by Anna Kessel
(And when can we stop pretending to be blokes?)
I first realized that football existed in my primary school playground, aged six, watching an enormous group of boys kick a ball about on the concrete. I clocked the game, and promptly went back to pretending to be a squirrel. On a bicycle. Playing football, I decided there and then, was clearly something that boys did, and girls didn’t do. How they ever learned this game was invisible to me. Football, I thought, must just be an innate skill that boys possessed. So I carried on with the squirrel game, and didn’t think any more of it.
Forever after, football was a game that I missed out on learning how to play. Because football, I figured, well, any sport really, was either something imbued in you, or it wasn’t. So when I was twelve and secondary school introduced a term of football into our PE lessons, I had already decided that it was too late to learn. And when a bunch of girls started playing at university, I thought it was definitely too late to learn. And when some of my friends started playing in our late twenties, I was adamant that there was just no point. At every stage in my life, football and I had missed the boat.
Perhaps it could never have been otherwise. When I was growing up on a street in Camden Town, North London, there wasn’t any sport going on. The park at the end of the road was taken over by traveller caravans each summer, and the local kids preferred knock down ginger to knocking a ball about. The only live action was the Stag’s Head pub over the road – fights, arguments, smashing, yelling. On hot summer nights, my bedroom window open to let in the cool night air, I’d lie in bed listening to the drink-infused dramas. The next morning there would be broken glass outside our house and my mum would be out, cursing, with a brush and pan to clean it up.
In our house I was conscious of the darker side of sport, how it had been instrumental in repressive regimes, from Sparta to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, to my dad’s native sports-mad South Africa. My dad grew up listening to the exploits of Manchester United on the radio, but his enthusiasm for football ended the day he went to his first football match in England in 1976. Having recently left his home country because of racial discrimination and violence under apartheid, he was shocked to witness the reality of football hooliganism in England. He visited Filbert Street and, on approach to the stadium, saw shops and houses boarded up, bracing themselves for trouble. Meanwhile South Africa was banned from playing international sport, and it would be almost another two decades before my dad could comfortably celebrate his home country hosting, and winning, the 1995 rugby World Cup.
In many ways the requirements for being a sports fan are as embryonic as playing sport itself. If you don’t have a team to support before you can walk, you’re not seen as a true supporter. It’s as though if you’re not there from the very start, from before you can even consciously grant consent to being a sports fan in the first place, then you can never truly be accorded the title of ‘proper supporter’. It’s kind of an in-utero-or-you’re-out type conundrum.
The problem with this pedant’s quest for authenticity of course, is that it’s really just code for ‘bloke’. Everything other is deemed wrong. And that, I surmise, is the reason for women sounding so weird at football matches. Myself included. As the crowd stirs to a chant, instinctively a sound emerges from my throat that is as low as my voice can go; a faux drunken roar, and a slur. That’s how I sound at football. Occasionally I have hit a few notes in my native vocal range, and promptly stuttered. A series of strange squeaks, like a boy adapting to manhood, voice officially broken. In the end, though, I can only feel comfortable at football singing like a man. And yet that is – by definition – intensely uncomfortable.
Maybe that’s because there isn’t a proper cultural space for women to be football fans. Take Nick Hornby’s iconic football memoir Fever Pitch, for example, an intense and brilliantly written narrative about being an Arsenal fan. On its publication in 1992 everyone was raving about this incredible book, which was fast becoming a totemic symbol of the intellectualization and new middle-class acceptability of football. As an Arsenal fan I knew I was supposed to love it, but I didn’t. How could I love a book where women were portrayed as nagging, irritating diversions from the football? Damn their reproductive organs! Must they insist on giving birth before full time? ‘How was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn’t be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?’ asks Nick Hornby’s narrator.29 Where was I, as a woman, supposed to fit into this apparently modern picture of football?
