The radical shifts in public acknowledgment of women’s football over the last few years – and especially late last month – appear to be changing all that.
Last week England won their first major football tournament in more than half a century. Last week England’s women’s team won their first major football tournament.
All the newspapers agreed the next morning that this was a truly historic event. Their front pages were dominated by the news of Chloe Kelly’s winning goal against Germany in the European Championship final at Wembley. For reasons of football history and military history, a win against Germany was considered particularly sweet.
This “inspiring” team was, according to the daily mirror, “Historians”. That Daily mail hailed England’s “historic victory” and declared it “the greatest sporting triumph in the lives of most who were lucky enough to see it”. The women’s win would have been “unimaginable” when England’s men’s team last won a major trophy, the World Cup, also at Wembley, in 1966.
The guard Calling the team “game changers” it felt “like the end of one journey and the beginning of another” as their captain “held up the trophy in her rainbow armband”. The times described it as a “watershed moment” not only for women’s football, but for women’s sport in general. That BBCThe editor-in-chief of the Football Association of eV suggested that “women’s football will never be the same again” – but we may hope the impact of this event will reach far beyond the world of sport.
In fact, Her Majesty the Queen went further than most of these pundits when she sent the team a congratulatory message, saying they were “an inspiration to girls and women today and for generations to come.” Surely that was the point.
With more than seventeen million viewers on television and a further six million online viewers in the UK alone, this unprecedented level of public esteem has seen this once underrated and still scarce sport suddenly come of age. But that moment of sporting glory was much more important than that. It was bigger than women’s football and women’s sport. It demonstrated an extraordinary level of English success – English women’s success – in a sport that had once been male-dominated, a sport at the heart of the nation’s mainstream culture and public consciousness.
Although popular for forty years since its inception in the 1880s, women’s football had been banned from Football Association member pitches between 1921 and 1970. The umbrella organization had argued that the sport was “unsuitable for women”.
His decision may have something to do with the growing popularity of women’s football at the time, particularly during (and immediately after) World War I – and because he was financially independent of the FA. With a game that reportedly attracted more than 50,000 spectators (about sixty per cent of the attendance at last week’s UEFA final), it had quickly surpassed men’s football in profile and revenue.
In the decades that followed, with men once again dominating the pitches and stands, the sport developed a culture of machismo and chauvinism that not only reflected, but also reinforced and exacerbated, gender differences prevalent in a broader society. Football is really that important to England.
In June 1996, when England hosted the men’s EURO, the pop music charts were topped by a song proclaiming that football was ‘coming home’. It has since become the ubiquitous anthem of English football.
The beautiful game is ingrained in the nation’s psyche and 26 years ago it was believed that one of its flagship competitions might return to these shores to bring glory to the country that claimed it was its birthplace.
(This claim is obviously debatable, although modern football may have its roots in the so-called folk football of medieval England, a game in which two teams – each with an unlimited number of players – attempted to move an inflated pig’s bladder towards their opponents” End of town. The goalposts were the gates of churches and the rules prohibited killing of teammates, but not much more. The rules of contemporary football may have evolved from the playing fields of Victorian private schools, but in truth their origins are lost thousands of years ago to ancient China, Greece and Rome.)
In this context, the triumph of women’s football in a traditionally male-dominated sport may have wider social implications. Allegations of serious sexual misconduct by male players have rocked England’s Premier League in recent years. In terms of sex and race, there seems to have been little progress at times since the 1970s. Sometimes it feels like it’s gone backwards.
The radical shifts in public acknowledgment of women’s football over the last few years – and especially late last month – appear to be changing all that. Even the jubilant gesture of England’s decisive goalscorer was interpreted by many as a symbol of emancipation.
writing in Daily mail On Tuesday, Julie Burchill argued that “at a time when the existence of women is being denied, this show of bold femininity can change the world.” The guard This morning the result was presented as “a win for every overlooked and patronized woman”.
However, there is one important caveat to all this energizing hype, a concern several commenters have identified. England’s winning squad this year was made up entirely of white players. That would be unthinkable in men’s football and certainly unusual in women’s football. Football may have finally come home, but the homeland it has reached is not quite the multicultural nation we may know.
Nonetheless, this is a moment of celebration for England, a brief respite from the political and economic turmoil the country is currently suffering. But it is also perhaps a turning point – a potentially revolutionary moment – in the public perspective on gender in this hugely influential aspect of national culture.