“Wooh! Good finish,” calls out coach Ian Westlake as 10-year-old TJ Spurling fires a shot at goal. “Set it,” he shouts to the next player in line, “and then run. You want to come off your left foot.”
It’s halfway through the Kesgrave Kestrels’ regular 90-minute Thursday evening training session – somewhere between the opening drills and the finishing game – and a brisk southwesterly wind is blowing in from the Suffolk coast nine miles away, gusting across the pitch of blue artificial turf.
Volunteer coaches Westlake, 39, Dan Spurling, 46, and Paul Berry, 42, formed the team three years ago, but really it was started by their daughters. Summer, TJ and Hettie had played together at one of the more than 1,700 FA-backed Wildcats football centres across the country, established in 2017 to bring football closer to young girls and introduce them to the game.
When they were old enough to join the local league their fathers, a little reluctantly, raised their hands. Today their daughters are among 150 girls playing in 11 teams across the age groups at Kesgrave Kestrels, inspired by the sportsmanship and success of England’s national women’s team, the Lionesses.
While the parents, gathered on the sidelines in sunglasses and T-shirts, grew up in a world of routine dismay at England men’s national footballing defeats – “years of England dross with the men’s team,” as one puts it – their daughters live in another dimension: one of women and winning.
“It’s bizarre,” says Berry, a lifelong football fan and player who took his daughters to the Euro 2022 final, which the Lionesses won. “I was saying to my girls when we took them to Wembley: ‘This isn’t normal! We’ve spent our entire lives watching England not win anything!’” When his kids have a kickabout they pretend to be Lucy Bronze, Ella Toone or Lauren James.
The rise of the Lionesses, and with them the uplifting of women’s and girl’s football, can feel precipitous: from niche to mainstream in little more than the short lifetime of the Kestrels’ U12s players. But it’s really more restoration than breakthrough: the absence of women from football is a 20th-century anomaly.
The world’s oldest football dates back to the 1540s and was found in the private chambers of Mary Queen of Scots. The women’s game thrived through the 19th century and boomed during the first world war, when women worked in factories while men fought abroad, and all-female factory teams played matches that drew crowds in the tens of thousands.
In 1921, as the postwar patriarchy sought to reassert itself, the FA declared: “The game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”, imposing a ban that suffocated the women’s game and was not lifted for 50 years.
The recovery of women’s football was slow at first but races ahead now, with the Lionesses reaching the semi-finals of the European Championship in 2017 and the World Cup in 2019, winning Euro 2022 and, today, taking on Spain in the final of the World Cup in Australia.
With success has come increased support, attendance at matches, participation in the game and growing influence. After winning the Euros, the England players wrote an open letter to the then Conservative candidates for prime minister, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, saying: “We want every young girl in the nation to be able to play football at school … The reality is we are inspiring young girls to play football, only for many to end up going to school and not being able to play.”
Seven months later, Sunak’s government committed itself to providing girls and boys with equal access to sports at school, including football.
“We’re starting to close the gender gap in sports, but there’s a long way to go,” says Kate Dale of Sport England, citing figures that show 100,000 more girls playing football now than in 2017, and 75% of schools currently offering equal access to football in PE lessons.
“We are seeing an impact from the Lionesses on showing girls –and boys – what’s possible,” Dale adds. “This generation won’t think of football as being mainly for boys but as something that both girls and boys can do.”
Last season, the Kesgrave Kestrels entered an U11 girls team in the local boys league. Berry says there was “a little bit of resistance” at first, but the competitive matches (regularly won by the girls) had changed attitudes among coaches, parents, and kids.
“Boys still think girls won’t be as good,” says Kathy Cooke, whose daughter Florence plays with the Kestrels. “But even the boys’ coaches now say: ‘These girls can really play’, and they’re getting that respect.”
“It’s exciting,” she adds, “because it feels like we’re at the beginning, that these girls can really do something.”
For the young players it’s less about gender equality and equal access (though they do love beating the boys’ teams) and more about having fun and hanging out with their friends – an attitude that is so often displayed by the Lionesses through their camaraderie, team spirit and joy.
“I like running and having fun outdoors, and I like scoring lots of goals,” says Hettie. And how does she feel when she watches the Lionesses? “Like I want to play football.”
