Call me a lioness! I wear it ooooon my chest!” bawled my daughter, Pearl, on the way home from school yesterday, cranking up the car stereo to blast out the unofficial World Cup anthem for the England women’s team.
Now 11, Pearl has seen the British attitude to women’s football transform over the course of her lifetime. She has been training with our village team – Baddow Spartak – since she was six, but by the time she was nine and ready for proper matches, there weren’t enough local girls to build a team. Then came the Lioness’ triumph at the Women’s 2022 Euros and the average girl’s interest in football swelled. Pearl’s team now includes a full bench of subs. Just last month, they lifted their first tournament trophy. It was a jubilant, game-changing moment for a group of suburban kids who’ve all, at some point or another, been told by boys at school that their gender prevents them from kicking a ball.
“This – GET IN! ALL OF THIS! – is why I was so happy to be involved with recording ‘Call Me A Lioness’,” says Marika Hackman. The 31-year-old alt-rock singer-songwriter (usually known for her more melancholy sound) is part of the delightfully diverse lineup of musicians involved in writing and recording the football anthem, newly released under the moniker Hope FC. “I got to STAND NEXT TO F***ING MELANIE C in a south London studio!” enthuses Hackman. “The list of contributors was wild!” Self Esteem, Olivia Dean, Ellie Rowsell (from Wolf Alice), Rachel Chinouriri, Jasmine Jethwa and Rose Gray all sing on the track, with Sports Team’s Al Greenwood on drums. “It wasn’t about any of us, sitting in the dark, crafting stuff or putting an individual stamp on things. It was all about the fun stuff, it was about unity...”
“Call Me A Lioness” was co-written by rising star Olivia Dean, Glen Roberts (who has worked with artists including Joy Crookes) and Joel Pott (formerly of the aptly titled indie band Athlete). It was while watching the Euros with his football-crazy goddaughter that the seeds of the song began to germinate in Roberts’ mind. “We were singing along to ‘Sweet Caroline’,” he recalls. “Cheering as Gabby Logan said that the Lionesses had brought football home: ‘You think it’s all over? It’s only just begun!’ We wanted to do something to keep building on that joy and elevate it even further.”
This track does exactly that and nowhere more than in its barnstorming chorus which runs, “Call me a Lioness/ I wear it on my chest/ Won’t stop ’til we’re holding up the cup/ Cos winning once was not enough!” Pratt suggested they add in a post-chorus of “La-la-las”, specially tailored – just like the “Bom-bom-boms” in “Sweet Caroline” – for stadium-wide singalongs. “It was designed to capture joy and warmth, slipping down the scale, removing any sense of aggression… you can imagine people linking arms, swaying along, Mexican waves.” Just like those human tsunamis, the song’s melody isn’t subtle. But it is irresistible. A major chord uplift and a gentle descent that everyone from toddlers to grandparents can sing to. The beat is there to be stomped in the stands. “Stompability is key,” says Roberts. “And though we didn’t want to analyse the classic football formulae too much, you can hear some of them in there.”
“Music is such a huge part of football culture,” Hackman says down the line from her home in London. “Those roaring chants unite stadiums full of fans. That’s what drives teams to pull out their best performances.” Hackman witnessed that special power first-hand at a recent Arsenal women’s match – the first time the team had sold out Emirates. “It was a really tough game and we ended up losing. But the roaring, the singing! There was a huge, bonding catharsis that allowed us to really enter our emotions, making that direct connection for spectators with the feelings of the players on the pitch.”
As a lifelong football fan, Roberts loves the “Three Lions” anthem and drew on the iconic number to help him structure “Call Me a Lioness”. “I liked the commentary in that song,” he says. “But that narrative was about losing: 30 years of hurt. Our narrative was coming off the back of a win so I did wonder how we’d inject drama into that. I didn’t want the song to go, ‘Hey! We won!’” He laughs. “So, we latched onto the concept of the dream, somebody waking up and thinking, did we really just do that? Could we do it again?” Roberts knew he wanted to namecheck the players and their coach, Sarina Wiegman. “From the off, we wanted to give a nod to Hope Powell, who was the first ever full-time national coach, appointed back in 1998. Her spirit and, conveniently, her name is perfectly aspirational. It all starts with hope, in both senses.”
