There is a particular kind of story that the powerful spend enormous energy trying to prevent from being told. Not because it is false. Because it is true – and the truth, in the wrong hands, is the most dangerous thing in any room.
The Uncommon Enemy is that kind of book.
2 weeks ago at the Royal Air Force Club in London, I had the honour of hosting the official launch of Isha Johansen’s memoir – published by SBB Publishing – in a room that included former Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, former Chelsea FC director Marina Granovskaia, and His Excellency Dr Morie Komba Manyeh, Sierra Leone’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Fatma Samoura, the former FIFA Secretary General, provided a foreword that sets the tone for everything that follows.
“They were not silencing Isha Johansen,” Samoura writes. “They were giving her the defining chapter of her story.”
That sentence says it all. Because that is exactly what happened.
Who Isha Johansen Is – and Why They Came for Her
Before she became the first woman to lead football in Sierra Leone and West Africa, before she was elected to the Executive Committee of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), before she became the first West African woman elected to the FIFA Council – Isha Johansen was standing on a rocky football field in Freetown, trying to give war-affected children and former child soldiers somewhere to belong.
She founded FC Johansen as a lifeline for boys who had nothing. Displaced by civil war, orphaned, discarded. She invested in them, built a proper club around them, and watched them become under-15 champions against Liverpool in the Swiss Youth Cup. It is the kind of origin story that should have made her untouchable. Instead, it made her a threat.
Because what Isha was really doing – on that field in Freetown, and later in every boardroom and FIFA corridor she entered – was demonstrating that the gatekeepers of football had been wrong. Wrong about who could lead. Wrong about who belonged. Wrong about whose voice deserved to carry weight in the rooms where decisions were made.
Institutions do not forgive that kind of demonstration easily.
What the Book Actually Is
The Uncommon Enemy is described as part memoir and part political thriller. That description is accurate, and it still undersells it.
It is an insider account of what happens when a woman refuses to be pushed out of a system built to exclude her. It documents political interference, governance failures, corruption, player trafficking, media attacks and the kind of sustained personal pressure that is designed not to win an argument but to simply exhaust the person standing in the way.
Isha is precise about this in the book. She is not writing to settle scores, though she has earned the right to settle several. She is writing because she understood, at some point in the middle of everything that was thrown at her, that her survival was itself a form of evidence. Evidence that the system she was navigating was broken in ways that needed to be named.
“This is not simply a football story,” she says. “It is a story about power. About what happens when institutions are challenged, how systems protect themselves, and the personal price people pay when they refuse to look away.”
I have spent my career as a journalist asking exactly those questions. Which is why, when Isha brought this story to SBB Publishing, I knew we had to be the ones to put it into the world.
Why We Published It
SBB Publishing was built on a single conviction: that the stories most worth telling are often the ones that face the most resistance. Not the polished narratives that institutions are comfortable releasing. Not the versions of events that have been smoothed over by PR departments and legal teams. The real ones. The ones that cost something to write and require courage to read.
Isha’s book cost her something. There is no question about that. The years she spent navigating FIFA politics, the personal attacks, the moments she stood alone in corridors that were not designed for someone who looked like her – none of that comes free. And she chose to write it down anyway, with precision and without self-pity, in a way that makes the book both a testimony and a manual for anyone who has ever tried to challenge power from the inside.
That is what SBB Publishing exists to amplify. Not celebrity. Not convenience. Story – the kind that actually changes how people think about the systems they are living inside.
The Room at the Royal Air Force Club
I want to say something about the night of the launch, because rooms tell you things.
When David Dein walks across a room to tell an author that her book matters, that is a specific kind of endorsement. When Marina Granovskaia, who has operated at the highest levels of football administration, sits down to hear the story of a woman who faced many of the same invisible walls she has faced – that is a specific kind of solidarity. When the Sierra Leone High Commissioner is present to witness one of his country’s most significant voices be formally introduced to an international audience – that is a specific kind of acknowledgement.
The room was full of people who understand power. And they were all there to celebrate a book about a woman who refused to let power silence her.
That matters. Not as decoration. As signal.
What I Want You to Take Away
If you work in football – read this book. If you work in any institution that tells itself it is meritocratic while quietly ensuring that certain kinds of people never quite rise to the top – read this book. If you are a woman who has ever been in a room where the unspoken message was that your presence was tolerated but your authority was not – read this book.
And if you are a leader, anywhere, in any sector, who has faced the choice between protecting yourself and telling the truth – read this book. Because Isha Johansen chose the truth, and she is still standing. That is not a small thing. That is, in the current state of the world, a remarkable one.
The Uncommon Enemy: A True Story of Football, Power and Betrayal is available now, get your copy at sbbpublishing.com
For media enquiries and interview requests: press@sbbmedia.com
Stephanie Busari is an Emmy, Peabody, and Gracie award-winning journalist, founder and CEO of SBB Media and SBB Publishing, and founder of Her Story Global. She spent 16 years at CNN International and was recognised by the United Nations as one of the 100 Most Influential People of African Descent.
Follow her work at sbbmedia.com | @official_sbbmedia
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