant with her daughter Amaya, now 7, she’d spent a sleepless week looking after her one-year-old sick son Julian. ‘‘I rarely woke Mark up because he’d be training or playing the next day,’’ Paloma explains. ‘‘Then I came down sick too. It was a Friday morning and Mark was supposed to travel to Liverpool for an away game and I was throwing up in the bathroom, sick as a dog, with a fever.’’ With her husband leaving her sick and alone with a one-year-old,

Paloma became desperate. ‘‘Can’t you just ring the coach and say your wife is sick and you can’t go?’’ she begged. ‘‘How can I say that?’’ he replied. ‘‘I’ll be told to pay someone to look after you.’’ But the Schwarzers didn’t know anybody. ‘‘We didn’t have any friends,’’ Paloma says. ‘‘We had no one here who I felt safe to leave Julian with so I could just lie in bed. We just carried on. Off he went.’’ Eventually, Paloma carved out friendships with other players’ wives, one the wife of another goalkeeper who lectures at a Manchester university. That friend recently asked a class of 18- and 19-year-old English women to list who they considered the most iconic females in the country. ‘‘These girls, supposedly reasonably educated, suggested Victoria Beckham and [Wayne Rooney’s wife] Colleen McLoughlin,’’ Paloma says. ‘‘The culture here in England is such that girls aspire to be a footballer’s wife. It’s sad. We always joke that our husband’s careers are socially limiting to us. Laugh but it’s

true, because of the social stereotype of what a WAG is supposed to be – a stupid bimbo who shops and has no interests.’’ If pressed, Paloma tells people she’s a ‘‘housewife’’, ignoring her own qualifications and projects that include publishing children’s books and managing her husband’s role as an ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Her son, eight-year-old Julian, wants to be a professional tennis player when he grows up. It’s possible that plans to be a footballer were canned after sitting among the crowd and watching his father play. His dad’s job is tough. There’s only occasional personal glory and one error can be costly for the team, both in a game and over a season. ‘‘It can be pretty horrendous, especially the swearing,’’ says Paloma of attending matches with her children. ‘‘It’s not all doom and gloom, and I wouldn’t swap it for anything, but I wouldn’t think it’s for everybody.’’ Sharon adds: ‘‘I always miss Australia – the summer for sure – but this is what we have to do. It will come to an end one day, which makes you appreciate it a lot more.’’

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