Needle and Pitch: How Nicole Chui Is Stitching Asian Identity Into Women's Football

Athenea Lim
4 minutes ago
5 min read

For most of her life, Nicole Chui has been the only one. The only Asian player on her grassroots team in East London. The only person in the room, in campaigns, in creative spaces, who felt the absence of people who looked like her and understood why it mattered.

Disruption, it turns out, is the thread that runs through everything she does. In her embroidery, where she takes a traditionally delicate craft and refuses to be quiet about it. In football, where she took the sport that had long overlooked women like her and built a space for them to belong.

She grew up as a quiet kid, but football drew something louder out of her, eventually leading her to captain her school teams and carry that same energy into everything she built after. And when the spaces she entered didn't reflect who she was, she didn't just push back. She made new ones.

In 2022, Nicole started Baes FC with a kickabout in a park in Bethnal Green. Three years later, it's a community of over 200 women, trans, and non-binary people of Asian heritage playing football across East London and finding in each other something many of them had spent years looking for. A place where being the only one is no longer the experience.

The Club That Started as a Kickabout

When Nicole moved to London in 2013, football took a back seat. It wasn't until 2019 that she found her way back to the game, joining a grassroots women's team in East London called Victoria Park Vixens. She loved being back on the pitch. But a familiar feeling followed her there.

"I would voice all these things I’d notice as the only Chinese player and it would be something that, because it was a majority white team, wouldn't be considered a serious thing," she says. "It was a lot of talk, but no action."

That experience of being heard but not acted on, and included in name but not in practice, became the fuel for something new. In 2022, Nicole met with the two co-founders of the art collective BAESIANZ, and spoke to them about identity, tokenism, and the exhaustion of being othered in both creative and football spaces. That conversation led to a casual kickabout in Weavers Fields park, which led to the birth of Baes FC.

"I don't think people realise how much of a barrier there is for Asian women in sports," Nicole says. "It does get spoken about, but people don't take action on it."

More Than a Football Team

Three years on from that first kickabout, Baes FC has grown into a community of over 200 people playing two to three times a week across leagues and casual sessions, all run by Nicole and ten other volunteers.

"We are a team that celebrates Asian identity, but without screaming it out loud, by just existing," she says. "There's a mutual respect and kindness, those are our two main values."

The culture around the club is as considered as the football itself. New members can join through a "Bae v Bae" friendly at the start of each month, which is an inter-community game that keeps things competitive but low-pressure. Or they can drop into a training session led by Coach Kiran, who previously worked at Leyton Orient and West Ham and now plays in the league alongside the players she trains.

After sessions, the team often heads to Tita’s, a Filipina-owned coffee cart that happens to operate in the same Weavers Fields park where Baes FC first kicked a ball. They've collaborated with South Asian designer Askari on a bespoke kit, and recently redesigned their logo with two of their own graphic designers.

Nicole still plays herself, mostly in goal. It’s a position she fell into when no one else on her five-a-side team would take it, but she immediately felt at home in net.

"I'm just not afraid of going in for the dives, I'm not afraid of the clashes,” she grins. “I love being the last line of defence."

The Gloves That Started Everything

The spark that fused Nicole's two worlds came from a pair of goalkeeper gloves.

"I had a great pair of Nike goalkeeper gloves and I really wanted to just customise and make my own, because in everything I do, I love to express my identity," she explains.

She photographed the finished gloves, they were picked up by a magazine, and suddenly her work existed at an intersection people hadn't quite seen before.

The medium was embroidery, something she'd first learned at fifteen from her grandmother who taught her English smocking: a traditional technique of gathering pleats and stitching decorative patterns on top. It was precise, patient work.

Nicole took it and made it loud.

"My style with embroidery has been very loud colours, loud palettes, because it's almost like screaming at you ‘hey, look at me! this is what the possibilities of embroidery can be’."

She began stitching on everything: gloves, shirts, sports bags, and anything that could become a canvas. Her process is emotionally driven and deliberately imperfect.

"The imperfection of what I do makes it perfect," she says. "Craft and textiles have had this rep for being very perfect, but to me there's a bit of disruption in the way its traditional form has been perceived."

In 2024, she mounted her debut solo show ‘Ruined’ at Oof Gallery in London following a three-month artist residency, bringing together five years of work at the crossroads of football and art. It drew her first critical review from The Times.

"For me, that is a success," she says, "Because it's not something I personally read, but I know it means I'm doing something right."

Want to Customise Your Kit? Just Pick Up the Needle

With football customisation having its moment, from embroidered badges, to hand-painted shirts, to reworked away kits, Nicole has a straightforward message for anyone thinking about trying it themselves: just start.

"Think about what's true to you," she says. "With the rise of customisations in the football space, it's been so great to see different people express their fandom.

"Grab a pair of scissors, needles, pens, colours, anything, and just start, because I feel like the more you think about something, the more it sits there in your brain and doesn't actually happen.

‘That's how I did it, and five, six years later I'm still starting and doing it again, and finding joy in making all these things."

Her own process begins with emotion, reacting to a feeling through the work, leaving a piece unfinished, returning to it, and building on it over time. There's no fixed end point.

"I love the lack of control I have over not knowing how a piece will end up," she says. "There's always uncertainty with how it will turn out, and that leaves a bit of motivation to create more."

Stitch by Stitch, Match by Match

The future, for both Baes FC and Nicole's art, is rooted in collaboration. More creative projects with Asian artists, more kit commissions, and building the kind of structural stability that lets a volunteer-run club keep going without burning out.

"I see more collaborations happening in order to share resources and knowledge to enable the sustainability of our club's future," she says.

What she's built, stitch by stitch and match by match, is something that so many were yearning for. A space where the question of belonging doesn't need to be asked.

To support Baes FC, contact baesfootballclub@gmail.com, or to get involved in the team, follow their Instagram to find session schedules and upcoming events.