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Growing up in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai did not have easy access to sports. By comparison, her husband, Asser Malik, whom she married in November 2021 after an initially secret courtship, could play hockey, football and cricket during his recess at the all-boy’s school he attended in a different area of the country.
Their disparate experiences — and a shared passion for sports — led the couple to found Recess Capital, a firm they launched in January to invest in women’s sports at the professional and amateur levels.
Yousafzai, a celebrated education activist and the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after surviving a Taliban assassination attempt as a teen, says the project’s name was born from their desire to reimagine school recess time for girls.
While the 28-year-old is well-known around the world as an advocate, some might be surprised to learn she and Malik, 35, are both sports fanatics.
It was sports, after all, that helped bring them together.
Gillian Laub
“He [was working] in cricket, and that was one of the reasons why I was interested in him, because I was like, every cricketer is a hard and handsome guy to meet,” she says in an interview for this week’s issue of PEOPLE.
When they met in the summer of 2018, Malik, 35, was working as a cricket manager in Pakistan and Yousafzai was a student at Oxford University in the U.K. Their relationship overcame long distance, the global COVID-19 pandemic and cultural pressures. (Love marriages, like theirs, are still frowned upon throughout Pakistan.)
Yousafzai credits Malik with exposing her to new sports, such as golf and pickleball. She’s also built relationships with legendary athletes through her advocacy work and counts Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn among her good friends, while tennis legends Serena Williams and Billie Jean King have helped mentor or advise her new venture.
She hopes to soon connect with WNBA star Caitlin Clark, whom both she and Malik are fans of.
Yousafzai has also supported the women’s Afghan cricket team in its advocacy effort against FIFA, which would not allow them to be a formally recognized team while in exile following the Taliban’s return to power.
“I believe that true education is giving girls access to all of these different pathways that they choose for themselves,” say Yousafzai, who is set to publish a new memoir, Finding My Way, on Tuesday, Oct. 21. “And sports is a really powerful one, because it builds self-esteem and confidence among them, it challenges stereotypes around how women are seen and it promotes a very positive message about women and girls.”
Yousafzai and Malik took a natural liking to women’s sports before they began planning Recess.
They have attended many live events, such as women’s tennis matches, WNBA games and the Women’s World Cup. (They’re also considering attending the next one, in Brazil in 2027.)
“There is this power about women’s sports that can bring so many people together from different cultures, and it is such a powerful tool for gender equity as well,” Yousafzai says. “So for me, I was like, we need to prove the business case of women’s sports.”
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Malik, who is also the director of franchise development for the Multan Sultans, a Pakistani cricket team, hopes Recess can help create sports equity on a global scale.
“All this progress should not just be in one part of the world,” he says. “So I think that’s something that drives me also, is to figure out that piece of the puzzle as we start building out Recess.”
