When you look at football in its rawest form, it is initially hard to see how it has become such a politically and financially powerful tool. From the Syrian refugees using breeze blocks as goalposts to the glistening multimillion pound academies of the world’s top clubs, the game remains, at heart, the same. It is a sport that, like rugby, cricket and tennis, can be picked up by just about anyone. Yet football stands alone – arguably commanding more respect and wielding greater power among ordinary people around the world than many governments.
Throughout history, the accessibility and universal appeal of football have made it a powerful means for fighting back against all forms of oppression, from Didier Drogba and his Ivory Coast teammates calling for an end to the civil war to Bundesliga clubs joining together against anti-immigration rhetoric, and from players taking the knee against racism to Marcus Rashford challenging the UK government over child food poverty. It is this side of the game that I love exploring: how football can be used as a force for good. Imagine what it could do for women – the 50% of the global population it has excluded for so long.
As a girl growing up in east London in the early 1990s, I could feel the power of the game on every warm day when, with the balcony windows of my family’s council flat open, you could determine the score of the Arsenal men’s match from the faint far-off roars from Highbury, and from the cheers around the estate as people listened on radios and watched on televisions. A community united in celebration.
Later, it would be in those fleeting moments of match-day euphoria that the self-consciousness I felt in being a woman at a football match would fade into the background. That fade was always brief. A look, a comment, or a sexist chant that I would pretend to join in with – all would quickly remind me I was different.
Women’s football was always different. It was welcoming and open, without many of the prejudices you find in the men’s game, yet the most powerful thing was that I didn’t feel out of place. Instead, I felt the sense of belonging and community that so many experience watching men’s football every week.
Women have long used football, and sport generally, to fight for influence and a more equitable society. Most female players would not say this campaigning drive is what motivates them to play; or at least isn’t why they started. But playing football is unequivocally a feminist act. Picking up a ball and heading to a patch of grass violates everything society expects of women: how they should look, how they should behave, how they should exercise, what they should wear, and how they should feel. I have seen this many times as I have explored the journeys of players from grassroots to elite, but particularly in my own relationship with the game.
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Growing up, I wanted to be like my dad; I wanted to like what he thought was cool. Fortunately, I was blessed with a father who was progressive and embraced and cultivated my love of football. When the Arsenal Ladies players pushed leaflets through the letterboxes on my council estate advertising their next match across the road in Shoreditch Park, my dad and I went to watch. He was the exception. In primary school I was the only girl who played football with the boys, the outlier who was forced to play in goal. I wore boys’ football shirts because girls’ sizes and cuts did not exist. As I grew and my body changed, the shirts didn’t quite fit; they were tighter around the top of the hips and there was no room for a developing bust. It increasingly felt as if I was expected to grow out of sport.
My secondary school in Hackney was single-sex. I felt as if I didn’t fit in, but I tried. PE, which seemed to avoid team sports, was universally hated, and so I hated it too. For someone who spent the majority of her first 11 years refusing to wear dresses and skirts, suddenly I had to pull on a short pleated skirt and oversize pants to take part. I hated my body, a body that was stopping me being welcomed in an arena I was so desperate to be a part of, because I was different from everyone else who was playing and didn’t want to stand out. I was self-conscious, I hated changing in front of my peers and I hated my period, too. The more I avoided PE, and the more I was driven from sport, the more unfit I became and the less welcome I felt.
There were brief moments when I dipped back in. A handful of Arsenal Ladies players ran sessions after school for a couple of terms. I held the keepie uppie record and revelled in those brief evenings dancing across the sports hall with a ball at my feet, but the damage had been done. Friends were bemused that I would stick behind after school, that I had to walk home alone in the fading light. I felt unfit, and the sessions were short-lived. I stopped.
In the stands, I didn’t fit in, either. How dare I, a young woman, encroach on this overwhelmingly male “safe space”? My earliest memories of going to games are fleeting, but how I would act remains engrained. I wore baggy clothes, sportswear, all the Arsenal clobber I owned so that my body screamed: “I’m really a fan just like you”. Even so, I never took off my baseball cap to try to avoid drawing attention to myself. I would mumble along with the chant that ends with the Tottenham manager’s mother being called a whore and would join in with the one that began “Hello, hello, we are the Arsenal boys” – they made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, but I was proving I wasn’t out to ruin anyone’s fun.
I stuck glued to my dad’s side because I hoped the fact that a man had taken me was validation of my right to be there. I felt like the ugly ducking, followed by eyes sizing me up, confused by my presence and in some cases disdainful of it. Some men would brush close past me in crowds or to get to their seats, making me incredibly uncomfortable. I wouldn’t have dreamed of going to a game on my own. That came much later, when I was in my early 20s. Even though there were still the sexist comments, the inappropriate touching and a feeling of not completely belonging, I was in a more comfortable place with my body, my worth, my right to enjoy sport and my views of the world than I was as a slightly nerdy teenager.
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Times are changing. We live in a very different society from that of 20 years ago, when I was 14 and grappling with these complex emotions, and a wildly different one from that which existed when women were making their first forays into football. Women can vote, divorce, own property, work, be single. Yet even today, women’s football provokes a vitriolic, misogynist defence of this space that many still consider the preserve of men. Why? Because despite the huge strides forward made by women, ingrained prejudices and oppressive views of a woman’s place in society are still very much present. That is seen in boardrooms, in pay packets, in advertising, and far, far more.
