uild-up continues to this Sunday, when the Lionesses will meet Germany in the Euro final, in an uncanny parallel to the men’s team a year earlier. The rivals are preparing for a showdown at Wembley as England battle it out for their first European Championship. As we celebrate this historic moment, the Standard goes back in time to how it all began.
In the 1800s, men’s football clubs sprang up all over the country in England. Less well known is that there were attempts by women to get involved in the sport as well, and small teams started to form.
One of the first recorded women’s clubs was the British Ladies Football Club in 1895, which was mainly made up of middle-class women and based in North London. Their first game had an audience of 12,000 people, with subsequent games reported to be thousands of spectators. However, the club itself was incredibly short-lived and was disbanded the following year.
During these early days for women’s sports, the press and the general public were largely unfavorable to women playing soccer. It was widely discouraged by both the press and the public, with pitches sometimes mobbed by crowds.
All this, of course, changed during the First World War. With many young footballers signing up to fight, the Football Association suspended the men’s competition in 1915. This was a hiatus that would last until 1919.
It was from this wartime that the women’s game began to shine. About 150 teams emerged, formed in the new and often industrial workplaces of women.
Vintage Women’s Soccer – In Photos
It seemed that organizing charity matches between workplaces was an excellent way to raise money for the war effort and boost workers’ morale.
The largest team of the time came from a munitions factory. Dick Kerr’s Ladies FC beat the factory’s men before they became internationally famous. They are the first registered women’s team to play an international match against a team of French women from Paris.
Their popularity peaked when Boxing Day drew a packed stadium of 53,000 people, at Everton’s Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920. Another 10,000 spectators were turned away from the gates. The total attendance of this competition remained an official women’s record for 98 years.
After this wild success, the English Football Association, led by Lord Kinnaird, tried to put an end to the popularity of women’s football. On December 5, 1921, the FA formally banned women from entering their grounds and from using their training facilities.
The women lost all FA accreditation and were formally shadowed, and without the structure and support, hopes for an officially affiliated women’s league collapsed.
It took 50 years for this ban to be lifted.
After the Men’s World Cup in Mexico in 1970, Mexico held an unofficial women’s tournament.
They held lucrative sponsorship of Martini & Rosso, drawing huge crowds to the same stadiums the men’s teams had used just a year earlier.
An independent team representing England took part, the youngest member being 13-year-old midfielder Leah Caleb. England didn’t win, but their game against the Mexican home side is said to have attracted 80,000 spectators.
The English Football Association overturned their ban the following year, in 1971.
This was not the saving grace of the women’s game, with a World Cup still twenty years away. FIFA took place in China in 1991, and perhaps to distance itself from the far-reaching superiority of the men’s World Cup, FIFA officially dubbed it “The first FIFA Women’s World Cup for the M&M’s Cup.”
Of course, there is still a huge gap between the profile of the men’s game and that of women.
I myself played in the Tottenham Ladies Youth Academy in the 2000s. I remember practicing in poorly maintained parks and rented turf pitches – none of the luster of the men’s youth academies.
But as more attention is paid to the women’s game, the hope for more basic funding and changing attitudes, the beautiful game becomes more accessible to everyone.