The Chelsea defender Niamh Charles hopes that new Football Association initiatives will mean the England Women’s team will be “more representative of society” for generations to come.
Three of the Lionesses called up to Sarina Wiegman’s squad to face Belgium in the Nations League this month are from mixed ethnic backgrounds, in stark contrast to the squad picked by Gareth Southgate earlier in October for the internationals against Australia and Italy.
Charles believes new directives from the FA can start to change the current picture. “I think, right now, you’ve kind of seen it at the top, but when you look at times gone by, yes we’ve probably not had the access in place and we’ve probably failed at some point,” she said.
“But I think right now the things that have been put in place, you might not see them right now, the progress, but I do believe that there are things in place that – in the future, hopefully – [mean] it’ll be more representative of the society we live in.
“I have hope that, for … the clubs across the country, in terms of access at grassroots level, hopefully showing that first-team level, hopefully it [will] be more representative in the future.”
Arsenal said this week that they accepted there is a lack of diversity in their women’s team after they posted their squad photo for the season and vowed to make improving the situation a “key priority”.
The FA’s new pathway hopes to solve some of the historical challenges identified, two of which have been long distances – and related expenses – for girls to travel to regional training centres.
Under the new Emerging Talent Centres initiative, centres are spread out more evenly across the country and an FA statement announcing the revamped programme said they “will see 95% of players accessing an ETC within one hour of where they live by 2024 and the number of young female players engaged in FA talent programmes across the country rise from 1,722 to more than 4,200 by the end of the 2023-24 season.”
England take on the Group One leaders Belgium on Friday night in the first of two critical Nations League games at Leicester’s King Power Stadium.
