On Boxing Day of 1920, 53,000 people filed into the famous Goodison Park stadium in northern Liverpool to watch a football match.
They squeezed onto every available wooden bench and stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the field, and behind the nets, treading on each other’s toes to try to get the best view.
Outside the gates, 10,000 more waited, hoping there was room to spare, desperate to catch a glimpse of the history that was about to unfold within.
However, the stands were already at capacity. The excited crowds were reluctantly turned away.
Not long afterwards, two teams — the famous Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies, who’d formed out of the many women factory workers during World War I — walked out onto the field to a swell of noise and rapturous applause.
It was the closing match of an historic tour that the Dick, Kerr Ladies team from Preston North End had embarked upon throughout 1920.
They played matches throughout England, with tens of thousands of people flocking to watch them in storied grounds — such as Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge — before becoming the first British women’s team to travel overseas to play France in Paris, Roubaix, Le Havre and Rouen in front of more than 62,000 total spectators.
They returned to England unbeaten, their reputation preceding them as cheering crowds lined the streets along their victory route to welcome them home.
Then came Goodison. It was the game that changed everything for football in England — but for all the wrong reasons.
The attendance record, which stood for 92 years, was one thing: While the men’s game had been expanded, with more clubs and tiers added to the domestic pyramid, they weren’t attracting the kinds of crowds that the women’s game was getting at the time.
The fundraising was another: The match, which DKL won 4-0, reportedly raised over 3,000 pounds (roughly 140,000 pounds, or $245,000, today), with the proceeds being donated to charities helping the unemployed and disabled ex-servicemen who had returned from the war.
However, rather than seeing this blossoming area of the game as an opportunity for growth, the Football Association and wider political establishment saw it as a threat.
The women’s game was something they had no control over: not the fixtures, not the ticket sales, not the destination of the money raised, and certainly not the women who raised it.
And, so, the following year, in December of 1921, the FA banned them. Women were forbidden from playing football on association-run pitches, effectively relegating them to public parks and backyards.
“Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, Council felt impelled to express the strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged,” the FA’s infamous ruling read.
The ban quickly fanned out across the world as multiple national associations followed suit.
Some, such as Brazil, banned women outright from the game, while others l— such as Australia — simply refused to provide the resources and opportunities to play, which had the same effect.
Just as it was on the precipice of something special, women’s football was flung into the shadows. It would remain there for the next 50 years.
But that didn’t stop the Dick, Kerr Ladies team.
They defied the ban and continued to travel and play, crossing the Atlantic for another tour in Canada and the USA in 1922, although they were forced to play against men’s teams due to the lack of women’s sides abroad.
In 1923, they took part in the first ever match played at night under electric lights at Turf Moor.
In 1926, they changed their name to Preston Ladies.
In 1937, they were challenged by Edinburgh Ladies in the first recorded “Championship of the World” match at Squires Gate in Blackpool, which they won 5-1.
In 1957, a pilot Women’s European Championship was organised in Berlin between teams from West Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and eventual champions, England — despite the fact that women’s football was officially forbidden by the German federation.
In 1970, Italy hosted the first recorded Women’s World Championship — named the Martini & Rossi Cup after independent sponsors — which featured teams from Denmark, Mexico, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and England.
The next year, there was a second global tournament in Mexico, a pilot Women’s World Cup that saw tens of thousands of spectators once again cramming into major stadiums to watch women’s football.
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Despite all the bans, the taboos, the harassment and the punishments, women’s football survived, carried on the shoulders of generations of women who ensured it would not slip away into the darkness.
It was their collective effort — their collective defiance — that helped see the ban on women playing football eventually lifted that year, in 1971.
Slowly, achingly, the women’s game began to open up across England and across the world.
Domestic clubs were founded and national teams were formed, continental and international tournaments were organised, old chapters came to a close and new ones began to be written.
Its history would begin to be unearthed, too, having been kept safe in the yellowed pages of family photo albums and the treasure-chest memories of the women who had participated in it all those years ago.
All of them have been tied together by these small acts of defiance, this collective refusal to succumb to what others told them was possible.
It was this history that echoed around Wembley Stadium on Monday morning as, a century after that famous Goodison game, 87,000 people watched England’s Lionesses defeat Germany to claim the 2022 Women’s European Championship title: the first major trophy for the nation since 1966, when women were still banned from the sport.
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