Sarai Bareman: Kiwi Fifa boss on her meteoric rise, corruption and sexism in football, and brother Eugene’s success

Eugene Bareman and Sarai Bareman. Photo / Getty Images.

West Auckland bank teller turned administrator of 211 countries, Sarai Bareman has charted a unique sporting life. The Fifa chief women’s football officer joined Between Two Beers to chat about the World Cup, a career in which she overcame gropes and taunts from colleagues, and playing a game against Diego Maradona.

It was a day long in her dreams and Sarai Bareman had planned to sleep in.

July 20 would be the culmination to a period of immense pressure for the global women’s football boss, a World Cup kicking off in the city where she first kicked a ball, and being woken early by a helicopter was the last thing she needed.

Then Bareman turned on the TV in her downtown Auckland hotel room and discovered something much worse.

“I saw ‘breaking news, shooting’, then looked out the window, saw the helicopter, saw the police cars, flashing lights,” she says. “The images on TV were of fully armed police sprinting around herding people with their guns. It was confronting.

“My first thing was like, holy shit, this is happening. This is a serious situation. I hope that people haven’t died. What is this? Is this terrorism? What does this mean?

“And then I just went straight into crisis mode, picked up my phone and was like, okay, what do we need to do?”

Bareman’s initial response must have been common to many the morning a gunman entered the construction site at One Queen Street and killed two coworkers before shooting himself.

What came next was shared by few. Not long after being buzzed awake, she joined a call with Prime Minister Chris Hipkins, Minister for Sport Grant Robinson and Fifa president Gianni Infantino, the Football Ferns’ opener against Norway less than 12 hours away.

“Everyone was still wondering what the hell was going on,” Bareman says. “In that call, they gave us confidential information about what was unfolding. So we were privy to this information which explained the situation and also gave us an immediate sense of relief that this wasn’t related to the tournament.

“That’s when it hit me like, f**k, this is the big time. This is a serious moment. We’re talking to the head of the country here. He’s giving us confidential information about the situation, putting us at ease as a tournament organiser. It was totally surreal.”

That moment the Samoan-Kiwi could never have anticipated. But Bareman is well acquainted with significant and transformative moments. Some seemed small, like a post-match chat with a teammate; others were of wider consequence, like football’s most powerful men being bundled into police cars.

A few stand out to Bareman, inflection points pivotal to her scarcely believable rise from West Auckland bank teller to sporting administrator overseeing 211 countries.

The conversation

For someone whose journey led all over the world, Bareman had no idea where to begin.

“When we left school, everyone was going off to do a BA at Auckland Uni or whatever,” she says. “I just thought, why am I going to commit four years to studying something when I don’t even know what I want to do with my life?”

Her life lacked nothing in guidance and support, growing up in a big family inheriting Christian values from a Samoan mum and work ethic from a Dutch dad.

Bareman and her siblings — including big brother Eugene, who would establish City Kickboxing, shepherd the ascent of Israel Adesanya and become one the best mixed martial arts trainers in the world — were embedded in the local sporting scene.

“Having such a presence in sport was massive,” she says. “This is something I only recognised now as an adult: the values that sport instils in you as a kid, like how to lose graciously, how to celebrate wins together, how to be a team player, the fact other people are counting on you.”

Those lessons were learnt first on the athletics track and then the rugby field, where years later an otherwise unremarkable conversation set Bareman on her path to Zurich.

“I was playing rugby for Massey and there was a girl in my team working at National Bank. We were just chatting after a game one day and I said, ‘I’m not going to uni; everyone else is going. I gotta do something’, and she said, ‘Come apply at the bank’.”

Application successful, Bareman became fond of the financial security, if never quite the industry itself. “I wanted to do a field that would help people,” she says.

Before chasing that desire into football, Bareman helped Eugene on his own remarkable road, setting up the first bank account of City Kickboxing.

“I remember thinking to myself, f**k, this is a big step. My brother’s setting up his own business. This is a massive step.”

Having since taken giant strides in their sporting fields, little has changed when the siblings head home.