And for some reason, the very idea of a woman entering a place of escapism “for men” has, for some, always been a step too far. The first recorded official women’s football match took place on 9 May 1881 between Scotland and England at Easter Road in Edinburgh, and the disdain from the press and public was palpable. Contempt for clothing, the standard of play and appearance dominated. The Glasgow Herald described the game as “rather novel” and added that “the game, judged from a player’s point of view, was a failure”. Yet goalkeeper Helen Matthews (also known as Mrs Graham) persevered, and the game she organised saw the host nation finish victorious with a 3–0 win. Five days later, in front of 5,000 fans, a second game was abandoned after hundreds of men mobbed the pitch, forcing the players to flee on a horse-drawn bus.
After dipping into obscurity, women’s football re-emerged during the first world war. The women who had flooded into the factories in place of men sent to the front took to the factory yards in the same way the previous workforce had, and used football to lift morale and fitness. Teams quickly developed and the sport thrived but, in 1921, fearful of the uncontrolled momentum it was gaining, with a peak attendance of more than 53,000 at Goodison Park to watch the Dick, Kerr Ladies play St Helens, the Football Association cut it away at the knees by banning women’s football matches from all affiliated grounds. That ban would stand for close to 50 years.
Through more than a century of setbacks, bans and prejudices since, the resilient women’s game has climbed off its knees time and time again. It has been fought for by women who could have easily given up or swapped into a sport more palatable to wider society. It has been driven both by those who desire political change but also by those who just enjoy the freedom of playing.
I became a sportswriter in 2016, when the growth of the women’s game was about to accelerate. In my first press box, covering a men’s game, I felt as out of place as I once did in the stands. Now, covering women’s football, I work in one of the most inclusive and welcoming environments I have encountered, one that is increasingly respected in broader football journalist circles, too. Finally, women’s football is seeing the investment and support it has been lacking. And yet, despite the ideological battles for women’s right to play being won, it still gets attacked like no other sport. The trolls come out in force:
“It’s rubbish.”
“The goalkeeping is terrible.”
“It’s not fast enough.”
“Men’s teams would beat them.”
“Women’s football gets too much press coverage.”
“It’s being shoved down our throats.”
“Non-league gets better crowds, but they don’t get as much press.”
These are the voices of a minority, but it’s a vocal one. And it’s not new. In 1895, the Daily Sketch wrote scathingly of a British Ladies game: “The first few minutes were sufficient to show that football by women … is totally out of the question. A footballer requires speed, judgment, skill, and pluck. Not one of these four qualities was apparent on Saturday. For the most part, the ladies wandered aimlessly over the field at an ungraceful jog-trot.”
The fight hasn’t stopped: the US women’s national team has in recent years taken to the courts to force a reluctant federation’s hand and fight for equal pay and funding to match a men’s team they outstrip on the pitch and in revenue generated. They reached a $24m (£19m) settlement in their equal pay case in February, and last month the US women’s and men’s teams announced a historic deal to share World Cup prize money. Denmark, Colombia, Brazil, Scotland, the Republic of Ireland, Argentina and Norway are just some of the countries where female players have gone public in their fight for a bigger piece of the pie.
But when Norway’s Ada Hegerberg, winner of the first Ballon d’Or Féminin, was asked by a French DJ if she could twerk on stage after her 2018 victory, it showed that with every two steps forward there is a step back. Her decision to stop playing for her national team for almost five years in protest at the direction of the domestic game in Norway and the limited opportunities for young girls, shows there are many battles still to win.
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Women’s football is catching up. And to anyone who questions the level of the game, we must ask: would any men playing professionally today be as technically gifted, physically fit or as mentally prepared if they had to wash kits like Arsenal legend Alex Scott; fight fires full-time like goalkeeper Nicola Hobbs; go back to a homeless shelter after training like Reading’s Fara Williams; if they had to cope with little to no medical or physio assistance for much of their careers; essentially have to pay to play; or make six-hour round-trips after work to attend training?
A new generation of female footballers in countries where professionalism is slowly becoming a reality are starting to be relieved of those burdens. There is still a long way to go, but we are welcoming the most talented generation – and it’s only going to get better. I am both desperately jealous of the opportunity afforded to today’s young women and hugely relieved and buoyed up by the fact that young girls are welcome in football, with places to play, kit to wear, boots that fit.
We are less than a month from a home Euros in England that could catapult the development of women’s and girls’ football in the country forward another 10 steps. That could drive interest from investors, sponsors and, most critically, get more girls playing. National record club attendances set in 2019 in Mexico, Spain, England and Italy – and this year’s 90,000-plus attendances at Camp Nou in the Champions League quarter- and semi-finals – show the potential audience.
Football is often called “the beautiful game”, but it is a beautiful game that is increasingly removed from the realities of ordinary people. High ticket prices, jaw-dropping wage demands, tenuous sponsorship deals, the cost of food and drink in grounds, corruption and mismanagement in governing bodies: these things isolate the fans and communities that built the game. There is a drive to make the women’s game a mirror of the men’s, but do we really want it to be? We have the opportunity for it to be something better.
Recently, I was walking home with my eight-year-old son after school when I asked him whether girls play football at playtime. “Some,” he replied. “Do the boys mind?” I probed. Matter of factly, he told me that if any of the boys tried to prevent the girls from joining in, the ball would be taken away from them and given to the girls to play with for the rest of the week.
I was buzzing. Buzzing for the girls in his school who have the system on their side. Buzzing because a generation of young boys is being taught that football is for all. It really is that simple.
• This is an edited extract from A Woman’s Game by Suzanne Wrack: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Women’s Football, published by Guardian Faber on 16 June. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
When the FA banned women’s football: read another extract from Suzanne Wrack’s book on Monday 13 June
