I’m in my sixties now, but whenever I watch the Lionesses, I still wonder what might have happened if someone had simply handed me a football and said, “Go on then, have a go.” I loved football as a child. I loved watching it, talking about it and, like most children, I loved the fun of kicking a ball around. But at school, football was very definitely a boys’ game. The boys went off to play football while the girls were expected to do something altogether more sensible. Cooking, for example. At my school, the girls did cooking classes and the boys weren’t allowed to join us. Looking back now, I have to laugh. How ridiculously sexist that was
Apparently, boys needed to learn football and girls needed to learn how to make a Victoria sponge.
I wonder what happened if a boy secretly wanted to learn how to cook? Or a girl wanted to score the winning goal? There seemed to be an unwritten rule about what boys and girls were supposed to be interested in, and nobody seemed to question it very much at the time.
Thankfully, times have changed. And nowhere is that change more obvious than in football.
So who decided football was a man’s game?
The fascinating thing is that women’s football isn’t some modern invention. Women were playing football more than a century ago. In fact, there was a recorded women’s international match in Edinburgh as far back as 1881, and by the early 1920s there were around 150 women’s football clubs in England.
Some matches attracted enormous crowds.
Then, in 1921, the Football Association banned women from playing on FA-affiliated grounds, declaring football to be “quite unsuitable for females”. It seems extraordinary to us now. For nearly 50 years, women’s football was pushed to the margins. But women carried on playing wherever they could. Eventually, the ban was lifted and women’s football slowly began to rebuild. It is remarkable to think that the football we now watch on television has roots stretching back all those years.
The women who helped change the game
There were women who simply refused to accept that football wasn’t for them.
Patricia Gregory was one of those pioneers. In the 1960s she became involved in the campaign to establish proper opportunities for women and girls to play, at a time when the sport had very little support or infrastructure. There were no glamorous training grounds or huge sponsorship deals. Women had to fight for pitches, organise teams and raise money themselves. And yet they kept going. Perhaps they knew something that should have been obvious all along:
If you love football, why shouldn’t you play it?
Then came the girls who showed us what was possible
One of the names that stands out is Kelly Smith.
Growing up in Watford, Kelly was football mad from a young age and played with boys. But eventually she was told she could no longer play for a boys’ team after complaints from parents.
Imagine being a little girl who loves football and being told that the problem isn’t how you play it’s simply that you’re a girl.
Kelly didn’t let that stop her. She went on to have an extraordinary career, representing England and becoming one of the country’s best known female footballers.
Then there is Lucy Bronze, who grew up in the north east in a football loving family.
Her mother has spoken about how Lucy was always surrounded by football and would practise constantly. She went on to become one of England’s most decorated players, winning major honours both internationally and at club level.
And Lauren James is part of an even newer generation
Football was simply part of family life for Lauren. She grew up playing alongside her brothers and was involved in football from a very young age.
Today, girls can grow up watching players like Lauren and think, quite naturally:
I want to be a footballer.
That sentence would have sounded very different when I was at school.
Look at them now
Perhaps what I find most wonderful about women’s football today is the young girls playing football. They don’t seem to be asking permission anymore. They turn up in their football boots. They train. They compete. They score goals. They celebrate. They have heroes and dreams and favourite players. And the crowds turn up to watch them.
The Lionesses have become part of the sporting landscape in a way that would have been difficult to imagine when I was a girl. England’s women won the European Championship in 2022 and again in 2025, and the success of the national team has helped bring even more attention to women’s football.
I look at the players now and sometimes think about that schoolgirl version of myself. I would have loved to have had the chance to play, I was very sporty.
And maybe that’s why the sight of a little girl now running onto a football pitch makes me smile. She doesn’t have to think about whether football is suitable for her. She doesn’t have to wonder whether she belongs there.
She just picks up the ball and plays.
And while she’s doing that, perhaps somewhere another little boy is learning to bake a cake.
Now that really would be progress.
