It is a curious thing that the astonishing leap forward in scientific knowledge during the period of the ancient Greeks came to an abrupt halt after Aristotle. By the time of Galileo in the early 17th century, Aristotelian physics still prevailed in the west. Progress, previously so rapid, had been stifled for almost 2,000 years. The church, worried that science might overturn religious dogma, effectively banned scientists from doing their jobs.
This example came to mind while watching a splendid Channel 4 documentary on women’s football. For it is a remarkable fact that between 1917 and 1921, this was one of the fastest growing sports, and players such as Lily Parr and Alice Woods were among the most instantly recognised athletes. The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies team — drawn from a factory in Preston that turned its attention to munitions during the First World War, and where women had been drafted en masse to support the war effort — were watched by tens of thousands.
Hundreds of such munitions teams, made up of women, were formed. The first league match in 1917 was a sell-out. In 1920, Dick, Kerr’s Ladies played 30 games, scoring 133 goals. In December 1920, a match at Goodison Park broke attendance records with 53,000 in the ground, and 14,000 locked out. Dick, Kerr’s Ladies were invited to play in Europe and the US, as a kind of unofficial England team.
The media were, by and large, supportive, recognising that there was a vast appetite for women’s games, many of which raised money for charity. There was an appreciation, too, that although women were not as skilled as the men — they had scarcely had previous opportunity to train or play — they were evolving at a rapid pace. As one report in 1918 put it: “The attendance at Deepdale shows that there is distinctly a public for ladies’ football in Preston and moreover that the girls are improving in their knowledge and practice of the game.”
But this extraordinary progress did not last. By the 1960s, the legendary Dick, Kerr’s team had been disbanded. Women, who had been so widely embraced by fans, were ridiculed for playing the game. June Gregson, who played for Dick, Kerr’s Ladies in the 1950s, briefly alongside Parr, who was, by then, in her sixth decade, was condemned by her family and teased by her friends, male and female. When she saved up to buy her first, cherished pair of football boots, her father burnt them.
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What had happened? Just as the progress of science was scuppered by the church, the boom in women’s football was guillotined by the organisation that should have been nurturing it: the FA. On December 5, 1921, the FA banned women from playing at affiliated grounds, partly because it believed that the game was “quite unsuitable for females”, but also out of a wider fear that the women who had gained such joy from playing and watching football were growing in social and political self-confidence. They needed to be kept in their place.
“Since the 2015 World Cup, there has been a vivid leap forward in athleticism and technique
This ruling was devastating. Women were forced out of the great stadiums of England and on to parks and pitches attached to borstals. Deprived of the oxygen of publicity, the game began to starve. Detached from a critical mass of fans, and confronting a wider culture that had absorbed the fallacy that it wasn’t feminine to play football, the game was denuded of young girls coming through the ranks. The tiny minority who did play risked social stigma.
The men’s game, of course, was following a wholly different trajectory. Football for men went with the grain of cultural sensibility and political power. Schoolmasters believed that the sport built masculine qualities such as grit and resolve. The rough and tumble was deemed to develop physical strength. After the hiatus of the First World War, the game returned to the stadiums of England, creating a rich set of rituals and traditions. The rite of watching football was passed, father to son.
This social momentum drove a rapid evolution in quality. Watch videos of men’s football through the decades, and you witness astonishing progress as new talent flows into the game, through the infrastructure of school teams, youth leagues and club academies. All of these took time to create, and to cultivate the requisite social networks, the better to develop talent. The net result is a game played today at a tempo that would have been unimaginable a hundred years ago.
The vitality of the men’s game, then, is not independent of cultural and political context; it is enmeshed within it. Sport, as with science, is an ecosystem with myriad parts and synergies. The men’s game, every day, benefits from a weight of history, an impetus that nourishes the interest of sponsors, TV companies and powerbrokers, and which is situated within a complex web of social institutions such as fanzines, youth teams and informal leagues.
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It is in this context that one is struck not by what critics suggest is the relatively low quality of the women’s game, but at just how far it has come since 1971, when the FA finally lifted the ban on playing in affiliated stadiums. I have not merely been impressed by the skill and stamina of the England team, who tomorrow play Holland for a place in the European Championship final, but at the remarkable progress when compared with archive footage of the 1970s. In the past two years alone, since the 2015 World Cup, there has been a vivid leap forward in athleticism and technique.
After decades of heartbreaking decline, and in the teeth of formidable obstacles, women’s football is now the fastest growing sport in the UK in terms of participation, and is benefiting from, and helping to transform, conceptions of femininity. The European Championship is being covered on terrestrial television, with the quarter-final victory over France on Sunday drawing three million viewers on Channel 4. Newspapers are featuring match reports, aware of the commercial imperative of covering a competition that could, if England win, prove to be yet another watershed.
For reasons of physicality, women are unlikely to compete at the level of their male counterparts, but that is a different matter. What this latest boom proves is that there is huge enthusiasm for the women’s game — a market, if you will — as its forebears could have testified a century ago. Manchester United dropped their women’s set-up after the Glazer takeover in 2005, the team described as “not part of our core business”, but one wonders if this decision will soon be reversed, not least because capitalists, like the United owners, are not the kind to miss a financial opportunity.
Perhaps the most beautiful thing of all is that young girls today see football not as a denial of their femininity, but as an expression of it. As May Robson, a footballer from Edinburgh, said in Carrie Dunn’s book The Roar of the Lionesses: “There was a total change in confidence that I found . . . and such pride in being able to play football. It’s the holy grail . . . Loads of my friends who have never identified as sporty, say, ‘I’ve got to stop saying to myself that I’m not somebody who can play sport. I am. I’m doing it.’ ”