And that’s why women stand out on match days, even in the twenty-first century. We’re not written into the narrative, so when we do pop up – unexpectedly – everyone freaks and starts talking about kitchens. For this reason I feel a genuine sympathy for Delia Smith, celebrity cook and joint majority shareholder at Norwich City Football Club. The doyenne of cookery writing and one of Britain’s national treasures, Delia, when she dared to raise her voice at a football match, was roundly ridiculed. Her now-infamous 2005 rallying cry at Norwich’s home ground, Carrow Road, as the team drew level with Manchester City at half-time, was intended to be a display of passion. ‘A message for the best football supporters in the world,’ she yelled into the microphone, in exactly the kind of woman’s football voice I am talking about, ‘we need a twelfth man here. Where are you? Where are you? Let’s be ’avin’ you! Come on!’ The next day the Sun newspaper accused her of being drunk, the Independent said she was a fool, and the Mirror thought she should be up for FA charges of bringing the game into disrepute. Meanwhile a section of the less charming Chelsea fans reportedly sang, ‘We’ve got [Roman] Abramovich, you’ve got a drunken bitch.’ No charges pressed.
Incredibly, to this day, Delia still finds her alcohol intake is monitored and commented on by journalists. Since when did shouting a bit at the football mean you’re an alcoholic? Isn’t that just what you’re supposed to do? ‘All my working career they called me a saint,’ said Delia, reflecting on the hypocrisy, ‘suddenly now I can only speak under the influence of alcohol – absolute nonsense.’ Was Delia drunk? Who knows. Maybe she was just a bit tipsy and shouting in a woman’s version of a man’s voice at the football. The truth is, it could have been any of us. As Delia put it at the time, ‘I was just really, really caught up in what was happening with the football.’30
That’s the thing about women at football: they are noticeable. Any mention of Arsenal’s Highbury Screamer – a female fan famous for letting out an agonized scream when the team concede a goal – is met with vitriol on Internet fans’ forums for her high-pitched efforts. In a blogger’s list of ‘Ten Things That Spoil The Beautiful Game’, which included cheating and swearing at the referee, the Highbury Screamer was placed seventh – worse than hooliganism. ‘Every time the players were near the net an almighty wail would rip through the crowd and split your eardrums,’ opined the blogger. A brief trawl of fans’ forums provides ample evidence of such attitudes, with supporters complaining about their female peers being too ‘squeaky’ and ‘needing a punch’ and wishing they would stay home to sort the dinner out.
Don’t just take my word for it, ask a bloke. Specifically, one that used to be a woman. The writer behind the popular LadyArse.com fan’s blog recently began a gender reassignment process and is now known as Lee Hurley. His blog also underwent a sex change and became the ‘Daily Cannon’. Lee told the Daily Mirror about the difference in the responses from football fans since changing his gender. His experience is fascinating. ‘When people disagree with my opinions they disagree with me now, not an entire gender. When I was writing as female I was called a “slut” and a “virgin” who “needs a good seeing to”. “Wench”, “whore”, “lesbo” and “dyke” were all quite common insults . . . Writing as male, the insults have become more generic. I’m an “idiot”, “moron”, “asshole”, all things I was also called when writing as female but without the “stupid f***ing female” prefix which was almost expected, I received it t
hat often . . . With two different people, one male and one female, it is easy to dismiss the difference in abuse for a myriad of factors. But when it is the same person and the nature of the abuse changes so radically, what else can it demonstrate?’31
The year I turned ten our lives changed forever. Moving to Crouch End, North London, we were suddenly residents of a more leafy way of life. My mum and dad breathed a heavy sigh of relief – no more drug dens, police raids, prostitutes, domestic violence, shouting, cider breath, L-O-V-E / H-A-T-E tattoos on knuckles, or walls so paper thin we could hear the neighbours’ telly or even smell their dinner. But despite all the social horrors, my brother and I missed Camden Town. As far as we were concerned it was our home. Bus-dependent Crouch End seemed a million miles away from anywhere.
But with the new North London territory came new sights and sounds too – the most striking of which was the proximity to Arsenal’s old Highbury stadium. Soon after moving in I remember playing in my bedroom one sunny Saturday afternoon and hearing a roar. A thrilling chorus of human voices, crescendoing on the air. The air vibrated with the noise. ‘What’s that?’ I asked my dad. ‘Oh, Arsenal must have scored,’ he said casually. I loved it.
