Women's association football

• 1. Introduction

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  Women's association football has been played competitively for well over a century, yet for much of that time the sport was actively banned by the very institutions that governed the game. Around 200 national teams now compete internationally, and the same Laws of the Game that apply to men's football apply here without modification. The United States stands as the most successful nation in the sport's history, having won 4 Women's World Cups and 5 Olympic gold medals. Germany follows with 2 World Cup titles and 1 Olympic gold.

  But those figures tell only part of the story. Long before those trophies existed, women were playing football on cold pitches in Scotland in the 1790s, in factory yards during wartime, and in front of crowds that sometimes outnumbered those watching men's matches. The organisations that should have supported them chose instead to shut them out. How that ban came about, how it lasted nearly half a century, and how the sport rebuilt itself into a global competition spanning every continent are the threads this documentary follows.

  The early 1990s brought the first FIFA Women's World Cup, held in China in 1991. Within a decade, the 1999 tournament in the United States sold more than 1,194,221 tickets. The questions ahead are not only about triumph. They are also about who held the door closed, who forced it open, and what the sport still owes to the women who played when no one was watching.

• 2. Origins and Early Pioneers

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  Evidence that women played a form of football dates to the Han dynasty, between 25 and 220 CE, where frescoes depict female figures playing tsu chu, the kicking game also known as cuju. Annual matches in Midlothian, Scotland, are on record as early as the 1790s. By 1863, governing bodies had standardised rules to remove violence from the pitch, which made the sport widely considered safe for women to participate in.

  The first match described as international in character took place in 1881 at Hibernian Park in Edinburgh, during a tour by Scotland and England teams. The Scottish Football Association recorded a women's match in 1892. Then, in 1894, activist Nettie Honeyball founded the British Ladies' Football Club in England. In March 1895, the club played the first women's match to be officially recorded in England.

  Honeyball was explicit about her intent. She said she founded the association in 1894 "with the fixed resolve of proving to the world that women are not the 'ornamental and useless' creatures men have pictured," and she looked forward to the time when women might sit in Parliament. Her words tied the football pitch directly to the wider suffrage movement.

  The British football associations frowned on the women's game from the start. Historians have suggested that the resistance was driven partly by a perceived threat to the perceived "masculinity" of football. Whatever the motivation, the sport continued without institutional support, sustained by the players and by crowds large enough to draw notice. Those crowds would eventually become the stated justification for the ban that followed.

• 3. Wartime Football and the Munitionettes

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  In August 1917, a tournament was launched specifically for female munition workers' teams in north-east England. Its official title was the "Tyne Wear & Tees Alfred Wood Munition Girls Cup," though it quickly became known simply as the Munitionettes' Cup. The first winners were Blyth Spartans, who defeated Bolckow Vaughan 5-0 in a replayed final at Middlesbrough on the 18th of May 1918, in front of 22,000 spectators.

  The tournament ran a second year. In the 1918-19 season, the ladies of Palmer's shipyard in Jarrow defeated Christopher Brown's of Hartlepool 1-0 at St James' Park in Newcastle on the 22nd of March 1919. Female employment in heavy industry during the First World War had done for women's football what industrial expansion had done for the men's game fifty years earlier: it created networks, workplaces with enough women to field teams, and audiences eager to watch.

  On Boxing Day 1917, a team from England played a team from Ireland in front of 20,000 spectators. That Irish match was later dramatised in the 2021 play Rough Girls. Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. of Preston played in one of the first international women's matches against a French XI team in 1920, and in the same year made up most of the England team against a Scottish Ladies XI, winning that match 22-0.

  By this point, women's football in England was drawing crowds that sometimes exceeded those at men's matches. One match attracted over 53,000 spectators. The Football Association was watching.

• 4. The FA Ban and Its Echoes

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  In December 1921, the Football Association outlawed women's football on pitches belonging to its member clubs. The FA's stated reason was that "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged." The ban would hold for nearly fifty years, until January 1970.

  Dick, Kerr Ladies player Alice Barlow offered a different explanation. She said the players could "only put it down to jealousy. We were more popular than the men and our bigger gates were for charity." Other players and football writers pointed to the FA's lack of control over the charitable proceeds from women's matches as a driving motive.

  Some women's teams found ways to keep playing. The Northern Rugby Union did not adopt the FA's position, so the short-lived English Ladies Football Association, active from 1921 to 1922, staged some matches at rugby grounds. Following the ban on the 5th of December 1921, the English Ladies' Football Association was formed with 58 affiliated clubs, and a silver cup was donated by its first president, Len Bridgett. Stoke Ladies won the first competition, beating Doncaster and Bentley Ladies 3-1 on the 24th of June 1922.

