On Saturday, once West Ham’s Viviane Asseyi was home from the match, she picked up her phone and called her mum. It has become almost ritualistic for them to speak after a game. On the other end came a familiar sound.
She knows that she can tell me anything and everything, I’m good, I’m not good. I will just keep going and working to be better.” When Asseyi had called, she was annoyed. West Ham had lost 3-0 at Brighton and, despite the home team dominating possession, the Hammers were far closer to their opponents in terms of shots, shots on target and touches in the opposition box than the score suggested.
The collective laughter of her family has been a constant. Asseyi was born in France to Gabonese parents and spent her childhood with Gabonese culture around her. Her parents were so determined she have a relationship with her African heritage that everyone ate together on Sundays and the food, music and things happening in the country were always around.
She was four when she asked her mum to buy her a football. I want to be like [Zinedine] Zidane.’ “We are a family who laugh at each other a lot. In the beginning there was a lot of laughing because I was really skinny and they were like: ‘How will you play?
People are so much stronger than you!’ They were just laughing because that is the mood of the family, but they were really directly behind me.” Asseyi embraced the laughter then, as she does now, but the tiny, skinny child was deadly serious. I always said I wanted to be a professional footballer, that I wanted to be like Zidane. The teacher was like: ‘Is she OK?’ Women’s football wasn’t visible then, so all the teachers thought that I was crazy, but my friends understood, because they all played football.
Every day I would just go to school and play with them.” Her mum put her in clubs in Normandy, where she grew up. Eventually, the journey took her to the home of French football, when she earned a place at the national football centre in Clairefontaine. When the letter arrived confirming she had a place, it was “a dream”.
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