Women’s football is flourishing, on the pitch and off it

By M.S.

NOT ALL that long ago, female football players struggled to find a pitch they could play on—let alone someone willing to pay them. Between 1921 and 1971 the Football Association (FA), which governs the sport in England, prohibited women from using the grounds of professional men’s teams, claiming that the sport was “quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged”. (Perhaps the men in suits had been irked by the enormous crowds, sometimes exceeding 50,000, that had flocked to women’s games during the first world war.) A similar ban in Germany was lifted in 1970. In 1972 the United States passed Title IX, a law that banned organisations that receive funds from the federal government from discriminating on the basis of sex. This forced universities to spend as much on women’s sport as on men’s, and kicked off the long rise of women’s football in the country.

Fast forward nearly 50 years, and women’s football seems on the verge of going mainstream. Television records have been tumbling at this summer’s World Cup in France. Nearly 10m viewers in the host country tuned into the opening match against South Korea, accounting for almost half of all French people watching TV at the time. Some 6m Britons saw England beat Scotland 2-1. A similar number of Germans enjoyed Die Nationalelf’s 1-0 victory over Spain. The winning squad, regardless of which country they come from, will become national treasures at home.