Peerlessly tough Fara Williams opens up about her early career homelessness

Nothing expresses Fara Williams’ mental fortitude quite like the fact that England’s most capped player, male or female, spent six years of her career homeless. It is the one chapter to which none of the lavish tributes marking her retirement this week, after 172 appearances for her country, can quite do justice. Even as she looks back excitedly on her international debut, almost 20 years ago, it is difficult to shake the image of how, at the same time, she was entering a perilous existence of bouncing between hostels.  

“I don’t think anyone will ever truly have a true reflection of what it was like inside the hostel,” says Williams, from the hard-earned comfort of her home in Leatherhead. “We weren’t even allowed visitors. Trying to explain what your room looked like, or the showers, or the kitchen? It was awful. I’m a bit of a clean freak, so I really struggled with that. Fortunately, the area where I ended up in London, around Victoria, was where I had started playing with Chelsea. I would walk past where my friends had lived, and I ended up getting back in contact with them. Those were times when I would get a nice hot bath, and some food.”  

At the time, almost nobody knew that the “shy, vulnerable, unaware young kid”, as Williams describes her younger self, was of no fixed abode. The one exception was her then coach, Hope Powell, who, on noticing her shuffling around at the end of an England Under-19s trip, asked her where she was planning to go. She had no idea, she said. Immediately, Powell drove her to the homeless unit in King’s Cross and bought her a sleeping bag. “If you ask any player who worked under Hope with England, they would say she was hard, that she never showed her softer side. But she did to me.”  

Williams, in her own way, was also well-versed during this period at putting up defences, at barely telling a soul what she was experiencing. Such barriers, she explains, “were there to show I couldn’t be broken”. They also served as a form of self-preservation. She freely admits there were moments, especially when she began her long service for Everton in the mid-2000s, that she felt frightened returning from Liverpool to her temporary shelter in London. “It was those late nights coming back. People who are on drugs or afflicted with alcohol, you don’t know what they’re capable of doing. I was scared sometimes walking the streets. So, I would walk a few yards, spin around and drop the shoulder.” Amid the bleakness of the memory, she cannot help but laugh. “As any good midfielder would do.”  

She became homeless shortly before her 18th birthday, in what began as an impetuous act of rebellion against her aunt, with whom she clashed, and a determination to show her mother, Tanya, that she could discover her own path beyond their Battersea estate. “That was my stubbornness, the independence that I tried to have so young,” she says. “I probably ended up homeless a little longer than I needed to. When I was first in a hostel, I used to share a room with three other females. My belongings would get stolen, my clothes. That was what troubled me the most. I never had any friendships or relationships there. Inside, I had to remain strong.”  

You will never hear Williams descend into self-pity about any of this. Even at 37, fortified by a CV that includes an MBE, two domestic league triumphs, two FA Cup wins and involvement in three World Cups, she depicts her former life of drift as a “bump in the road”. “So long as I had a roof over my head, some way to keep myself clean and dry, that was the most important thing,” she argues. “I was naïve. When you thought about homelessness growing up, you didn’t think very nicely about people who were in that situation. Those you pass on the streets, their addictions are covering up the pain that they’re in. They get ignored. They can’t see a way out. They’re the pictures and the images that we see. But there’s a deeper issue than that in terms of homelessness.”  

Football, for as long as she can remember, has been her release valve. She acquired resilience early, competing on Saturday nights in the cage on the estate, pretending to be one of the Chelsea players she had just watched with her uncle at Stamford Bridge. “I was a tomboy,” she says. “I would be playing football in my rollerblades. I must have had a bit about me.” It was at one five-a-side tournament, run by the Metropolitan Police at her local youth club, that a Fulham scout spotted her self-evident talent and offered her a contract.  

As she surveys the sweep of her life, the game that holds the fondest memories for Williams is still her first in an England senior jersey. “It’s the start of a journey and you don’t know where it's going to take you. I was a nervous wreck on the day, but it’s the one I hold closest to me. I’d like to think that, for the 171 games I added on to that, I wore the shirt with the same emotion, the same pride, the same honour.”  

Williams has few worries on this front, with Casey Stoney, her long-time team-mate and now Manchester United manager, lauding her this week as an “icon”. Her only regret is that her final season for Reading has unfolded in far from the fashion she intended. In February, she announced that she had been diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome, an unusual kidney condition treated with high-dose steroids that brought a plethora of distressing physical changes. At one stage, she was so ill and swollen that she had take a trip to A&E.  

“The worst part was what the steroids did in changing how I look. I was getting hair in places that are unnatural for a female. All the fluid being moved inside my body meant that I ended up with moon face. I was eight kilos (17½ lbs) over my normal body weight. I would go into games knowing that there would be cameras there, that opponents would be judging me for how I looked. With all those negative thoughts going on, I was never going to get anywhere near my best.”  

As a consequence, she grew increasingly withdrawn. “I was really insecure with it,” she acknowledges. “I didn't really go anywhere. When I sat down or tried to sleep at night, it was very painful. It was playing on my mind. I didn’t want to be remembered like this. I worried people would think that I was just overweight, or too old. I knew it was time to hang my boots ago. But the illness ruined what I had planned.”  

If there is a sense of grace to Williams’ life after football, it comes from having fully reconciled with her mother. The pair had been estranged for nine years, until a World Cup qualifier in Switzerland in 2011, when Williams scored a 50th-minute goal and shaped her hands into a heart symbol. Tanya, who was due to turn 50 and believed the timing of the goal was fateful coincidence, sent a message thanking for the celebration. It was a text that would ensure not just a reunion, but an ever-deeper bond.  

“The reason I was homeless had nothing to do with my mum,” Williams says. “It was to do with me thinking I could go and attack the big bad world. Our relationship breakdown lasted longer than it should have because of me, thinking that I didn’t need anybody. But there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about her. She was always my motivation to succeed. In school, I had wanted to do well, so that I could give my mum a better life. So, for her to be able to watch some of my greatest achievements, such as the bronze-medal game at the 2015 World Cup, has been the most important thing.”  

The subject of her most traumatic years, fearing if she would even find a bed for the night, has not been raised between them. “There was never any need to talk about it. I was safe, I was healthy, and she had been through a lot in any case. It was about catching up on lost time. I had lost a lot of years of our lives together. I never wanted to look back at what had been, only to move forward.”  

It is an attitude that strongly influences her outlook today. While she is grateful for all the eulogies about her accomplishments as a player, Williams is restless to carve another niche for herself in the game. She would, one feels, make a fearsome pundit. Already, she demands that England’s under-performing women’s team, who have lost nine of their last 14 games, be held to the same uncompromising standards as the men. “We have ex-players in commentary saying, ‘Oh, it will come, they’re performing well, they’re out-possessing teams,’” she says. “But it’s not good enough. As a pundit, you’re on the other side. You have to be truthful. Rio Ferdinand is happy to say bad things about Manchester United, a club that has done so much for him. In the female game, we have to be doing that as well.”  

Hers is a dauntless voice. She has barely been retired a week, but already, there is a sense that Williams has much still to give. For it is a product of her homeless background, requiring a level of self-sufficiency to which very few footballers can relate, that she is not merely honest, but peerlessly tough.