Women and Girls in Grassroots
Football
Between 2013 and 2015, the Female Football Development Programme attracted
42,462 new girls into playing football despite football’s overall participation figures dropping. In
spite of this, football for both genders has received dramatic funding cuts, leading to fewer
facilities in football for everyone. This has had a devastating effect on the women’s game,
despite their numbers doing nothing but rising at rate which would have seen over a million girls
taking part in women’s football within 40 years. However, due to these funding cuts, many are
worried about whether or not these impressive rises in participation will continue. It seems that
something must be done to increase the participation even further, through both funding and
motivation.
It is not good enough that the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation in 2012 just 0.6%
of women played football once a week, down 0.1% from 2011, many due to a lack of available
teams, as a fifteen year old girl from Croxley told me:
“At the age of 7, I wanted to play for a football team. I trained with a local boys team,
and couldn’t compete with the physicality and roughness of some of the boys, even at a young
age, something which my mother noticed immediately. She tried to find me a girls football team
to play in, however the closest one to our house for my age-group was a one and a half hour
drive away in Central London. Now, there is another team 45 minutes away, whereas I have
friends who are boys and have a 30 second walk to get to the pitch they play. Because of this, I
never played football for a team, and though I have been an Arsenal fan my whole life, became
a hockey player instead.”
This is just one of many stories that girls all around the country experience daily. It
seems that though some has been done already, more funding needs to be provided and more
girls football teams need to be launched not just in urban areas but also all around the country.
In addition to the lack of teams around, many girls also feel as if they shouldn’t play
football, instead opting for sports that are more traditionally for girls, as a Year 10 student from
Watford Grammar Girls School shared:
“I never thought I would be able to play football as in my mind, even at a young age it
was an extremely male dominated sport. I felt as if I should to play netball or do gymnastics so
that I could play with other girls and I also felt as if I wouldn’t be good enough to play football. I
think that not only do girls struggle to find a team, they also feel like football is a sport for boys at
a young age, just from the influence of society.”
Clearly many girls are under pressure to go into sports that they see as more suited to
their natural abilities, a fact to me which doesn’t reflect accurately on the truth at all, especially
in England where the women’s football team are ranked nine places higher than their male
counterparts, despite common misconceptions that football in England is a male dominated
field, which isn’t the case in many scenarios. In this instance, the problem stems from the
grassroots level, where not enough people play the game, but also from the professional level
where the game isn’t followed to the same level as the men’s, with an average attendance of
1,076 in the Women’s Super League 2015, says the FA, compared to 39,452 in the 2015-16
Premier League according to world football. In an interview with the same two girls as
previously, both aged fifteen, I was told that despite women’s football prices often being up to
ten times cheaper than their male counterparts, they had never been to, or even watched on
TV, a women’s football match, despite going to multiple male matches a year.
A possible solution, along with pumping more money into the game at grassroots level,
could be to run alongside this a campaign, through the most accomplished female players of
this generation. This campaign could be aimed at urging young women and girls to participate in
the sport from a young age and drawing on the women’s team’s recent success of finishing 3rd
at the world cup in Canada just two years ago. This could inspire more girls to enter the sport
and the England women’s team may be even more successful in the future.
By Charley