“Football for me means everything. When I started at 13 years old, it was a hobby. But after that, I found that it was a game where when you go onto the pitch you don’t think about anything. You have a lot of worries, you have a lot of problems but you keep them off the pitch. You focus on your football and you enjoy your time with your friends.
“It makes me so happy. I don’t have any worries. I don’t think about the problems that I have. It’s…” Here, Najma Arefi pauses. The 19-year-old Afghan footballer considers her words carefully, wiping away a stubborn tear in the process. Almost indiscernibly, the earnestness in her voice notches up an octave. “It’s like a safe place for me when I’m playing football with my teammates.”
The final sentiment is important. Football has long been the tonic providing generations with personal escapes from life’s mortal coils; acting as, essentially, a safe place.
For Arefi, football works similarly, providing a place where the bad cannot get her.
Yet, it is also the very reason she was forced to seek an escape in the first place.
In 2021, Arefi was one of 130 Afghans who fled their home country after the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul following the United States’ withdrawal of its military. The Islamist regime reinstated draconian restrictions on the freedoms for women and girls, including bans on work, education and playing sport, while hunting down dissidents.
In search of aid at a time the team felt abandoned, Arefi used social media to track down Khalida Popal, the former national team captain who was forced to flee Afghanistan in 2011 in fear for her life due to her role in establishing the national team.
“Those people who had the power and connections abroad use them to save themselves, their families and friends. We had nobody,” Arefi describes. “So we found Khalida and requested her to be our voice and save us. She became our saviour and fought really hard for us to get us out.”
Arefi and teammates were eventually evacuated to Pakistan on temporary visas before securing safety in the UK.
Arefi maintains that she is a footballer, along with the other 32 female footballers who escaped with her. She says they provided the necessary documents at the border. In Herat, they played for the youth development team, travelling from Herat, Jawizjan, Mazar, and Kabul provinces to do so.
Today, she plays for her college team in Manchester. She’s a defender, which means she finds herself invariably swatting away archaic notions that “defending is easy” from her attacking teammates. She loves both Barcelona and Manchester City. And most days, she lets herself dream of one day stepping onto the pitch at a World Cup.
Yet, in the last few weeks, Arefi’s identity and that of her teammates has come under intense scrutiny. A Newsnight report claimed those female football players who fled Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Taliban did so under false pretences.
The investigation identified 13 players who used fake documents claiming to be national team players or members of a regional team. The report also claimed resentment abounded among “genuine players” living under Taliban rule.
Arefi, one of a number of players labelled without consent in the report, has criticised the BBC for its report, condemning the investigation as not only erroneously dangerous but as posing a direct threat to the safety of herself, her teammates and those women and girls still living in Afghanistan.
“I really don’t know why they published this news,” Arefi says. “They’re destroying all the lives of the girls who vacated from Afghanistan and at the same time, the girls who are still in Afghanistan. They’re putting their lives in danger by publishing this news, by stating there are footballers still in Afghanistan.”
Arefi also harbours concern that the report only further engenders a fractious tribalism in the current rhetoric gripping the refugee crisis in the UK and within her home country.
The plight of refugees has come into strict focus in recent weeks in light of the UK government’s new Illegal Migration Bill. Anti-refugee protests have increased.
Match of the Day was thrown into disarrayafter Gary Lineker tweeted criticism of the bill, with unprecedented fallout.
For Arefi, the report adds fuel to the perilous sense of “us versus them” boiling under the surface of the larger conversation, with she and her teammates wrongly cast as villains in the UK and to the women in Afghanistan. She said she and her teammates have been victims of online harassment and abuse on Afghan social media channels as a consequence.
“We’re not the bad guys they’re trying to make us out to be in this story, that instead of them, we came to the UK,” she says. “We didn’t take their place. We’re all football players.
“The women in Afghanistan think we are the reason they are left home. This is not true, we are not the reason. We want to use our platforms to fight for us and for them.”
Arefi explains that football was not the only threat posed to their lives while under Taliban rule, but of the 130 who fled, most were of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, what Arefi calls “targets” in Afghanistan.
Such were the risks she, her teammates and family took to reach safety, hiding away in fear, forced to abandon their homes while waiting for a sliver of an opportunity that she knew may never reveal itself.
“It was a bad moment for all of us,” she recalls on reaching the Pakistan border. “We didn’t know what was going to happen. We would die or we would survive. I remember I was so sad, but at the same time so happy for my family and my friends, they’re safe and I will be safe in the future.
“But leaving your home, you cannot think about it. Leaving your home, you can’t go back, and thinking about that…” Arefi trails off as she fends off tears.
Yet, the prospect of remaining in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, forced to give up education, work and football, was worse than the prospect of losing her life in search of freedom.
And Arefi believes the new report only detracts from the critical issues facing refugees seeking succour from the international community as well as the repressive conditions facing women still under the Islamist regime.
“They have no hope for the future,” Arefi says when describing the situation her 23-year-old sister and other teammates find themselves back in Afghanistan.
At just 19, Arefi knows she has experienced more than what’s normal. So too do her teammates. She admits they feel older than their ages suggest. Girls her age are not meant to experience so much upheaval so early in life.
For Arefi the responsibility of her family living in the UK can also feel crushing. She is the only fluent English speaker and had it not been for football, perhaps such a big risk might not have to be taken.
“We took this risk. And here, we feel so responsible,” she says. “We feel we should help [our families] in every single way and we’re just sorry for every single Afghan girl that this has happened to them.”
But Arefi remains hopeful too. Arefi says since the allegations, she and her teammates have received emotional support from many people in the UK, including school, work, refugee councils and Popal, though she still feels an unshakeable urge “to explain myself and my team” when greeted with solidarity.
“We are lucky to have a good support system,” Arefi says, stating that she doesn’t fear that she will be forced out of the country.
A longstanding subtext underpinning the refugee crisis has been sport’s silent role in addressing it. But Arefi believes football can be the source of change.
She points to the Qatar World Cup where the plight of Iranian women was broadcast to the world. With more exposure, she believes help can be afforded to Afghan women and perhaps one day, the future might look better.
“My perfect future would be to go back home and we have every right that every single girl in the world has. We should have it,” Arefi says. “That’s it for me. Afghan girls can do the same things that the other girls around the world do. That’s the perfect future.”
