Long before his role in New Zealand’s landmark 2018 equal pay agreement, Chris Wood was a feminist ally without really realising it. The year was 1995 and the setting the junior grassroots football scene in Auckland — specifically, Onehunga Soccer and Sports Club — where Chris, then about three or four, was learning the ropes before growing into a prolific forward.
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His sister Chelsey, two years his senior, at first thought the whole thing was far too rough so would sit a few metres from the touchline with crayons and a colouring book until, in Chris’ words, “she was just sick of watching on the sidelines and thought, ‘I can do just as good’”. The only problem was that, at first, Chris was the only one willing to pass to her.
“I don’t think people were used to having a girl on the team, but at the end of the day she wasn’t a girl to me — she was my sister,” says Chris. “She was just another person.”
Chelsey was more technical than Chris, he explains, and from her role as a holding midfielder — her 5ft 8in frame meant she often had to play centre-half — she would routinely set him up to score.
“I had a lot more hustle and bustle, stood up front and scored the goals, but she had a better pass, better touch,” he says.
Chelsey also, somehow, had the skilful knack of managing to never get dirty: by full-time, Chris’ white kit would be a sorry umber, Chelsey’s unfathomably pristine. “I loved it, but I didn’t like to get dirty,” Chelsey, 30, chimes in. “Probably in each team, there was maybe one girl. I can remember there being maybe a group of four of us that were constantly at football events in Auckland. It’s much better now, but I still had people to look up to.”
She was — and still is — “very defensive, very protective” of Chris in everyday life, “but not on the field. He’s massive. He can cope.”
Through a webcam, over Zoom, the siblings are an inch apart, one on each side of the screen. In real life, there are almost 19,000 kilometres between them: Chris, 28, is on an iPad in his front room in England and Chelsey, 30, in the Bay of Islands, a popular tourist spot in New Zealand where she moved with her husband Ron two years ago.
It is early evening in England and touching 7am on the other side of the world. Chris is a talismanic forward for Burnley, where he moved for a club joint-record fee of £15 million from Leeds in 2017, and Chelsey is a successful optometrist who, having represented the New Zealand national teams in her youth, now plays football recreationally for a local women’s team.
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They train twice a week but “get rained off pretty much every training”, she says. At the time of our call they had trained just twice in the past three weeks and were trying to jam in an extra session to limit the damage. “There’s just not the facilities and things, but I’m OK with that because I enjoy my football for football.”
Chris, the Burnley striker, is a familiar figure in English football (Photo: Getty Images)This is how they have lived since Chris was scouted for West Brom at 15. He had gone to the Under-17 World Cup, after which his coach recommended him for a trial in the Midlands and he made the scholarship programme — a move that saw Chris’ English mother Julie move to England with her son while his father Grant stayed in New Zealand with their daughter, who was just beginning an optometry degree. There have been times when the siblings have gone 18 months without seeing each other in the flesh.
“We’re used to it,” he says, ruefully. “I wish the last 15 years could have been different and I could have had my sister over full-time. We’ve missed out on loads of things that normal families and brothers and sisters get to do. In that sense, I’m gutted that we never got to grow up fully together — we only got to grow up until we were 16.
“So it’s a… I wouldn’t say a regret, but a thing that I’ve definitely missed out on.” Chris confesses he is “very bad for communication” so FaceTime is rare, but they swap messages after each of Chris’s games and have accepted the situation as a necessary sacrifice, Chelsey says.
“I missed them, of course — my brother’s like my best friend,” she says, smiling. She and their father holidayed in England at each opportunity “because Christopher couldn’t come back as much anymore. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make because he is the most important person to me, and I just want him to succeed”.
In other ways, though, they have been passing ships for even longer. At 12, they were no longer allowed to play on the same junior team and the family’s move from Auckland to Cambridge coincided with Chelsey’s moved into women’s football.
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“Every Saturday, Chels and I had five games between us,” Chris says. “Chels and Dad went one place in the morning for one game and me and Mum went the other way. We crossed over for a bit of lunch, then on to the next game in the afternoon.
“They were taking us to all different places. Hamilton is where we played our football, which is half an hour away from Cambridge. We’d just meet at — oh, jeez, anywhere. Restaurants, local anything, just to find something between. You just get used to it. It became second nature to us. We both wanted to play football so much.”
As children, their favourite toy at home was their Crazy Catch, a rebounder that would fire the ball back in different directions. Previously, they had battered the trellis so much by kicking the ball against it that their neighbours got angry, until Chelsey and Chris decided to turn their trampoline on the side and use that as a goal instead.
