Playing football at a basic level only requires two things: a person to play with and a ball, or anything else that can be kicked, headed or thrown during a game. This means that it can be played practically anywhere and by anybody, which is undoubtedly one of the many reasons that the game is so popular and always has been. As with other sports, football has its winners and losers, devoted supporters, and sporting heroes; it is the simplicity of the game that differentiates it from the others – young people can easily play, visualising themselves as their favourite players and inspiring them to dream of pursuing a career as a professional footballer. However, there have always been more obstacles to this visualisation for those aspiring to such a career on a women’s team.

Women’s football has never been taken as seriously as that of men. Although the first women’s football match in England dates back to 1895, only 23 years later than the first official match for men, the game has never achieved genuine gender equality. Until the 1960s, the Football Association (FA) had banned women’s football from their grounds, stating that ‘football was quite unsuitable for females’. Although the FA allows women to play on their grounds today, these past sentiments have sadly not been forgotten. Recently, Graeme Souness, a Sky Sports pundit and former captain of the Liverpool Football Club, remarked that ‘it’s a man’s game…again’ and ‘we’ve got our football back – men playing men’. This prejudice against women’s football means that it is much more difficult for girls to get involved with the game from a young age, as there is less accessibility to training and fewer role models for young people to aspire to become. The FA has made a statement that it hopes there will be equal access to football in physical education lessons by 2024, but this is still two years away, providing more time for inequalities within the game to grow. Further, it has recently been reported that men playing in the Crystal Palace academy are able to train for free, whereas women must pay as there is no official academy for them yet. A parent of a child hoping to play for a women’s team has emphasised the inequality between women and men’s football even from a young age, stating that the boys are ‘treated as superior’. 

This is one of the reasons why academies like Velocity Football in Oxford are so important. Velocity is located at the RAW Charging Stadium in Marston, where the Oxford City Football Club is based, and allows its students to ‘train, play, learn, and achieve, both in the game and education’. It is open to all students aged 16-23 but has noted a marked increase in the number of female students choosing to enrol on the programme for the coming academic year. The Head Coach of Velocity’s female programme believes that this is the result of the success of the Lionesses at the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Women’s Euro, where they took the title after beating the German team 2-1 in July. The support and publicity for the event were enormous, and although there is still a long way to go in the equality of women’s and men’s football, it was undeniably a significant step to provide those aspiring to play professionally with the assurance that the women’s teams are being taken more seriously; the positive effects of this are clearly already being seen in Oxford. 

Women’s football has already come a significant way in recent years, but there is no denying that the goal posts for equality with the men’s teams were incredibly distant and therefore remain far away. To move these closer, there needs to be a bigger push in accessibility to women’s teams to enable those wanting to play from an early age to do so, and more financial support for those wishing to pursue the game professionally, just as there is for the men’s teams. After all, if the popularity of the game rests on its simplicity, let’s make it just as straightforward for everybody to play it. 

You can sign up to Velocity Football’s upcoming courses here: https://www.velocityfootball.co.uk/contact-us/