Many, if not most, women can recall growing up feeling excluded from football culture. Both Hackman and Greenwood played at primary school but, like so many other girls of their generation, they both quit in secondary school. A 2022 study by Women in Sport found that 43 per cent of girls who identified as “sporty” as a primary pupil no longer defined themselves as such after moving into secondary education. “There are so many depressing stats about girls dropping out of sport as they hit puberty, which is exactly when they need that personal empowerment,” says Greenwood. “There’s research analysing children throwing a ball, which shows that compared to boys, when girls throw a ball, they do it in a way that doesn’t enable them to do it to the best of their ability. They don’t take up the space. And you can map that onto the way we socialise girls and women, expecting underperformance as a norm into adult life.” Her frustration boils over as she stresses that “confidence in sport correlates with confidence in life, leading to the inequalities we see in society”.
Historically, football has not been a safe space for women. Reports of domestic violence in the UK surge during the men’s World Cup and Euros. Researchers found abuse and violence by partners increased by 47 per cent whenever England won a World Cup or Euros match. Newspapers began paying attention to this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, just as “Call Me A Lioness” collaborator Mel C and her fellow Spice Girls were espousing Girl Power. Hackman, who regularly dressed up as Sporty Spice when she was a child, notes that the girl band “came up at a very odd time for feminism. On the surface level I think people felt there was a lot of progress happening but then you look at what was going on underneath and… ugh, oh my God”.
Racist violence, too, increases around football matches. Indie pop singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri, who contributes vocals to the track, tells me that the racism surrounding football has stopped her from going to matches. Chinouriri, whose parents emigrated to the UK from Zimbabwe shortly before her birth, recalls being called “all sorts” when walking past the West Ham football stadium next to her house. “Being a Black woman, there’s a lot of fear – I’ve not ever been to watch a football game but when it came to getting involved with this song, I felt it was a beautiful thing to be part of this shifting mindset.” Anglo-English musician Jasmine Jethwa tells me she believes that Gurinda Chadha’s 2002 film Bend it Like Beckham “did an amazing job of showing how people of different ethnicities and backgrounds can come together to be involved in something that brings the whole nation together.” Jethwa will be proudly waving an English flag during matches and wearing her Hope FC T-shirt over the next couple months, she says.
The mindset is shifting but there is still a long way to go. After buying my daughter a Lioness T-shirt from Asda, I searched the supermarket website for a matching one to give my friend Simon – a 48-year-old man and longtime Lioness supporter – only to find none available. The retailer is only selling shirts for women and children. “When the men’s team plays, it’s totally normal to see men, women, and children wearing the same shirts, and I can’t see why this should be any different,” says Simon. (Asda did not respond to requests for comment.)
Greenwood compares sexism in the sporting world to that of the music industry. “As in football, music is so depressingly imbalanced when it comes to gender. Production, management, label execs... women are allowed in up to a certain point. Beyond that, there’s a sense of tokenistic inclusion and I think that needs to be called out.” She thinks we need more men like Simon wearing Lioness shirts, arguing that “the best way to affect change is by bringing everyone along with you. I’m in a band with five men who are all pushing me forward as my biggest allies and cheerleaders. That’s how we push forward. Together.”
To this end, profits from “Call Me A Lioness” will go to grassroots football charities. Greenwood tells me the charities “are less about what happens on the pitch” than they are about facilitating inclusion and building communities off the pitch. (Although finding the next Lionesses would be a lovely by-product of that). One charity, called Football Beyond Borders, helps provide long-term support to young football fans who are disengaged at school. Another runs training sessions for girls and non-binary players who would otherwise have no access to the sport.
Suffice to say, everyone involved in the making of “Call Me A Lioness” will be fervently following the Women’s World Cup as it unfolds over the next month. Jethwa will be at her local pub; Hackman will be hosting a buck’s fizz brunch; Chinouriri will watch the Lionesses on telly before going to see her local women’s team in person (“My first live game should be a women’s game, right?”) Meanwhile, Roberts will be kicking back with his goddaughter. His hope is that “Call Me A Lioness” will stay with the Lionesses until their next match at Wembley. “As a football fan and a songwriter, Wembley stadium is the dream, isn’t it?” he sighs. “I’d love to hear our song echoing from the terraces. That’s the goal!”
