Her Game Too: A Manifesto for Change - Softcover

Riley, Matt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1801502080 ISBN 13: 9781801502085

Publisher: Pitch Publishing, 2023

Synopsis

A call to arms for equality in the beautiful game.Her Game Too shines a light on the challenges women face in football, from misogyny to lack of opportunity. This manifesto for change gives voice to the movement fighting for respect and inclusion.

Explore the roots of sexism in football and meet the key figures leading the charge:

• The Her Game Too founders, fighting for a safer environment.
• Lily Parr, the pioneering footballer erased from history.
• Helen Nkwocha, the first woman to coach a top-flight men's team in Europe.

Discover how Everton and other Premier League clubs are pledging support, and find inspiration to create a better future for women in sports. For anyone interested in sports, social issues, and gender equality, this is a must-read.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Riley worked as a journalist in Thai football for many years, appearing regularly on the Fox Sports Central nightly show beamed across Asia, before returning to England as Lecturer in Business Management at the University of Exeter. Today he writes content for Fair Game Too UK as their Regional Media Manager.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1.
The Euros. Don’t Watch
Women’s Football
YOU MAY have heardThere was a football tournament in
England this summerThe England team took on and beat
all comers through irrepressible force (Norway) sheer guts
and determination against a technically gifted and tactically
advanced Spain (until their coach’s bizarre substitution
decisions) and showed how far their game has advanced when
dismantling a largely amateur Northern IrelandPlenty about
that final to come ... Stadiums have been packed, television
audiences have smashed records (for that England and Spain
game it peaked at 76 million plus 15 million BBC streams)
and games often full of technical and physical mastery have
described dramatic and compelling story arcsThere were
93 million BBC viewers and two million streams for the
semi final meant record keepers were updating faster than
those cat furiously typing memesSo here I am 100 words
into the paragraph and I only mentioned the ‘w’ of wins
and not of ‘women’ Why? I never watch women’s footballI
watch the beautiful game played by artists like De Bryne or
Bronze, defensive titans like Bright or Van Dijk and daydream
achievers like Kane or Stanway
Now with the broadest of platforms, increasing seasons
of elite training and financial security in their legs, lungs
and minds, the hype comes from the contest (and THAT
backheel) instead of being fuelled by hopeWhen alking
toThe Athletic’s Sarah Shephard in July 2022, consummate
presenter Gabby Logan admitted that had been previously,
especially for the 2007 World Cup in China, it had been a
challenge, ‘being really enthusiastic about something but
knowing that it’s not quite there yet’The Euros have been
a case study in ‘build it and they will come’Not only is the
product on offer now consistently of the highest quality,
but there was reassuring normality walking into our local
pub with all the screens showing Germany beating Austria
Drinkers ridiculed Austrian keeper Manuela Zinsberger for
gifting the Germans a second goal because of her decision‑
making rather than chromosome count, which lowers the
temperature of conversations and creates normality in
evaluating the action over the actors

FIFA 23. Don’t Play Women’s Football
The next FIFA iteration expands to include the WSL and
French Division 1 Féminine for the first timeThe game’s
cover features two players, Kylian Mbappé and Sam Kerr,
and also adds the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New
ZealandTo be fair to EA Sport, women have been included
since 2015, but with only a smattering of international
sides and, in FIFA 22, the profile had evolved to include 17
international squads and increasing access to features like
Pro Club modes allowing thumb twiddlers to create a female
playerPrevious efforts invited talk of gender tokenism, but
FIFA 23 (the 30th and final edition created by EA Sport)
should help lay that to restLike so many of the issues
surrounding the women’s game, success will come when no
one (apart from apoplectic keyboard warriors) even notices
their player or team’s gender and focusses their ire on poor
defending or missed open goals

Euro 2022. Don’t Ruin Women’s Football
In his predictably eviscerating and affirming article on 18
July 18th John Nicholson described this tournament as, ‘like
a filter for the dickheads who spoil football for the rest of us’
Echoing a phrase Boris Johnson used to berate Putin (sorry to
drag him in, John), the ‘toxic masculinity’ that often blights
our matchday experiences drives the atmosphere down to the
lowest common denominator of a drink/drug‑fuelled bear pit
where the ‘it’s only banter’ defence is trotted out for a range
of reprehensible behavioursRailing against what he sees
as a world becoming more conflicted and confrontational,
Nicholson sees the women’s game as an instructive inversion
of these testosterone‑fuelled trends
The inclusive, welcoming and supportive atmosphere we
feel at Exeter City Women FC is a window into the women’s
game and fuels the EurosFree from boorish and belligerent
posturing, Euros crowds also reminded me of my time
working in Thai football where families would see games as
a chance to enjoy each other’s company, knowing they were
safe from having to explain to granny what a ‘pedo’ was or
why we are all encouraged to ‘shit on the City’
Nicholson’s key point is punishingly tellingThe
overwhelming dominance of men in general and a particular
male demographic in particular feeds on itself with a race to
the bottom of general unpleasantness cloaked in the lie that
this is what real support looks likeThe Euros crowds had a
balance: of age, gender and orientation so that abuse has no
room to breathe, fester and explode like some inky boil but is
stifled at sourceNicholson draws a powerful image of those
who prefer male dominance and a carte blanche for cretins,
describing those who feel he is a woolly ‘woke’ bleeding heart
liberal as watching on with:
‘faces angrily twisted like an inflamed hernia, indignant
that someone is neutering their desire to piss in gardens and
insert flaming objects into their rectum’
It used to be a simple logic about the women’s game that,
with so few fans watching, the mob didn’t get a chance to
ruleBut, with its exponential growth, the women’s game has
not switched off its ‘dickhead filter’ and Nicholson’s article
climaxes with the sadness this joyous new footballing world
has engendered in the men hell‑bent on dumb weekend
behaviourWe could have had this in the men’s gameIn
Thailand, crowd violence is often driven by politics, but
when Granny sits next to you and your daughter is on your
knee, the civilising power of women creates a welcoming
and intoxicating atmosphere ( especially after sampling the
local Thai beers)Gabby Logan describes women’s football
toThe Athletic’s Sarah Shephard as ‘a beautiful evolution to
watch’ that mirrors the world we live in, or aspire to‘Football
reflects so many attitudes in societySometimes I think it
reflects where we are as a civilisation in terms of attitudes
and how important subjects like racism and homophobia are
handledIf football treats it seriously then it sends a really
strong messageThat’s why the women’s game being so much
more professional is really important in terms of women’s
sport generally and women’s access to things they want to
do in society’

