Liverpool Women Captain Puts Footballing On Hold During Pandemic

A fun thing for anyone writing about Liverpool Women will be reporting something positive. Unfortunately, today is still not that day. Liverpool Women will be losing another key player for the foreseeable future: this time defender and captain Sophie Bradley-Auckland. Bradley-Auckland. Bradley-Auckland taking a pause from football is at least less to do with FSG and Liverpool being terrible, and more to do with the world being terrible. Bradley-Auckland will be staying on at her other job as a key-worker in a care home in Nottingham for the duration of the pandemic.

“With the current situation it’s made me have to make a decision, one that’s been awful and I’ve actually lost sleep about it,” she told the club’s official website this weekend. “The fact is that I can’t return to Liverpool until a risk isn’t posed on the care home.”

“My happiness - and that’s what I call playing football, which is my happiness, is something that I love to do - isn’t worth somebody’s life and that is what it is as well. It is actually risking somebody’s life.

“I have a duty of care,” she added. “I’ve got 24 residents, actually 24 other members of my family I would call them, and I would never want to pose any further risk on them than what’s already there.”

It goes without saying that what Bradley-Auckland is doing is incredible and her work as a key worker is far more important than football will ever be. It’s probably worth having a conversation as well about the number of women footballers doing secondary jobs compared to the number of men footballers who do the same.

“All I’m holding onto is that I’ll be back,” the England international said. “My training continues before I go to work and I’ll always be fit and ready to come back whenever that risk is not there on the care home. It’s tough because I feel like I’m letting everybody (team-mates) down but I’ll be back. That’s all I keep telling myself.”

“Hopefully this doesn’t go on too long and I’ll be back and I can get the team where they belong - in the Women’s Super League.”

You can read her entire interview here.