Most female players would not say this campaigning drive is what motivates them to play or at least isn’t why they started. Women have long used football, and sport generally, to fight for influence and a more equitable society. Instead, I felt the sense of belonging and community that so many experience watching men’s football every week.
It was welcoming and open, without many of the prejudices you find in the men’s game, yet the most powerful thing was that I didn’t feel out of place. A look, a comment, or a sexist chant that I would pretend to join in with – all would quickly remind me I was different. Later, it would be in those fleeting moments of match-day euphoria that the self-consciousness I felt in being a woman at a football match would fade into the background.
Suzanne Wrack as a child in her Arsenal kitĪs a girl growing up in east London in the early 1990s, I could feel the power of the game on every warm day when, with the balcony windows of my family’s council flat open, you could determine the score of the Arsenal men’s match from the faint far-off roars from Highbury, and from the cheers around the estate as people listened on radios and watched on televisions. Imagine what it could do for women – the 50% of the global population it has excluded for so long. It is this side of the game that I love exploring: how football can be used as a force for good. Throughout history, the accessibility and universal appeal of football have made it a powerful means for fighting back against all forms of oppression, from Didier Drogba and his Ivory Coast teammates calling for an end to the civil war to Bundesliga clubs joining together against anti-immigration rhetoric, and from players taking the knee against racism to Marcus Rashford challenging the UK government over child food poverty. Yet football stands alone – arguably commanding more respect and wielding greater power among ordinary people around the world than many governments. It is a sport that, like rugby, cricket and tennis, can be picked up by just about anyone. From the Syrian refugees using breeze blocks as goalposts to the glistening multimillion pound academies of the world’s top clubs, the game remains, at heart, the same.
W hen you look at football in its rawest form, it is initially hard to see how it has become such a politically and financially powerful tool.