Did they dream of turning pro? Chris says that it wasn’t “until quite late on in my football career” that he felt, genuinely, that he could be a fully-fledged footballer: he suggests as late as 21 or 22. “At the beginning, I thought, it’s just nice and I’m doing well, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work to be here for 15 to 17 years.“ Chelsey, for her part, had been around the New Zealand women’s squad — the Football Ferns — since she was 15, playing at the 2008 and 2010 Under-20 World Cups, with Chris able to fly out to Germany to watch her in the latter having just been at the men’s World Cup in South Africa himself.
Chelsey playing at the 2010 Under-20 World Cup for New Zealand (Photo: Martin Rose – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)“Mum and Dad were out in Germany, picked me up at the airport,” Chris says. “When people play that I know, I see it that they’re doing something they love and I just want them to do well. Just seeing her play was just a joy.”
Chelsey is a devoted follower of Chris’ career and has not missed a game of his for 10 years but cannot claim to be as cool a spectator as her brother: she will go to bed at 8.30pm to be up at 3am to watch his Premier League games, after which she will go to the gym or to work.
She recalls watching Chris take a 94th-minute penalty against Wolves in July this year (which he scored). “I had to leave the room,” she says. “I literally thought I was having a stroke. He needed to put it away and I was like: ‘Oh, my God’. It’s very stressful. I’d rather be out there and take it myself because then I could have some control, but I love it. I truly have to pinch myself sometimes, because everyone here knows him and discusses his game to me. I’m like, how is my little brother playing in the Premier League?”
Chelsey and Chris in their childhood (Picture courtesy of the Wood family)Chelsey “immensely enjoyed my age-group representation” but “truly never wanted to be a professional footballer”. She was the smartest of the two, excelling at science at school, and wanted a more conventional career that would last her until retirement.
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“I didn’t have that drive to go overseas like most of my friends have done,” she says. “In women’s football, it’s hard. You make a living, but you don’t… it’s just hard financially, and I didn’t have that full drive to become a professional. Having that international exposure was awesome and playing at a high level in New Zealand was awesome, but that was enough for me. I’m happy to live vicariously through my brother.”
As New Zealand vice-captain, Chris was a key voice in one of the most pivotal moments in New Zealand football history. In 2018, the governing body and the New Zealand Professional Footballers’ Association (NZPFA), where Chris is a board member, became among the first national sports organisations to secure equity and parity for their senior men’s and women’s national teams. In practice, it meant pay parity, equal prize money, equal rights for image use and parity across travel while representing New Zealand. There were 30,000 female players in the country at that point, the Football Ferns ranked inside the world top 20.
“Women’s football has been in my life for 15, 20 years, ever since Chels stepped into that side of the game,” says Chris, who was previously in a relationship with the Liverpool Women forward Kirsty Linnett. “To me, it’s very important. It’s something where, until you open your eyes to it, you don’t see it. I was fortunate enough, through my sister and through my ex, that they opened my eyes to women’s football and what they need, what they miss out on, the struggles, the hardship. As a person in my position, especially back in New Zealand, I knew I could do something about it. I wanted to be involved.”
The former Football Ferns defender Maia Jackman was also part of the negotiations, a woman Chris recognised as one of Chelsey’s early football heroes. “It was coming to the point in time where I think everybody was changing their view on women’s football in general,” Chris says. “I wouldn’t say it was easy to get them to where we are in the men’s game, but they were very open to doing it. The female heads and captains pushed extremely hard, and a few of us lads on the side gave it the final push to get it over the line.
“Ultimately, finances are one of the hardest things (for female players). In New Zealand, especially about 10 years ago, you had to sacrifice and move to Auckland if you wanted to play for your national team. It didn’t matter where in the country you were — you had to move up. And that wasn’t subsidised. You didn’t get accommodation. You had to change your job and change your schooling and then just put yourself up. It wasn’t right — but there were ways to change and there’s still a lot more to come from that.”
Is that what Chelsey had to do, as a teenager? “Yeah,” she says. “I left school at 15 and moved to boarding school in Auckland for my last two years. There’s just no other way to get seen, to go to all the training and the camps.” She pauses, addresses her brother. “Don’t you think the flight situation was tricky, Christopher?”
“Oh, yeah,” he nods.
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“The girls were flying from New Zealand to these countries that were 17, 24 hours away, always economy, and they had no way of upgrading themselves,” resumes Chelsey. “But they’re athletes, having to be squished into an economy seat. In some cases, the boys were not having to do that.”
Chris acknowledges that there is sometimes a risk — particularly when men have been inspired to create change by women close to them, as in his case — of talking about women in relation to the other sex: we must care about them and they are valuable only because they are someone’s daughter, sister, girlfriend or wife. We must move past that point, Chris says.
“Definitely, and I think that’s the stage I got up to very quickly. These are talented people, dedicated people, who give up their lives to play football just as much as we do as men,” he says. “They work extremely hard, just as we do. They’re talented people because they are some of the best in the country.”
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