‘Football was just part of where we lived,’ remembers one of my oldest schoolfriends, Clare, who grew up a short walk away from the old Arsenal ground. ‘It wasn’t ever a matter of, “it’s for boys,” it was all around us; you could hear the football lying in your bed, everyone at school talked about it, it was part of our community.’ I love that Clare says this because, if you met her, you wouldn’t think she was at all interested in sport. She doesn’t talk about sport, doesn’t watch sport, and doesn’t play any sport. She hated PE at school where, because she was tall, they always tried to get her to do the high jump.
Twenty-five years on, though, she still remembers every word of ‘Back Where We Belong’, the 1989 title-winning Arsenal song with Paul Davis, Tony Adams and Lee Dixon singing their hearts out in high-waisted chinos. ‘We’re back!’ sings Clare now, picking at a quesadilla in trendy eaterie Wahaca, ‘back where we bel-o-ng / We only had a minute but then we went and did it . . . Doesn’t everyone know that one? It’s up there with the John Barnes rap, I thought . . . ?’
No doubt my secondary school had a big part to play in our football interest. It was a girls’ school where we called our teachers ‘Ms’, and learned about suffragettes and Femidoms. Each tutor group was named after a different inspirational woman in history – from the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, to nineteenth-century social activist Annie Besant and Olympic gold medallist Tessa Sanderson. And while we didn’t really play football, we were certainly obsessed with following it. The morning after Arsenal won the FA Cup in 1993 our school went Arsenal crazy. Scarves, shirts and flags hung out of the windows. No one got any work done that day, as a thousand girls erupted in uncontrollable excitement. It was a lovely feeling, being part of that achievement, all together.
The Arsenal obsession of my peers was best embodied by my friend Lucy. If it had Arsenal on it, she owned it. Arsenal scrunchies, Arsenal pencil cases, scarves, tops, badges and stickers: she was covered in them. She was a Neil Heaney fan. Never mind that he only ever played nine first-team games; as Lucy says, ‘He was handsome. I waited around for his autograph on my wallet, and then covered it in sticky-back plastic.’
For Lucy, paradoxically, football has often felt like one of the safest spaces to be a woman. ‘One of the most refreshing things for me about going to football as a girl is that the guys aren’t looking at you,’ she says now. ‘They’re looking at the football. It’s one of the few places you can go as a woman and be at ease. When you go outside and you’re in the crowd it starts again, of course; you get a few eyes or “phwoar”s, but not as much as you would anywhere else. I love that about football. Just not to get hassled by guys for ninety minutes while you’re surrounded by them is really refreshing.’ I know what she means. While the match is on there’s often a hiatus where it feels as though no one notices the fact that you are a woman, all eyes focused on the pitch. You can meld into one crowd, rooting for the same outcome, united. It’s not always that way, of course, but when it happens, it’s an extraordinary feeling. You are a human being, identified only by your football colours, not your sex. It’s a rare experience for women to have.
For a girl, knowing about football earned you respect from boys, and that brought confidence. Having boys eat out of your hand, bowing to your superior knowledge about sport, is pretty cool as a teenager. ‘I remember one time watching an FA Cup game, and Arsenal were playing a team in another division,’ Lucy says. ‘Because it was a lower-league side they didn’t have the names of the players on the back of their shirts. I remember my boyfriend at the time went, “That team’s so poor they can’t even afford to put names on the back of their shirts!” That was typical of him. Dissing everything in sight. And I said, “Um, isn’t it because they’re not Premier League?” I remember all the boys looked at each other and they were like, “Yeah, she’s right, you know.” And then they all started laughing and went, “Oh no! You just got told!”’ She grins.
