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Football
Justice
5 min read

The 50-year injustice at the heart of women’s football

Now we need to do these two things to put right decades of disparity
A victorious women's football team celeberate.
It came home.
The Football Association.

I don’t normally like men’s international football. I spend all season wishing Bukayo Saka and Jordan Pickford nothing but misfortune and now, suddenly, I’m expected to cheer them on? Not for me, thanks. I’ll stick to revelling in scouse Schadenfreude when football, inevitably, does not come home. 

By contrast, I find the Lionesses much easier to support. That’s probably because, to my shame, I don’t really follow the Women’s Super League as much as I should. I don’t watch them with any petty grudges lingering in my mind. It does mean, however, that I can happily join the 12.2 million other people tuning in to watch Chloe Kelly hop, skip, and volley England to another European Championship. 

It also helps that they seem to keep winning in the most implausible ways possible. There’s a stat going round social media at the moment that, across all the knock-out games of this Euros, England were only ahead for 4 minutes and 52 seconds. Incredible. 

The Lionesses have – yet again – managed to show their nation the joy and drama of football and look set to inspire yet more women and girls to get involved in grass roots football. Women’s football, it would seem, is in rude health. But, look beneath the surface a little, and there are still significant disparities between the women’s game and the men’s game. 

In May, Chelsea effectively sold their women’s team to themselves: they sold the team to BlueCo (Chelsea’s parent company) for a reported £198.7m. This is not the first time Chelsea have engaged creative accounting. In April. 2024, the club revealed it had sold two hotels it owned to one of BlueCo’s sister companies (a move later upheld by the Premier League itself). A whole women’s football team – a good one, at that! – being leveraged for accounting purposes. 

Elsewhere, Liverpool Women’s Team sold their star player – Canadian forward Olivia Smith – to Arsenal for a world record fee of … £1m. To put that into context, Liverpool’s men’s team have already bought Florian Wirtz for roughly £116m this summer. They may add to that by buying Alexander Isak for anywhere up to £150m. And that’s to ignore the purchases Hugo Ekitike (£69m), Milos Kerkez (£40.8m), or Jeremie Frimpong (£35m). Moreover, the first male player to be sold by an English club was Trevor Francis, sold by Birmingham City to Nottingham Forrest. The year? 1979. 46 years ago. 

In purely financial terms, then, the women’s game seems to be about 50 years behind the men’s. And yet, there are the Lionesses. They have just retained the European Championship. They have made three finals in a row, winning the Euros twice and narrowly losing the World Cup final in 2023. By contrast, the men’s team famously haven’t won a major trophy since 1966. 

And so why does women’s football exist in an alternative financial universe about 50 years behind the men’s game? Well, I think a big part of it is making up for lost time. 

The FA banned women from playing at FA-affiliated grounds between 1921 and 1971. Did you know that? It’s one of the UK’s greatest sporting shames and yet it’s hardly common knowledge. How like this country to front up to its institutional mistakes with silence. 

For 50 years women were effectively unable to participate in the sport in any meaningful and professional way. 50 years. Where have we heard that number before? 

Prior to this, women’s football had been rather popular. Dick, Kerr Ladies FC regularly attracted matchday audiences of thousands. In 1920, the year before the FA ban, 53,000 fans went to Goodison Park to watch they play against St. Helens. For context, this is a crowd so big the vast majority of Premier League stadiums would not be able to accommodate it. It would fill Brentford’s stadium three times over, and there would still be people queuing up outside. 

For 50 years, men’s football was able to accelerate and grow while women’s football matches simply weren’t possible. Who knows where women’s football would be now, if it had been allowed to continue with the successes it had won for itself. 

The success of the men’s game is built, in part, upon the enforced stagnation of the women’s game. People watched men’s football because it was the only football it was possible to watch. Men’s football owes its success in part to this. I don’t see how we can say otherwise. In response to this, I wonder if there are two things the sport might do to attempt to rectify this somewhat: one big, one small. 

First, the big change. I wonder if there does need to be some form of reparations instituted to restore parity and to right the wrongs of the past? I know this won’t be popular. I love football, and I love it when my football club spends loads of money on players. I love that Liverpool (men’s team) might spend over £100m on two separate players this summer. I probably shouldn't be rubbing my hands at this, but if I’m honest, I am. 

But at least some of this money ought to be diverted away from the men’s game and funnelled towards the women’s game. If men’s football is built in no small part on the enforced cessation of women’s football, then this seems only to be right. It’s not about punishing men’s football or paying a penalty for wrongdoing. It’s simply about restoring back to women’s football that which rightfully belongs to it. 

Second, the small change. We should start calling men’s football teams ‘Men’s Football Teams’. When I talk about Liverpool Men’s Team, I just say ‘Liverpool’. I know, and anyone listening to me knows, that I mean the men’s team. I then add ‘Women’s’ when I’m talking about the Women’s Team. 

