Football has come home in fight for sporting equality
| Published date | 13 August 2022 |
| Publication title | Journal, The |
That's a sentence to evoke tears of completely justified joy from millions across the country.
Stick the word "women's" in and suddenly every social media post regarding it has a comment section infected by interminable heated debate; with the counterproductively aggressive nature of internet arguments, between viewpoints whose advocates are shielded by a screen, the only thing that can triumph is ignorance and bitterness.
This is nothing less than a shame on what was, for the most part, an incredibly celebratory day, with male and female cheers alike being heard in households and pubs everywhere.
So why should the fact of a victory secured by women put the return of football to its home under question for the bitter few?
After all, the women's game is nothing new, and neither is the instance of it attracting more fans than the men's, with this year's women's Euro final bringing 87,000 men, women and children to Wembley and thus superseding all previous Euro finals.
Before the game was deemed "unsuitable for females" and banned in 1921, Dick Kerr's Ladies' team brought 53,000 to Everton's Goodison Park with thousands locked outside on Boxing Day 1920, numbers that Everton's men to this day do not frequently reach and, as an avid fan of Sunderland's men myself, numbers that I will rarely see either.
Yet the male voice still prevailed and the women's FA would not be seen until the 70s. England's (and Sunderland's!) Jill Scott recently recalled playing for the squad in 2009, when the players would have 24 hours a week for other part-time work, meaning England's women's full-time professional team is only a little over 10 years old now.
It has needed to build back up from the years of oppression forever staining its history, diminishing its popularity and funding in comparison to the men, who will never experience the feeling of being told their game is not theirs at all.
Of course, women's football is not going to be banned again, especially after proving so attractive, integrating all different types of people and effectively banishing the typical "football fan" stereotype. But the fight for women is far from over, and just as the days of Dick Kerr's Ladies'
' team were the days of the woman's fight for suffrage in the UK - which would only be granted in 1928 - the days of Sarina Wiegman's incredible team will be remembered as paralleling the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the US and the succeeding supposedly...
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