The Lionesses have gone down in history after winning England's first major football tournament since 1966.
In front of 87,192 fans at Wembley, England Women's team beat Germany 2-1 to become champions of Europe for the first time. The historic win has changed the face of women's football, in what was described by fans as a “victory for girls across the country."
But this victory is made even more poignant in the knowledge that the last time England's men lifted a major trophy with their World Cup win back in 1966, women were banned from playing competitive football. The ban was imposed by the FA back in December 1921 at a time when women's football was flourishing across the country.
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It came just a year after a charity football match between Dick Kerr’s Ladies and St Helen’s Ladies at a packed out Goodison Park. Dick Kerr’s Ladies were formed at a munitions factory in Preston during WWI and went on to win games up and down the country.
But it was the match at Goodison on Boxing Day 1920 that set a record for the biggest crowd at a women's game in UK for over 90 years until the London Olympics in 2012. The stadium is reported to have been packed out with more than 50,000 fans for the match, with thousands more locked outside.
Match receipts were £3,100, which when added to the £3,000 receipts for a match at Anfield was reported by the ECHO to be the most ever raised in a single day in football.
The report of the day said: "The ladies at Goodison Park gave us all great pleasure. We appreciated their skill, their stamina, their determination and their manner of taking hard knocks ‘without turning a hair."
But the team soon became victims of their own success, as less than a year later the FA banned women's football from its clubs’ grounds having decided "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged."
This ban stayed in place for the next 51 years, with The Lionesses' Euro 2022 win showing just how far we've come since then.
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