People die twice. Football is how the people you love stay in the room.

Jane Hoskisson grew up going to Goodison Park with her dad in the early 80s, right at the start of the Howard Kendall years. She was a little girl in a huge crowd, too small to see over the bar, carried along by the noise of it. She couldn’t name every player or read every tactic. But she could tell you exactly what Everton means to her, and why football is the love language she still shares with her dad today.

In episode eight of Football for Breakfast, Jim Johnson sits down with Jane in the greasy spoon café for a conversation about belonging, memory, and why being able to see yourself in the picture changes everything.

The work

Jane leads diversity for the global aviation industry. Her work has helped move the share of female pilots from around 4% towards 6% worldwide, and lifted the number of women running airlines from 3% to 9% in just six years. Her reason for why it matters is simple: you can’t be what you can’t see. It’s true in a cockpit. It’s true on a pitch.

People die twice

Her artefact is an engraved award from her grandad Jim, who ran Saint Matthew’s Football Club in Liverpool in the early 60s – a community organiser who gave local boys somewhere to go. Jane brought her dad to the studio too, sitting just off camera.

As she puts it, people die twice: once when they take their last breath, and again when the last person says their name. Football, she says, is how the people you love stay in the room.

Seeing yourself in the picture

They also get into the quiet crisis in grassroots football, why community organisers are disappearing, and the moment Everton announced Goodison Park would become the home of the women’s team.

A woman who knows that the most important work, in aviation or football, is making sure people can see themselves in the picture.

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Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Football for Breakfast is presented by OSS Security. New episode every Tuesday morning.