Millie Bright, captain of the Lionesses, is “absolutely heartbroken” that the England women’s team lost to Spain; they all are. The players are probably not in the mood to take the long view on what they’ve done for women’s football, and what women’s football has done for the country. My slender understanding of life at the top of an international sport is that you have to take it pretty seriously on a game-by-game basis, and the time for a philosophical approach is when you retire.
Yet it has taken just over a century for the women’s game to get back to the kind of adulation and spectator numbers it enjoyed just before it was banned by the Football Association (FA) in 1921. That ban was lifted just over 50 years later, which signalled a revival, but not a fast one: the first official women’s Euros were held 13 years later and the first Women’s World Cup didn’t take place until 1991. You can’t really account for that sluggish pace without figuring out why it was banned in the first place. The FA’s given reason was broad and weak – “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged” – and had a supposed basis in medicine, in the idea that the female frame was too delicate for the game. What rubbish.