Lucy enjoyed knowing the answer to the football trivia that day. Who doesn’t? But that pressure to know everything about sport puts a lot of women off defining themselves as sports fans. It’s that idea that you can’t just like sport, you’ve got to prove yourself as a proper fan. Your loyalty, authenticity, knowledge, are all up for scrutiny if you want to be accepted. It’s a doctrine that affects men as well as women, of course, but women – as the perceived exceptions – are usually treated with a greater degree of suspicion and a more intense line of questioning. At times it can feel intimidating. Why would any sane person subject themselves to such a level of scrutiny just because they might fancy watching a bit of sport on the telly once in a while? No wonder so many women feel excluded.
But here’s the thing: enjoying sport shouldn’t be akin to joining a private members’ club where you need to be vouched for, learn a secret knock, and possess a pair of testicles. Sport is meant to be fun. For everyone. The stats about goals scored, shutouts and strike rates don’t really matter. Not knowing about them doesn’t make you any less of a fan if your heart still pounds remembering the drama of Barnsley knocking Liverpool out of the FA Cup, but you just can’t quite recall the scoreline. Maybe to some people that stuff matters. But sport is not only about statistics; it is just as much about drama, characters, unfolding plots, intrigue, transgression, heroics, passion, determination, luck, and those special moments of incredible jaw-dropping displays of human ability. You don’t need to be born with a football yearbook in your mouth to appreciate these elements. And that’s the message that I want to send to potential female sports fans, and the organizations that attempt to woo them. Women and girls are not dependent on baby-pink replica shirts, or club insignia oven gloves, or cocktails at the match; they are just as capable of enjoying the action with a Bovril and a bulky coat on. They just need to be made to feel welcome. And they need to be allowed to enjoy sport on their own terms, in their own way. Free from judgement.
A key part of the solution is making sure that women can physically access sport, whether that means architects including enough women’s toilets in sports stadia, or accommodating parents’ needs with a crèche – as Chelsea do at Stamford Bridge – or making provision for babies to be allowed in the stands. Ahead of the recent rugby World Cup in England I was thrilled to hear from so many mums and dads desperate to bring their babies with them to the matches. They contacted me because they were devastated to discover that babes in arms were not allowed into World Cup stadia unless they had a ticket – even though many of the babies hadn’t even been conceived when their parents originally bought tickets for the tournament. They rang customer services in their droves, only to be told either that all the tickets for their matches had sold out, or that they would have to pay over £200 – for a baby to attend! I thought this was insane, and �
�� as several parents pointed out – discriminatory, particularly to breastfeeding mothers. Some of the parents were travelling from as far afield as New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Germany and France. Initially there was apathy towards this situation from the authorities. One very senior woman in sport told me, ‘Well, the mums will just have to stay home.’ I was horrified. Not only did this seem grossly unfair and lacking in equality, but on reading all these personal emails from parents I was getting such a lovely picture of families enjoying watching sport together. They told me how many years they’d all been attending games, how husband and wife always sat together, and as each child joined the family so they came along too. One mum said she’d be happy to leave her baby with the grandma, but she was already volunteering in the fans’ zone. Clearly, the whole family was rugby crazy. How could we be letting down such dedicated fans? It seemed to go against everything we had been trying to achieve in encouraging women and families to attend sport.
Luckily I knew the brilliant Joanna Manning-Cooper, head of marketing at the World Cup, and she helped put me in touch with the head of ticketing. I probably drove the poor man insane forwarding all these desperate pleas from rugby fans with breastfed babies, just a few days away from the start of the biggest tournament in the sport. But all credit to him: he promised me that they would ensure that no one missed out, promptly making alternative arrangements so that all parents with babes in arms could collect a free ticket on the day of the match for their little ones to attend. The resolution made so many fans happy, families who were eager to share this special sporting moment with those closest to them, but I can’t help but wonder why such considerations aren’t an essential part of every sporting experience. I remember going to London 2012 with my then ten-month-old daughter, and grinning from ear to ear when I stumbled upon a buggy park. Not only was it a brilliant practical solution in accommodating families with young children and their bulky prams, but it sent such a clear message to sports fans: you are all welcome here; the fact that you are a parent is not an inconvenience.