Voices: This World Cup means so much more for women than who wins and who loses
Record attendances, standout goalkeeping performances, and penalty-taking fire-power to eclipse any strike by a man in last season’s Premier League.
Not bad for a bunch of girls, is it?
The 2023 Women’s World Cup has certainly been pulling in the fans. One of the home teams, Australia, has twice played in front of crowds exceeding 75,000 in Sydney, and that was only limited by the capacity of the stadium.
Well over 500,000 have attended fan zones in host cities to watch the games on big screens, and, after only two rounds of the tournament, attendance numbers had already exceeded the total attendance of the 2015 World Cup in Canada.
The football world governing body, FIFA, has been trying to grow women’s football at pace, and it seems to be working.
As the tournament reaches its culmination, we’re about to be treated to a match which arguably surfaces the absolute ultimate in global sporting rivalries – Australia v England – in the second semi-final. But setting the sport history between to nations aside, this match is going to be huge for women’s football, for women’s sport, and, frankly, for women.
I have counted myself an avid football fan for 30 years now. My love of the game dates back to regular hot dog-fuelled Saturday afternoons spent with my dad, waving my little navy blue and white scarf on the terraces of White Hart Lane. I would have invariably been seen sporting a Holsten-sponsored replica football shirt with “Klinsmann” printed proudly on the back.
Jurgen (Klinsmann) was my hero. Still is, really. I adored watching him fire ball after ball into the back of the net for Spurs. I didn’t care that he was a man. In fact, the thought that my hero was male, not female, never even crossed my mind.
Looking back, it also never occurred to me that I was watching a “men’s” game of football. It was just, well, football. And I definitely never questioned why there wasn’t an equivalent women’s league.
Equally, despite being “sporty” at school, I can’t ever remember being encouraged to play organised football in PE lessons, or even offered the opportunity to. Football was for boys, netball was for girls.
[Note: I also, however, never remember watching netball on TV or going to watch live netball games, which says a lot more about the broader visibility of women’s sport, compared with men’s sports at the time].
I do, however, recollect a handful of times when me and a couple of other girls energetically attempted to get involved in a lunchtime game on the school playing field. Suffice to say we gave up pretty quickly, reverting back to standing on the sideline, chewing gum and our own disappointment.
To give the boys their due, it wasn’t because we weren’t made welcome, we just simply weren’t good enough to compete with a group of boys who had been playing football practically since they emerged from nappies.
All of those memories contribute to the reasons why I encouraged my daughter to take up football as early as possible. She loves it. And I love watching her go in for the tackle as much as I loved watching Jurgen hit the back of the net for Spurs in the nineties.
That being said, for me, what’s even better than being able to give her the opportunity to play organised football every weekend, is that she now has female super-star role models to look up to – the likes of Chloe Kelly, Rachel Daly and Alessia Russo.
Then top that with being able to explain to her that when Kelly took her penalty against Nigeria last week, she not only won the game for the Lionesses, but the speed of her shot (110.79km/h) beat the most powerful strike recorded in the entire 2022-23 Premier League, by West Ham’s Said Benrahma (that clocked in at 107.2km/h).
It’s examples like Kelly’s penalty which demonstrate that this World Cup is about so much more than who wins and who loses. We’re witnessing the transition of women’s football from a grassroots, local team activity into a globally-followed sport.
So, as much as I desperately hope for a Lionesses win against the Aussies, any outcome will be a good one for women’s sport. Witnessing 22 female footballers, watched by millions around the world, fighting to get through to a World Cup Final is something I never dreamed I would see in my lifetime.
The fact that my daughter is growing up with this as her reality means everything.
