A rugby World Cup winner walks into a room full of people who defend networks for a living. Maggie Alphonsi joins me to talk about breaking barriers, leading with your strengths, and what changed the day athletes stopped waiting for the back page and started telling their own stories.
A rugby World Cup winner walks into a room full of people who defend networks for a living. Maggie Alphonsi joins me to talk about breaking barriers, leading with your strengths, and what changed the day athletes stopped waiting for the back page and started telling their own stories.
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Maggie Alphonsi has spent her life refusing to let other people decide who she is. She grew up on a north London council estate, born with a club foot, handed a stack of stereotypes she wanted no part of and surrounded, in her words, by people whose ambition pointed down instead of up. Then a PE teacher pointed her toward a rugby pitch, and she found the place where her strength was the whole point — where what her body could do mattered far more than how anyone thought it should look. That teacher didn't just change her life, she told me. She saved it, because the other road was right there and easy to take.
I sat with Maggie at Infosecurity Europe 2026 — a Rugby World Cup winner speaking to a hall full of people who defend networks for a living. It sounds like a strange pairing until you hear her, and then it isn't strange at all. She wasn't there to explain rugby. She was there to talk about who gets to decide what your strengths are worth, which is a question the people in that room, many of them women in a field still run mostly by men, live with every day.
My obsession, the thing this whole show keeps circling, is who holds the pen. For years women's sport got something like a tenth of one percent of media coverage — two sentences at the bottom of the back page, if that. Someone else decided whether you existed. Then the phone in everyone's pocket changed whose hand was on the pen. Maggie watched athletes start telling their own stories and building their own audiences with nobody's permission. She pointed to Ilona Maher, a rugby player now more famous around the world than almost any man in the game, famous because she controls her own narrative one post at a time.
I love this, and I don't fully trust it, and neither does Maggie. The same platform that let her broadcast her strength also filled her feed with sexist garbage about a woman daring to commentate on men's rugby. She showed the crowd some of the worst of it, the misspelled cruelty, and then explained how she turns it into fuel. The tool is neutral. The hand on it is not.
We talk about technology as the thing that amplifies a voice, and it does. But the voice itself — the strength, the scars, the single mother who worked herself to the bone, the years of being told to play it down — none of that is digital. It is as analog as a muddy pitch. Maggie has two books out now, an autobiography and one for kids who haven't found their sport yet, and both exist for the same reason she stood on that stage: so a young person reads a story and thinks, that could be me.
We are all made of stories. I say it constantly, and this week a rugby player who learned it the hard way said it back to me. The technology decides how far a story travels. It still can't decide whether the story is worth telling. That part is ours.
So before you hand your story to an algorithm to carry, it's worth asking who wrote it — and whether you'd recognize yourself in the version that comes back.
Let's keep thinking.
Maggie's books are linked below. And if you want more conversations like this one, subscribe to the newsletter at marcociappelli.com.
— Marco
Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍
More from our Infosecurity Europe 2026 coverage:
Infosecurity Europe 2026 event coverage
Technology and cybersecurity conference coverage
About Marco
Marco Ciappelli is Co-Founder & CMO of ITSPmagazine, Co-Founder & Creative Director of Studio C60, Branding & Marketing Advisor, Personal Branding Coach, Journalist, Writer, and Host of An Analog Brain In A Digital Age podcast. Born in Florence, Italy, and based in Los Angeles, he explores the intersection of technology, society, storytelling, and creativity — with an analog brain, in a digital age.
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About the Guest
Maggie Alphonsi MBE is one of the most influential figures in the history of women's rugby. A flanker for Saracens and England, she won 74 caps, helped England to seven consecutive Six Nations titles, and lifted the Women's Rugby World Cup in 2014. Born in London in 1983 and raised by her single mother of Nigerian heritage, she was born with club foot and overcame it to reach the top of a sport that wasn't built with her in mind. Nicknamed "Maggie the Machine," she was appointed MBE in 2012, named Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year, became the first woman to win the Rugby Union Writers' Club Pat Marshall Award, and was inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame in 2016.
Since retiring, she has broken ground off the pitch — in 2015 becoming the first former female player to commentate on men's international rugby, and serving on the Rugby Football Union Council, where she drives the organization's diversity and inclusion work. She is a broadcaster across ITV, BBC and Sky, a sought-after speaker, and the author of two books: her autobiography Winning the Fight and Ultimate Rugby Superstars, written for young readers.
LinkedIn | Website | Books: Winning the Fight and Ultimate Rugby Superstars
EPISODE SUMMARY
At Infosecurity Europe 2026, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Rugby World Cup winner, broadcaster and author Maggie Alphonsi for a conversation that has little to do with rugby and everything to do with who gets to define you. Born with club foot and raised on a north London council estate, Maggie found in rugby the first place where her strength was celebrated rather than judged — what mattered, she says, was being valued for what she could do. She talks about the PE teacher who saved her life, the discipline of leading with your strengths, stepping out of your comfort zone, and knowing your "why." Then the conversation turns to Marco's own territory: media and narrative. For years women's sport got around a tenth of one percent of coverage, and someone else always held the pen. Social media changed that, letting athletes tell their own stories without permission — with all the abuse that comes alongside the reach. The throughline is one Marco returns to again and again: we are all made of stories, and the technology only decides how far they travel, never whether they are worth telling.
3 QUOTES — MAGGIE ALPHONSI
On the teacher who pointed her to rugby:
"It didn't just change my life, it saved my life — because I could easily have gone down a route that would have been quite negative."
On her body and her strengths:
"At school I'd get picked on for having big arms and big legs. In rugby they said, 'Wow, you've got big arms, you've got big legs — you're going to be a great player.' I was being celebrated for my strengths rather than judged on how I looked."
On controlling the narrative:
"Back in the day, women's sport got maybe 0.1% of media coverage. What's powerful about social media is women being able to tell their own stories, to control the narrative — without anyone's permission."
3 QUOTES — MARCO CIAPPELLI
On storytelling:
"If you have a good story, you're in a good spot anywhere you are."
On what we're made of:
"We're all made of stories. I love to say that."
On media and fame:
"Before, you needed the telly for your fifteen seconds of fame. Then social media arrived, and now everyone can be some kind of celebrity — for better and for worse."