  The FA ban was not an isolated case. The German Football Association banned women's football from 1955 until 1970. France banned it from 1941 to 1970. In Brazil, the Vargas regime and a subsequent military dictatorship legally prohibited women and girls from playing football from 1941 to 1979. The sport was not marginalised by accident. It was suppressed deliberately and simultaneously across multiple countries.

  It was not until 2008-87 years after the original ban, that the FA issued a formal apology for its role in suppressing the women's game.

• 5. Unofficial World Cups and the Road to FIFA

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  While FIFA looked away, other bodies moved first. In 1970, the Torino-based Federation of Independent European Female Football, the FIEFF, organised the first Women's World Cup in Italy, backed financially by the Martini & Rossi company and with no FIFA involvement whatsoever. The event was at least partly contested by clubs rather than national teams, and Denmark won.

  The following year, Mexico hosted the 1971 Women's World Cup. The final, again won by Denmark, was played at Estadio Azteca, then the largest stadium in North America. Crowds at that final have been estimated at between 110,000 and 112,500 attendees. These were figures that would not be matched again in women's football for decades.

  FIFA effectively ignored women's football until the 1988 FIFA Women's Invitation Tournament in China. That tournament served as a proof of concept. FIFA held its first officially recognised Women's World Cup in China in November 1991, and the United States won. In a notable administrative curiosity, FIFA's first officially recognised women's international match is listed as France vs. Netherlands from 1971, a recognition that was decided retroactively in 2003.

  A woman did not speak at the FIFA Congress until 1986, when Ellen Wille addressed the body. The AFC Women's Asian Cup, which had been founded in the 1970s, holds the distinction of being the oldest surviving continental women's championship. The institutional world had spent decades refusing to formally acknowledge a sport that was already filling the largest stadium in North America.

• 6. Professionalism Takes Hold

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  Italy became the first country to pay women footballers on a professional, if part-time, basis, during the 1970s. Italy also became the first country to import foreign players from other European nations, raising its league's international profile. Players who featured in that era included Susanne Augustesen of Denmark, Rose Reilly and Edna Neillis from Scotland, Anne O'Brien from Ireland, and Concepcion Sánchez Freire from Spain.

  Sweden moved further, introducing the first fully professional women's domestic league in 1988: the Damallsvenskan. In 1989, Japan became the first country in Asia to establish a semi-professional women's league, the L. League, which still exists today as Division 1 of the Nadeshiko League. In 2020, Japan took the further step of creating the WE League, the first fully professional women's league in Asia, which began play in fall 2021.

  In the United States, the national team was formed in 1985. After the country hosted and won the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup, the first professional women's soccer league in the United States, the WUSA, was launched. It was spearheaded by members of that World Cup-winning squad and featured players including Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Brandi Chastain, alongside international stars like Germany's Birgit Prinz and China's Sun Wen. The league lasted three years. A second attempt, Women's Professional Soccer, launched in 2009 and folded in late 2011. The National Women's Soccer League launched the following year, with initial support from the football federations of the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

  In Mexico, Liga MX Femenil launched in 2017 and immediately broke several attendance records. On the 20th of March 2024, the league and the NWSL jointly announced a new international competition, the Summer Cup, with the inaugural edition set to begin in July 2024.

• 7. Inequalities and Ongoing Disputes

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  A 2014 FIFA report confirmed that women's football was growing in both popularity and participation, and that professional leagues were multiplying worldwide. Yet the gap between the men's and women's games in pay, media coverage, and attendance remained sharp and, in some areas, persistent.

  The Women's FA Cup illustrates the financial disparity in concrete terms. In 2015, it was reported that even if Notts County won the tournament, their prize of £8,600 would leave the club out of pocket. In that same year, the winners of the Men's FA Cup received £1.8 million. Teams that did not reach the first round proper of the men's competition received more than the women's winners did.

  In the United States, the college soccer system created additional structural problems. Female college soccer players are 70% white, with the sport described as disproportionately white and upper-middle-class. Academy clubs are mainly located in suburban areas where black players are under-represented. In the National Women's Soccer League in 2020, coaches and executives were 98.9% white. Three women's soccer coaches were also implicated in the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal.

  Sexual abuse became a particularly urgent issue in the early 2020s. An investigation into the NWSL, covering incidents dating back to the league's formation in 2013, resulted in four team managers receiving lifetime bans from NWSL employment, with lesser sanctions for several other managers, coaches, and executives. Then, at the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup final, the behaviour of Spanish federation president Luis Rubiales became an international controversy, bringing the issue of institutional accountability back to the top of the global agenda.

  Female coaches remain under-represented across a number of European women's leagues. The 2024 A-League Women season in Australia set a record for the most attended season of any women's sport in Australian history, finishing with a total attendance of 312,199. Both trends are real, and they exist at the same time.