The effect of this is that the ‘Men’s Team’ becomes the ‘default’ way of thinking about football. It is the ‘normal’ way of engaging with the sport, and this is then qualified or relativised by my talking about ‘Women’s football’ elsewhere. ‘Women’s Football’ becomes a smaller sub-category of the bigger category of ‘football’ as a whole, which is implicitly linked to ‘Men’s football’ specifically. 

By taking the time to specify ‘Men’s Football’, we remind one another that football needn’t be played by men at all. That it, too, is just one way in which the sport might be engaged with or played. Not the ‘default’ or ‘correct’ way the sport exists. It’s a small change that, with time, may have a big effect on the way the sport as a whole of perceived. 

50 years of injustice cannot be repaired overnight. There is a lot of work to be done to undo the wrongs of football’s historic treatment of women. But the sooner men’s football starts, the sooner justice will be restored. 

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4 min read

Portofino’s real prisoners are not the beggars it is banning

The economic elite can’t exclude the poor from their privileged bubbles

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A colourful row of buildings in an Italian port.
Portofino's harbourside dining.
Slim Emcee on Unsplash.

I know Portofino a bit, because it’s nearby my Italian in-law family and we’ve been there a couple of times when visitors have wanted to see it. It’s a former fishing village on the Ligurian coast, a natural bay and beyond lovely. And its mayor, Matteo Viacava, has just banned beggars from its cobbled streets, as they irritate wealthy tourists and celebrity visitors, which is less lovely. 

Italy struggles with its relationship with tourism. Rome was sinking under a pile of rubbish a few years ago. The more literally sinking Venice tries to repel visitors with taxes, while providing a backdrop welcome for mega-wealthy weddings. The walled Tuscan town of Lucca recently cracked down on the buttodentri, the restaurant touts who hustle diners. As with any European tourist destination, Airbnb apartments drive rental prices up and the indigenous population out. 

There is something particular about the Portofino beggar purge though. Perhaps it’s a bit like Versailles before 1789 – in the case of Portofino, the poor have no clothes so let them wear Prada. It’s all designer boutiques and there isn’t a real shop, a paneterria or forno, to be found. No one carries any weight, naturally, but you do wonder how they eat at all, if not in one of the extortionately priced trattoria. 

To visit, as thousands will this summer, is to realise how much there is that you don’t require. It has everything a rich visitor wants, but nothing that they actually need. We’ve heard people call it Disneyland Italy, but I think it’s more like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series, shot in another, similarly named, dystopian village, Portmeirion in North Wales, where everything is laid on except freedom. Even that’s not quite right – as The Eagles nearly wrote, in Portofino you can leave any time you want, you just can’t afford to check out, unless you’re loaded. 

It strikes me now that the mysterious bubble that pursued the aspirant escapee McGoohan along the beach may have been a cunning metaphor. People who live in Portofino (and very few do), or who seek sanctuary there, or in Palm Beach, or on Long Island, or in St Moritz, or on Mustique, or in South Kensington, exist in a bubble.  

Joining friend and foodie Loyd Grossman at the Chelsea Arts Club a while ago, he told me he’d just walked down from his home in South Kensington and seen not a single person who actually lived there, but only people who cleaned their houses. Residents arrive from and leave for the airport, often from subterranean garages, in privacy-glassed limos. 

Like Portofino, these are bubbles from which anyone but their own demographic are excluded. It doesn’t have to have gates to be a gated community. The bubble is a psychological state, which is bought to protect us from those of lesser means and especially, God save us, from the poor. 

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities.

And, increasingly for the economic elite, the poor are anyone who cannot afford to, or are not forced to, separate themselves for security, because they have no access to a privileged bubble. That the poor are always with us is a gospel injunction, which I used to take at face value as a statement of apathy or resignation, even acceptance, in an inadequate world, that the poor are simply poor and there is nothing to be done about it. 

Latterly, I’ve seen it far more in the post-modern sense of being present with the poor in their moment of poverty, in solidarity and in their corner. That means they share our space, as neighbours. We’re not just talking about the economically poor here, but the dispossessed and discarded; the vulnerable and volatile; the marginalised and maligned.  

We, the rich, can’t afford to exercise zero tolerance, to pretend they don’t exist, because – to coin a phrase of George Osborne’s when, hilariously, he claimed as Chancellor of the Exchequer to be making common cause in austerity – we’re all in this together. And by “this” I mean the one, shared bubble, which is universal.  

We’ve been considering tourists and beggars, but we can scale it up to famine in Gaza or Sudan; asylum seekers in small boats; prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or on death rows; those who face earthquakes and tsunamis. They can’t be made to disappear by magic or mayoral edict, only by addressing the circumstances of their poverty – of food, money or spirit – with practical, social and political policy, plus a dollop of compassion for the cause of their plight. 

Simply to have them removed is to have head and hearts dwelling in gated communities. It’s not sufficient, for sure, to notice the beggars this summer, to drop a few euros, but it’s a start along the street towards knowing that the poor are indeed always here, with us. Even in Portofino.

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