Charlotte Spencer-Smith looks the relations between women and football…
a complicated romance | prehistoric gender politics | catfights or world domination?
A complicated romance
Immersed in the heavy atmosphere of spilt lager and roll-ups at the Jug and Jester in Leamington Spa, a woman in an England shirt is throwing abuse at the wide screen televising England vs. Trinidad & Tobago. “Fucking hell! What the fuck is going on?!”, she spits at her partner, as if somehow he is responsible. At the back, a group of girls in stilettos and skirts coolly observe the game over a bottle of white. Female football spectatorship is nothing unfamiliar or remarkable, nor is it purely the domain of the ladette, but football remains dominated by men both on the pitch and all over the stands. Male supporters account for 86% of season ticket holders and 84% of non-season ticket holders, and it is more likely that the little boy in the street with the cross of St. George sprayed onto his closely-cropped head is howling, “Roo-oo-oo-ney!” than singing the praises of the England women’s player of the year, “Uuuuu-uuu-nitt!” In a man’s world, just what is the deal with women and football?

The romance between women and football has a fraught and complicated history. Women’s football was brought into the mainstream by 1920s team the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies who were named after the munitions factory in Preston from which the players were drawn and became so popular that their fan base rapidly eclipsed those of male teams. The FA banned women’s football in 1921 as “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”. The Dick, Kerr’s Ladies’ right half Alice Barlow reflects, “We could only put it down to jealousy. We were more popular than the men”. The ban was only lifted in 1969, and despite the best efforts of a handful of teams such as the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies and the Manchester Corinthians, it managed to drastically stunt the development of female football. The WFA was created to regulate women’s football in 1971, but struggled to retain its independence and reluctantly handed over administration of its one hundred and thirty-seven teams to the FA in 1993. Female football has always suffered from the assumption that because it is played by women it might not be quite as good as the high-profile male version, and more antiquated views that women are too feeble to kick a ball. A small minority of hilariously Victorian men exist, such as the individual who wrote in to the Staffordshire Sentinel a couple of years ago, “the female physique is much more delicate than that of the male counterpart and hence they cannot sustain the impact of a contact sport such as football; Ladies, you can get involved in football by fetching your man a cold tin out of the fridge, while he is sitting in front of the TV watching the match.”

Prehistoric gender politics
Disappointingly, football culture is an arena in which gender politics remain prehistoric. As the media would have it, the alternative World Cup running parallel to the official game is not the current women’s World Cup, but the ongoing competition between high-profile “WAGs” (wives and girlfriends) of international players. England’s powerful side battered tatty Paraguay at the start of the competition with the ever more contorted Victoria Beckham as captain, supported by defender Cheryl Tweedy, forward Colleen McLoughlin, and 16-year-old hopeful Melanie Slade, girlfriend of Theo Walcott, not to mention an army of mistresses and football groupies. Women in football who have hit the headlines in recent years include figures such as Rebecca Loos and Faria Alam, demonstrating the cheerful marriage between sex and football. The world of genuine women’s football has suffered immensely from this association, and international players have been angered by FIFA president Joseph Sepp Blatter’s suggestion that they should wear “tighter shorts”. UEFA president Lennart Johansson has also offended female players by extolling the women’s game as prime for sexy marketing opportunities; “Companies could make use of a sweaty, lovely looking girl playing on the ground, with the rainy weather.”

Women are more accepted in the stands, where, at the UEFA cup semi-final, I found a tiny eight-year-old girl Middlesbrough fan in a pink tracksuit stabbing her finger at the pitch like Hitler at the Nuremburg rallies and yelling an incomprehensible war cry at opposition players from Steaua Bucharest. The phasing out of concrete terraces after the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 has contributed to the growth in female spectatorship, as Claire Terry, journalist for women’s football magazine Fairgame explains, “All-seater stadiums have resulted in cases of football hooliganism decreasing significantly. Many women now feel safer at football grounds than they did standing squashed on the terraces”. There remains the snide accusation that female spectators are only in it for David Beckham’s latest haircut or to admire Michael Owen’s insipid good looks, but this is a mere fallacy. The brief, hormonal flush of interest in footballers’ bodies experienced by thirteen-year-old girls is rapidly replaced either by table-chewing boredom on the discovery that the average professional footballer has the sexual charm of a shelving unit, or by excitement as passion for the beautiful game takes over all other critical faculties. Of course, this kind of debate over female spectatorship is a luxury for female supporters in Iran who you will not see at the World Cup because they have been banned from attending football matches since the revolution of 1979.

Catfights or world domination?
There is a long road ahead for women and football. Joseph Blatter might be right when he says, “The future of football is feminine”, but it remains unclear exactly what this will mean. Will the relationship between women and football become increasingly sexualised and dominated by catfights and hair extensions, or will we see the growth of serious, professional women’s football? On one hand, Victoria Beckham and her dieting army continue their ascendant march as Stephen Gerrard’s fiance Alex Curran scores the hat-trick of getting thinner while having more babies. On the other hand, the real England women’s team have bounced back from a disappointing early exit from Euro 2005 to dominate Group 5 in the World Cup, winning every game played so far, excluding a draw with France, and beating Hungary 13 – 0. Football has replaced netball as the top female participation sport in England, with 100,000 registered players in the UK and FIFA predicting that by 2010, there will be as many women playing as men. The passion and dedication of female footballers and fans throughout the twentieth century has not been lost, and hopefully the enthusiasm of girls in the twenty-first century will determine the future of female football. But what became of the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies? Alice Barlow could not relinquish her love of football and ended her days on the terraces at Preston North End. Decades after the peak of their success, Alice and other surviving players from the Dick, Kerr’s Ladies took part in a parade to display the cups that they had won. She later told sports
journalist Shelley Alexander, “a group of ex-servicemen saw us and they all stood up and saluted us. It made it all worthwhile.”