You know you’re getting on a bit when life suddenly jolts you into the present, when baby steps that happened while you were busy pottering from the tooth fairy to life insurance have somehow become a revolution. Let me tell you a story. Not far away lives a teenager I’ve known since she started primary school in the same year as my daughter. From reception class onwards she was an amazing sportswoman – the fastest runner, the most agile tag rugby player with the quickest hands and, above all, the noblest footballer.
She is driven and ridiculously competitive and each time she tried a new sport a coach would sidle up to her mum asking if she’d perhaps like to take the activity further. But it was always football and only football she wanted. She was noticed by a scout at six, who said he didn’t usually look at girls but she was exceptional. Now in her teens she is at a regional talent club and has international experience. She’s incredible.
Like other young athletes she makes huge sacrifices. She doesn’t go out with her friends much and there’s not really space for anything outside football, family, schoolwork and sleep. There are jibes, petty jealousies – perhaps she doesn’t always fit in – but it is worth it. It’s her world.
Think of her in 40 days when she sits down with her teammates in front of the television for the first game of the 2019 Women’s World Cup – France v South Korea at Parc des Princes. Young women tuning in, their dreams writ large on national TV.
Huge numbers, 750 million, watched the USA beat Japan in 2015– it will be more in July. In the UK all the games are being shown on the BBC. Barclays has just signed a lucrative three-year deal to sponsor the Women’s Super League and there will be a prize-money pot for the first time next season. The England Lionesses will feature on bottles of Lucozade Sport, once the domain of the moustache-quiveringly macho Daley Thompson.
Knowledgeable female pundits talk football on television, Gaby Logan deputises for Gary Lineker on Match of the Day, the children’s MOTD magazine frequently prints posters of female players and in Jamie Johnson, the popular CBBC series about a young footballer, two of the best players are girls.
All these things, this present, would have been fantastical to me and my friends in the 1980s when football, and all that surrounded it, seemed naturally and aggressively a male preserve. Women who played football were unfeminine, ugly, other. The only sport seeming available to a girl as a profession was tennis, and then you had to put up with having a camera stuck up your skirt for newspaper fantasies. Steffi Graf and Martina Navratilova were unbelievable but to us they were anomalies.
Even to someone like Rachel Yankey, the multi-capped England winger, 2019 is a different country. When Yankey, now 39, was at primary school she cut her hair and pretended to be a boy so that she could play football without comment.
She was discovered and made to move to a girls’ team, where other parents openly questioned her and tried – unbelievably – to make her prove she was a girl. She had no female role models in football. She didn’t know there was an Arsenal or even a national team.
When she made her England debut at 17, she was handed an extra-large men’s kit – she’s 5ft 4in. While at Arsenal for her first stint, she was simultaneously on a youth training scheme. She became the first woman in England to sign a professional football contract on moving to Fulham but, when the club folded due to the FA rolling back on its promise to make a professional league, she set up her own coaching company to make ends meet. It was only towards the very end of her career that she got a pro contract with Arsenal.
From the outside looking in it is easy to get your head turned by all this change. But professionalism comes with teething troubles. Yankey is now head coach at the Championship club London Bees.
“What worries me is that the WSL is professional but the money has yet to filter down,” she says. “The top league clubs can afford to buy fully formed players from abroad. Young players then come to the Championship searching for game time and they could really come unstuck. The difference in professionalism in the Women’s Super League and the Championship is huge and they can’t be protected by the PFA as the Championship isn’t professional. I hate to sound negative but the reality is that there is so much more that needs to be done.”
So we are not there yet. The women’s game desperately needs more investment and care. Its rise and rise cannot take away years of ingrained prejudice. It has not stopped young boys refusing to pass the ball to girls in the playground. It doesn’t prevent the social media vomit that trolls send to leading women in football. It hasn’t made the top players insanely rich. But it does mean that a teenager whose feet have always done the talking, has a chance of making the thing that she does and loves best, her career. That is quietly and transformatively thrilling. No skirt required.