When I started playing football as an adult, at the beginning of university age 17, I was having panic attacks. It would be perhaps midway through the game, when I was out of breath after a fast sprint and, usually, when I had either messed up a crucial play, or felt so tired that I was worried that I would mess up the next move.
Each time, my teammates would rally around me, get me water, teach me how to breathe in a way that would reduce the symptoms. After a while, I stopped having panic attacks altogether. The Sunday afternoons I spent with my football team were some of the happiest and purest of my life so far – a genuine safe space filled with laughter and good exercise, plus a bit of drama when it came to taking on other university teams. I played 11-a-side matches for my full three years at university, leaving with stronger legs and friendships than many of my peers.
I get the feeling that a lot of women feel this way about their amateur football teams. They’re a notorious haven for the lesbian community – at least half the players of every team I’ve played for have identified as LGBTQ – and in general tend to attract an interesting collection of people from disparate backgrounds. All consummate misfits. My current southeast London team, named after 2002’s Bend it Like Beckham film – we’re Bend it Like Peckham – certainly lives up to this ideal, which is why it’s such a shame that our existence has been put under threat by a potential pitch closure.
Our grounds have been labelled a “dilapidated eyesore”, but are actually a community area for grassroots football, kids from southeast London and, of course, women’s football – unsupported by any of the major investment a men’s team might have more ready access to. Although women’s football is now the fourth-largest participation sport in the UK (men’s holds the top spot), it is notoriously underfunded and ignored.
It was only in July of this year that Lewes FC became the first football club to give equal pay to its men’s and women’s teams. Football in the UK is very much still a man’s sport and by playing, female football players have to upset the traditional ideas of femininity (even though, before the FA banned it for 50 years in 1921, women’s football was normalised by its popularity).
Beyond this, discrimination within the amateur and professional women’s game is real. At university playoffs, we were always relegated to the earliest slot in the day, so no-one would bother to turn up for our matches. The men’s finals were always the highlight. Meanwhile, the upper echelons of football are still controlled by men. I have never been coached by a woman in my dozen years of intermittent playing, a bleak situation made worse by last week’s news that ex-England Women’s manager Mark Sampson was sacked after racism and bullying allegations.
I have to wonder how much has changed since Bend it Like Beckham came out 15 years ago. It was that movie which inspired me to join a club despite my huge anxiety around exposing myself as a failure (hence the panic attacks). In the film, talented Indian player Jess Bhamra (played by Parminder Nagra) is forced to move to America because professional British teams hadn’t stepped up with scholarships. And currently, Manchester United, Beckham’s old team, still don’t have a professional women’s side. At an amateur level, it makes me worried that no one will care that my own football club might lose its space to train.
But in other ways the news is better. There’s been a recent injection of £17m into women’s football from the FA, an increase of 16% from 2015. The European Championships smashed audience TV records.
I hope we can keep playing. I think of that cold rush of air I feel swirling into my lungs as I step out on to the field, laces tied up too tight, ready to take on the world, knowing I have a group of people that have my back, even beyond the 90 minutes of the match. I get why 90% of young boys play football, and I reckon in years to come the figures could be matched by girls. It’s addictive, healthy and I know if I ever have children I’ll be encouraging them to play – whatever their gender.