“When we’re all in the country, every Sunday, it’s family dinner at Mum’s,” Bareman says. “You show up or you’re in trouble. You ask permission to leave the table. Everyone has to bring a plate, everyone has to contribute, everyone has their turn washing the dishes. If you don’t, you get a whole bunch of shit.

“The moment you walk in that door, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best MMA coach in the world or in charge of the Women’s World Cup — you’re not anyone.”

Sarai Bareman speaks during the FIFA Women's Football Convention at Paris Expo Porte de Versailles on June 06, 2019. Photo / Getty Images.

The crisis

The Bareman brood were raised as “Kiwi kids”, influence of their Samoan heritage extending to exchanges of Talofa lava at family gatherings.

But Sarai always felt pride in that aspect of her identity, admiring Samoan kids at school without deeply considering her background. “I wanted to know more,” she says. “I wanted to understand it.”

That wish was fulfilled as many other dreams were shattered. After a decade in banking, the Global Financial Crisis struck while Bareman specialised in property, her clientele responsible for many prominent Auckland developments.

“So many of them went under. It was quite a depressing place to be working, people falling all around you. I was never that passionate about finance, so it was this moment I was looking for something else.”

Aligning with the search for her roots, Bareman took a trip to the Pacific, meeting family and spotting a critical job ad in the Samoa Observer.

The country’s football federation had been run by men concerned only with their own prosperity. It was now suspended from Fifa and requiring a full rebuild.

“They were looking for someone to do the finance stuff, so I chucked my hat in the ring,” Bareman says. “I’ve never been more nervous for any interview in my life, because I f****** wanted it. It felt like fate.

“My 10-year finance background, I was looking for something else, I was playing football, I loved the sport, and it seemed like this fateful moment that these parts of my life were coming together.

“I researched the shit out of it. I went to the Samoan library in Apia and read books and did Google searches about Samoan football and learned everything I could. Like I was studying for an exam.”

Bareman passed, despite wearing an unbreathable shirt that had soaked through by the end of an interview held in 30C heat.

She put plenty more sweat into Samoan football, representing the national team — “I was an average footballer in New Zealand. I was freaking amazing in Samoa” — before stepping off the pitch and into the chief executive’s office.

“By then I had gotten fully involved,” she says. “I was doing refereeing, development stuff, coaching kids. I was fully bought into rebuilding Samoan football from the ground up. Other people were applying, all men, but I felt like I had it.”

The confidence was justified, the job hers. But steadily it was undermined by men who targeted Bareman’s gender and mixed heritage, hiding some taunts behind a language barrier and delivering others in the open.

“It was pretty shit in the early days,” she says. “I was experiencing quite a bit of sexism, like innuendos. I’d stand up to address a meeting and get gross comments and wolf whistles, and just yuck. Like, walking through the office getting groped, just gross stuff.

“It pissed me off. Because I thought, f**k this. Why is it like this, when this is such an awesome sport to be working in? Why do I have to deal with this kind of bulls***?”

Ian Wright and FIFA Chief Women's Football Officer Sarai Bareman. Photo / Photosport.co.nz

The callout

Bareman soon discovered too many could relate to dealing with that kind of bullshit.

The Samoan chief had resolved to remain in a position of power. Improving kids’ lives through football outweighed an unseemly side to the beautiful game.

Then, in 2013, Bareman was invited to speak at the Pacific Youth and Sports conference in New Caledonia, a pedestal she dared to seize.

“I was thinking for a long time about what I was going to speak about, and it was actually that anger from a moment in a meeting where I literally got yelled out of the room and told to get to the kitchen.

“By then my Samoan was getting a little bit okay, so I understood what they were saying. I remember walking out of this meeting and closing the door to my office, and I cried.

“I decided I would talk about those challenges. I was angry and probably a bit naive, too, about what I was going to be saying and who I was going to be talking to.”

Bareman overcame any naivety, nerves and the emotion of detailing her ordeal, delivering a rousing address to tormenters and allies.

“I spoke my truth. Some of the people who had harassed me were in the room and that was important to me, that they heard what I had to say. I even remember thinking, I hope you f****** know that I’m talking about you.

