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The Game Changers
‘GOAL!’ shouts the announcer. Thousands of fans begin to cheer. The women on the football pitch start to jump, run and hug one another in victory. Today, scenes like this are common in many countries. However, there was a time when football was thought to be a game only for men.
Modern football, known as soccer in some countries, became popular in England and Scotland starting in the 1700s. By the 1870s, men’s teams were playing in front of large, paying crowds. Women played, too, but not publicly. Things began to change in the late 1800s, when female players started joining together to form teams and leagues.
One of the most famous women’s teams was created in 1895. It was called the British Ladies’ Football Club (BLFC). The team was started by several talented players with the help of a woman named Lady Florence Dixie. Though Dixie wasn’t a football player herself, she wanted to make life more equitable for women. She thought that female athletes deserved the same chance to play sports that male athletes had. She wanted women to be able to show their athletic talents to the world, too.
The BLFC got a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Some of the members played under made-up names, such as Nettie Honeyball. When the BLFC played its first game in London, a crowd of ten thousand people came to watch. A few newspaper reporters were excited by the game and wrote that it proved how well women could play. However, other reporters wrote negative things about the BLFC game and the women playing in it. They wrote that football was too rough for women. A few even refused to believe that all of the talented players were actually women.
Female football players have faced many challenges over the years. Between 1921 and 1971, most places in England refused to let women’s teams play on their pitches. For over sixty years, women’s teams also could not play in the world’s biggest football competition, the World Cup. However, female players never stopped fighting for the right to play the sport they loved. The Women’s World Cup was finally created in 1991, and since then, women’s football has grown more and more popular. By refusing to give up, female football players have changed people’s ideas about the things that women can do.