In the years that immediately followed World War I, women’s soccer thrived in England. The men’s competitions, including the Football League and the FA Cup, had been suspended during the war and the women’s game flourished.
The return of the soldiers didn’t squash the growth and popularity of the women’s game. A women’s match played on Boxing Day in 1920 with 53,000 attendees at Goodison Park in Liverpool was the highest-attended women’s soccer match in England’s history. That record remained until the 2012 London Olympic Games.
Women weren’t granted equal voting rights in England until 1928; eight years before that, their brand of soccer was taking off.
In reality though, women’s soccer had become too big. By 1920, there were around 120 women’s clubs in England. But the women’s game, and the not insignificant funds it was generating for worthwhile post-war charitable objectives, was sequestered independent of the Football Association’s control.
So in 1921, the FA had had its fill of the upstart women. The FA effectively banned women’s soccer, citing that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females, and should not be encouraged”.
The FA legally couldn’t outlaw the women’s game, so it decreed that no football grounds of any football club affiliated with the FA could be used for women’s soccer.
The Matildas went down 3-1 to England in an intense semi-final in the FIFA Women’s World Cup on Wednesday.Credit: Getty
What’s many magnitudes more startling though, is that the FA’s ban then wasn’t reversed until the early 1970s. And in the intervening half-century, women’s soccer was rendered a peculiar obscurity in England; played on public parks beyond the FA’s grip, in defiance more than anything. It wasn’t banned per se, but it was banned.
Such was the butterfly effect, the relative prosperity of soccer didn’t rise any higher in Australia, insofar as the interests of women were concerned. Australia’s women’s team didn’t even start competing in top international matches until 1979.
Women’s soccer was also outlawed in places like Belgium, from the 1920s to the 1970s. Brazil prohibited women’s involvement in the sport until 1979. Similar bans were instituted in West Germany, France and Norway, as well as in other places.
It’s through this prism, that we ought to measure how distinctly, off-the-charts remarkable this Women’s World Cup has been. Fifty years ago, international women’s soccer wasn’t really a thing.
The Matildas’ run at the World Cup captured the national zeitgeist.Credit: Getty
In the half-century to now it would have been tantamount to absurdity to contend that one day in the middle of 2023, women’s soccer might serve to shift the needle of Australia’s national zeitgeist.
The NRL can’t ever hope to achieve that cut-through. Cathy Freeman touched something approaching immortality in Sydney’s Olympic Stadium in 2000, but that was a moment in time that’s never been repeated. Maybe until now.
The rampaging success of this World Cup, considered by whatever metric you choose, brings to mind the musings of America’s psychedelic psychologist and author Timothy Leary and his observation that women who seek to be equal with men actually lack ambition. Presently, it seems they might well do. Yet it feels all rather wrong to proffer that opinion, speaking as a man.
The overall prizemoney pool staked by FIFA for this World Cup is $170 million. That’s almost four times the amount available for the previous tournament in 2019, yet still only one-quarter of what was available for the men’s tournament in Qatar late last year. The winning women’s team this weekend will receive for their national federation roughly just one-tenth of what Argentina received when they won the men’s tournament.
Fans packed live sites around the nation, such as Federation Square in Melbourne, for all the Matildas’ games.Credit: Getty
For the past few years, Socceroos and Matildas players have enjoyed some level of equity in remuneration received from Football Australia, yet even that level of fairness was doggedly fought for, involving a player strike that the NRL’s players weren’t brave enough to emulate.
It shouldn’t be forgotten either, that preceding this tournament the pay disputes between the Canadian, Nigerian and South African squads and their national federations, to varying degrees, put into question those teams’ participation.
Questions must be asked and answered about the obvious disparity in prize pools. The men’s and women’s World Cups are more equal in the sense of sporting competition than are the four grand slam tennis tournaments where men and women compete side-by-side for equal money. And yet, soccer’s present financial inequality is patent.
To illustrate, in women’s tennis majors competitors play matches involving less sets. And yet the prizemoney is equal between the sexes. Contrastingly, the “equal play” thesis in soccer rightly holds water. The tournaments are just as long, there’s just as many teams, and the matches run for the same length.
Of course, the difficulties are just as replete. Broadcast and sponsorship revenues for this Women’s World Cup sit at a fraction of those produced by the men’s equivalent, though that’s largely FIFA’s own mess because this is the first women’s tournament for which FIFA unbundled the men’s and women’s broadcasting and streaming rights, and asked broadcasters to bid on a stand-alone basis to acquire the latter. Ticket prices for the women’s tournament are set at just a small fraction of those for Qatar in 2022.
Balance everything up though and should players at this Women’s World Cup be playing for the same riches that the men played for last year? Of course they should, but then again possibly not. By economic and commercial measures, the women’s tournament does not generate what the men’s one does.
But isn’t the ultimate answer to asking precisely why that is, is that the effective banning of the women’s game until the 1970s squashed the sport to such a degree that it’s now playing catch-up big style? What would women’s soccer have been in 2023 if as late as the 1960s it wasn’t even a thing? Isn’t the disparity a product of fault?
On this matter, FIFA now surely has a moral obligation to ensure equality in the future. But in 2023, FIFA must faithfully and without fear enforce its statutes, to ensure that all 32 national federations pass on every last cent of money due to athletes, to the athletes themselves.
There’s a Zen koan where a teacher holds a menacing stick. He says to his student, “If you tell me this stick is real, I will beat you with it. If you tell me it is not real, I will beat you with it. If you say nothing, I will beat you with it.” And so, the student reaches out, grabs the stick and snaps it in two.
Now I’m no student of Zen philosophy and I actually learned that parable from a TV show … but haven’t these 730-odd women, who’ve each played a part in this World Cup, grabbed that stick and rendered it sawdust?