“The crowd started to respond. I started to get these woops of encouragement to go on. I could just feel this buzz in the room that people were into it. And then when I finished, everyone just roared.”

Mobbed when leaving the stage, her message resonating with women from across the Pacific, Bareman saw the commonality of her truth and the strength in solidarity.

“All they were saying was, ‘Thank you for sharing, because I’m going through this in my country’,” she recalls. “They were so grateful that someone spoke openly about what was going on.

“It was a pivotal moment for me as a woman in a position of leadership to understand the power I had to influence change for other women, and also to know there’s nothing I’m going through that other women are not.

“That gives you strength. Just being able to express to another woman, ‘This is absolute rubbish that I’m dealing with this, that you’re dealing with this’. To have that connection, that’s powerful.”

The committee

The speech raised voices, eyebrows and Bareman’s profile. The following year, she returned home as deputy general secretary of Oceania Football Confederation, a role that would take her to the scene of the crime.

In Zurich for Fifa’s annual congress, Bareman’s phone lit up and, not for the last time, she switched on TV to be greeted by unforgettable scenes.

“It was on CNN — that’s when you know shit is real. They showed the Baur au Lac, which is like the swankiest hotel in Zurich where all the main dudes were staying. They showed police cars swarming outside that f***ing five-star hotel and police escorting people out in handcuffs under bedsheets. And the headlines were like: Fifa officials arrested.”

Seven at the hotel, a further seven indicted, the US Justice Department alleging $250 million in bribes pocketed over two decades. The worst crisis in Fifa history.

“They were all corrupt, and they deserved it,” Bareman says. “The money changing hands, the backdoor deals that were going on…f***ing crazy levels of corruption.

“I just remember sitting there and thinking, what does this mean? That was another moment.”

For Bareman, it meant appointment as the sole woman on Fifa’s 15-person reform committee, coming armed with invaluable experience of cleaning up Samoa’s financial act.

“I distinctly remember the first meeting feeling super nervous and walking into this boardroom to all men in suits. I was wearing a skirt and heels — great pair of heels, actually — and thought, holy shit, I’m one of a kind in here.”

That solitude brought responsibility, as Bareman advocated for more women in football leadership and more resources in women’s football. Eventually, it brought opportunity, as her advocacy sparked the creation of a new division.

“They wanted me to come and lead it,” she says. “The job description was basically two sentences, which essentially said you’re in charge of women’s football all over the world.”

The size of that task was reinforced by her office inside Fifa headquarters in Zurich, a state-of-the-art bunker breached by an underground entrance that reminds Bareman of Get Smart.

“All the executive offices have these giant world maps behind the desks,” she says. “I turned around and remember thinking, holy shit, we are not in Samoa anymore. It just dawned on me, the magnitude of the job, and I freaked out.”

An isolated start was spent without husband Mark, a quantity surveyor who would learn German to expedite his shift north. Like in Samoa, Bareman began questioning her place, and like in Samoa, she found the answer in using football to help.

She also found the job not without perks. “We have this congress tournament where the delegates from the 211 countries play small-sided games with Fifa legends, and Maradona was one. He was old by then, his knee was heavily strapped, but man, he still had the magic.

“I just remember thinking, who the f**k can say they have played a game of football with Maradona.”

The path forward

Twelve hours after being awoken by tragedy, Bareman joined 43,000 at Eden Park to witness the Football Ferns’ greatest triumph.

“It was a complete day of A to Z on the emotional scale,” she says. “Fear, anticipation, nerves. Pure, raw ugly-crying at the stadium.

“It was just so joyful, for New Zealand, for the start of the tournament, for the sheer relief from the stress of the morning and the shooting. It was such a cool moment.”

The rest of the World Cup surpassing all expectations, Bareman’s extraordinary journey is awaiting its next indelible moment.

“I believe my path is already laid out,” she says. “It just happened that girl in my rugby team was working at the bank. It just happened I was in Samoa when that job was advertised. It just happened I was in the Oceania role with the Fifa corruption, and it just happened I was the only woman on that reform committee.

“I often get this question: what’s next after this? And I think there’s a path for me.”