Be My Plus One
The path to parity may feel dauntingly long, but there is a
fiendishly simple and massive step we can all makeWhen
we go to our next Exeter City Women or Larkhall Athletic,
Chelsea or Aston Villa game just bring one other person with
youClubs could give the plus ones a free single, double or
treble match voucher to thank them and, like a cheap Ryanair
ticket where an empty seat is replaced by a customer open to
purchase, food, merchandise or matchday programmes can
help boost coffers and build atmospheres
With the women’s season around the corner, each league
can, like EFL website templates, corporately and consistently
encourage fans to bring a friend and share their experiences,
with regular reminders built into their online messages
Lionesses promoting lower‑level clubs they started with could
reflect Alessia Russo’s decision to give her shirt to young fan
Nancy Richardson after she held up a sign to the queen of
backheels highlighting the team both of them played for:
‘Russo I play at Bearsted, please can I have your shirt?’
I admit my club bias, but I strongly feel that building from
the bottom up is the key hereThe much‑mentioned ‘football
pyramid’ cannot survive if the disparity between the Lioness
legends and those in the third and fourth tiers is allowed to
become an unbridgeable gapCoventry United, that I talk
about later, are the red flags that warn us not to tread the risky
financial path many of the lower league men’s teams have
taken but to pursue a culture of fan‑driven inclusivity driving
universal growth over top‑heavy conspicuous spending
So look around your family, friendship groups and
neighbourhoods and, as a famous philosopher didn’t say:
‘The journey of a thousand fans begins with a single text’

Ode to Joy
As a lecturer in marketing, I’m jealous of Leigh Moore who,
when moving from his marketing role at the FA in 2012,
coined the term ‘Lionesses’No more clunky stumbling
sentencesA clean, resonating brand was born that needed
no explanation or qualificationAnd that brand is, in the
words of The Greeter’s Guild’s Troy Hawke, ‘smashing it’
So to the finalWhere to start? When the game kicked
off, how about the matchday programme on the Amazon
Hot New Release chart at number four (aboveThe Football
Yearbookand The Zlatan’s autobiography)? Or a crowd of
87,192: a record for a Euros final (men or women)Maybe
the 101 new grassroots girls and women’s teams created by a
single tournament sponsor? The data is dazzling but, as heady
as these figures are, there is something more profound at play
hereIt feels like the game has, finally, grown upInstead of
being an increasingly unsustainable echo chamber of stale
ideas, joy has smashed down barriers built up over centuries
by male, pale and stale cartels closing their minds to half the
populationThere was just time for Caz and Lucy to meet
up with England legend Sue Smith ( who wore a Her Game
Too badge for the day) before diving into the infectious,
rambunctious, life‑affirming joy that climaxed on 31 July
2022
Like life, football is a perpetual pursuit of fleeting
perfectionBut that Sunday afternoon served up all the
elements of joy to keep these dark days of Russian bombs
and rising bills at bayThe game was officiated by Ukrainian
Kateryna Monzul four months after she’d fled her home in
Kharkiv and lived underground at her parents’ house for five
days before making the arduous journey across Europe to
take shelter in Germany; her nationality and story resonated,
but she was here on meritJust like our lionessesPlaying with
an outsized Her Game Too flag positioned behind one of the
Wembley goals was validation of the hard yards my HGT
legends have volunteered in the face of bitter jealousy from a
foetid male minorityBut, once the festival of joy was given
full freedom, it was time for calm concentration and to write
the tournament’s conclusion
The game was the story of women’s footballNerve‑
shredding moments that flirted with failure but, ultimately,
basked in glorious successDespite going behind and losing
their talismanic striker Alexandra Popp to injury in the
warm‑up, Germany purred with finely honed precision
as they explored fault lines in the English defenceAfter a
dominant second half, they found their moment and, with
11 minutes left, carved out a beautiful goal worthy of their
stunning styleOnly 11 heads remained unbowed but then,
after 111 sapping minutes, Chloe Kelly pounced on a moment
of fortune in the German box to calmly poke home a goal that
will resonate through generationsThat moment transformed
women’s football from the back page to the front page and
meant it can now turn a new pageAmong the legion of
content, this joke summed up what the women had done:
‘Men:
Football’s coming home!! It’s coming home!!
It’s coming!!
Women, 60yrs later: ... FFS I’ll get it myself’
Alex Scott, who has seen first‑hand the
evolution of the beautiful women’s game, struck
the perfect tone for those suddenly deciding that
women’s football is worthy of their attention:
‘We begged so many people to back us, and
they weren’t brave enoughI’m not standing up at
corporate events any more begging people to get
involved in the women’s gameYou know what?
If you’re not involved, you missed the trainWe
left the station without you’
What heightens the intensity of this glorious
kaleidoscope of community is how this represents
nothing more than the end of the beginningLet
me tell you more ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pitch Publishing
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1801502080
• ISBN 13: 9781801502085
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192