The growth of the women's game

Women's football has existed for almost as long as the modern men's game. It was particularly popular in Britain during and immediately after the First World War, when women's football teams raised significant funds for charity and drew large crowds. The English FA's 1921 ban on women's football being played on FA-affiliated grounds, and restrictions or bans in several other countries, held the game back for decades. The women's game's modern era began in the early 1970s, when many of those barriers were lifted.

Since then, the women's game has grown faster than at any previous point in its history. New international tournaments, new professional leagues, larger crowds, more broadcasting and more sponsorship have all added to the modern women's game. It remains younger than the men's professional game by about a hundred years, but the gap between the two narrowed considerably across the 2000s, 2010s and 2020s.

The most famous early women's football side was Dick, Kerr Ladies, formed in 1917 from workers at the Dick, Kerr & Co. munitions factory in Preston. The team drew very large crowds in the years after the First World War — including over fifty thousand at a single match at Goodison Park on Boxing Day 1920 — and raised substantial sums for charity. Similar women's sides existed in several countries, and the women's game was on a clearly upward path.

In December 1921, the English FA banned women's football from being played on FA-affiliated grounds, on the grounds that the game was "quite unsuitable for females". The ban lasted fifty years. Similar restrictions existed in Germany, Brazil, France and several other countries across the twentieth century. Women's football continued on a smaller scale in unofficial competitions and on non-affiliated grounds during the ban, but the loss of access to the existing football infrastructure held the game back substantially. The FA's ban was lifted in 1971.

UEFA recommended in 1971 that women's football be brought under the control of national football associations. Many associations agreed within a few years, and the women's game began to be administered as part of the wider sport rather than as a separate or unofficial activity. The first international women's tournaments followed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with both UEFA and individual countries running competitions. The first UEFA Women's Championship concluded in 1984, with Sweden winning the inaugural final.

Italian women's football developed strongly in the same period, and Scandinavia produced several of the strongest national sides in early international women's football. Norway and Sweden in particular were leading European sides across the 1980s and into the 1990s. The United States, where women's football grew through college and high-school competitions rather than club academies, developed a strong national programme during the 1980s as well, setting up the USA's long-term tournament success.

By the 2020s, the leading professional women's leagues included the Women's Super League in England, the National Women's Soccer League in the United States, the Liga F in Spain, the Frauen-Bundesliga in Germany, the Première Ligue in France, and the Serie A Femminile in Italy. Professional contracts in the women's game became normal across the leading leagues during the 2010s, although professional structures developed at very different speeds in different countries. The United States had a professional women's league as early as 2001, although its commercial structure shifted several times.

The UEFA Women's Champions League, the leading continental club competition in the women's game, was first held in 2001-02 as the UEFA Women's Cup and renamed to the Champions League in 2009. Lyon's run through the 2010s established the French club as a central reference point in the modern competition. The continental confederations outside Europe also developed women's club and national-team tournaments across the same period.

Crowds at the leading women's matches have grown noticeably across the 2010s and 2020s. The 2019 Women's World Cup in France drew more than a million spectators in total. The 2022 UEFA Women's European Championship final at Wembley, which England won, drew a crowd of more than eighty-seven thousand. Several women's club matches, particularly at Barcelona, have drawn crowds in the tens of thousands or higher when played in the men's main stadiums. The visibility of women's matches in the press and on television has grown in parallel.

Broadcasting deals for women's football followed. The Women's World Cup, the UEFA Women's Champions League, and several domestic leagues signed substantially larger broadcasting deals across the 2010s and 2020s than they had before. Sponsorship grew in line. The financial scale of the women's game remained well below the men's, but growth in both crowds and revenue across the 2010s and 2020s was one of the main commercial stories in professional sport.

The modern women's game has more professional players, more international tournaments and more visibility than at any earlier point in its history. The path is uneven. Pay disputes between women's national teams and their associations became a recurring feature of the era — the United States Women's National Team's long-running equal-pay case being the most prominent — and not all leading associations treated their women's and men's teams on the same terms. Professional structures below the leading leagues remained less developed than the men's equivalents.

The wider trajectory, however, has been clearly upward across the modern era. The Women's World Cup expanded several times, and the number of professional women's players grew across the 2010s and 2020s. New national associations entered international women's football. The combination of modern growth and the long head start the men's game has makes long-term comparisons difficult, but the women's game's modern expansion is not in doubt.