What you need to know
Growing up in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai didn’t have easy access to sports. By comparison, her husband, Assar Malik, whom she married in November 2021 after an initially secret relationship, was able to play hockey, football and cricket during recess at an all-boys school in another part of the country.
Their different experiences and shared passion for sports led the couple to form Recess Capital, a company they founded in January to invest in women’s sports at the professional and amateur levels.
Yousafzai, a prominent education activist who survived a Taliban assassination attempt as a teenager and is the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, said the project’s name was born out of their desire to reimagine school recess for girls.
While the 28-year-old is well known around the world as an advocate, some may be surprised to learn that she and Malik, 35, are both sports enthusiasts.
After all, it was sports that helped bring them together.
Jillian Laub
“He[worked in]cricket, and that was one of the reasons I was interested in him, because I thought all cricketers were handsome guys who were hard to meet,” she said in an interview in this week’s issue of PEOPLE.
When the pair met in the summer of 2018, Malik, 35, was working as a cricket manager in Pakistan and Yousafzai was a student at Britain’s Oxford University. Their relationship has overcome long distance, the COVID-19 pandemic and cultural pressures. (Love marriages like theirs are still frowned upon throughout Pakistan.)
Yousafzai said Malik introduced her to new sports such as golf and pickleball. She has also built relationships with legendary athletes through her advocacy work, and counts Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn among her good friends, and tennis legends Serena Williams and Billie Jean King have also helped guide and advise her new venture.
She hopes to get in touch soon with WNBA star Caitlin Clark, who is a fan of hers and Malik’s.
Yousafzai has also supported the Afghan women’s cricket team in its advocacy against FIFA for refusing to allow it to become an officially recognized team during its exile following the Taliban’s return to power.
“I believe that true education gives girls access to all the different paths they can choose for themselves,” said Yousafzai, whose new memoir, “Finding My Way,” will be published on Tuesday, October 21. “Sport is a really powerful thing because it builds girls’ self-esteem and confidence, challenges stereotypes about how women are seen, and promotes very positive messages about women and girls.”
Yousafzai and Malik had a natural love for women’s sports even before they started planning Recess.
They have attended many live events, including women’s tennis matches, WNBA games, and the Women’s World Cup. (They are also considering participating in the next edition, which will be held in Brazil in 2027.)
“Women’s sports have the power to bring people together from different cultures and are a very powerful tool for gender equality,” Yousafzai says. “So for me, I thought we needed to prove the business case for women’s sports.”
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Malik, who is also director of franchise development for Pakistan’s Multan Sultans cricket team, hopes that Recess can contribute to building fairness in the sport on a global scale.
“All this progress shouldn’t just happen in one part of the world,” he says. “So I think what’s driving me is finding that piece of the puzzle as we start building Recess.”
