If you want a job doing, ask a woman.
So the former sports minister (and girls’ football coach) Tracey Crouch tweeted, tongue firmly in cheek, as the whistle blew at Wembley on Sunday. All those years of waiting, wanting and arguing over why football wasn’t coming home, and it turns out the nation was looking in the wrong place all the time. It wasn’t England men’s squad who would end the years of hurt, but the women’s, beating Germany in a tense and thrilling final watched by a record-breaking crowd at Wembley and millions more at home. The nail-biting finish was the most-watched five minutes of television this year, and left barely a dry eye in the house. Never again can broadcasters deny women’s sport airtime with the feeble excuse that nobody wants to watch it.
The exuberant, joyful and ferociously determined Lionesses have busted through every barrier facing them, and in the process they did so much more than bring a trophy home. The message that football is for everyone, boy or girl, will resonate wherever jumpers are put down for goalposts. So too will the idea that women can be powerful, strong and fiercely competitive without being branded bitches; that wanting to be an alpha female at the top of your game is something to be celebrated, not crushed out of girls at the earliest opportunity.
What’s more, they did it without the ugliness that has sometimes marred the men’s game. No crowd violence, abuse screamed from the stands or booing of Germany’s anthem. Parents taking their thrilled small daughters to the match didn’t have to pick their way past anyone trying to insert a lit firework into any part of their anatomy. And even more miraculously, somehow the Lionesses managed not to exclude the boys. My son and his friends have followed this contest as keenly as any other: having grown up with girls playing on their village teams, to this generation football is finally just football, and winning is winning. Besides, what’s not to love about a squad gleefully interrupting their manager’s post-match press conference, singing and dancing on the table? There is a glorious unselfconsciousness to the Lionesses, which is perhaps the only good thing to come of not labouring under the same crippling weight of national expectations as Gareth Southgate’s lot.
Yet watching them, you could weep for all the female players lost to the game at every stage from the playground upwards, during the long years of being denied a level playing field with the men. It’s not just the waste of talent, but the sheer joy denied; the lives that could have been lived, and weren’t. And that’s a story that resonates far beyond sport.
Why were so many women who normally couldn’t care less about football in tears watching the Lionesses triumph? Because we understood, or thought we did, what it must have meant to them at a gut level. Because a lot of us know how it feels to have been underestimated and overlooked, patronised and pushed out or made to feel unwanted; because some of us know too the bittersweet pleasure of succeeding in fields where older women were prevented from doing so. Because we’ve heard the feeble excuses about why our bosses would love to pay us what our male colleagues are getting, but for some incomprehensible structural reason can’t. Because we’ve all seen mediocre men failing upwards, while competent but less noisily self-promoting women don’t get the same chances. The sight of England’s women quietly nailing what the men have been trying and failing to do for so long, on a fraction of the money and with virtually none of the drama, evokes a rare and very specific kind of satisfaction.
So it was a smart piece of image-making for Liz Truss – who, after years of being mocked and memed and not taken seriously, now threatens to leapfrog all her rivals into No 10 – to join the crowds at Wembley. Victory for Truss would be – how to put this politely? – a rather more divisive prospect for the nation than victory for Leah Williamson and her squad.
Truss was not the strongest candidate in the field. But she has been the quickest to analyse and learn from her weaknesses over the past few weeks, the most fleet-footed player of internal party politics, and above all the one who clearly wants it most. Having made Sunak look complacent by comparison, she is now visibly enjoying the last laugh over those who underestimated her. Don’t be surprised if the Lionesses’ triumph finds its way into her campaign speeches.
Yet beware attempts, however uplifting or well-meaning, to paint this victory as a can-do signal that young girls can be anything if they work hard enough. For the more complex message of the Lionesses’ success is that individual hard work by itself isn’t always enough; that progress requires dismantling the structural barriers holding women back.
What happened on Sunday reflects not just individual brilliance on the field, but years of hard slog behind the scenes by sports administrators, coaches, players and champions of women’s football from the grassroots to the top, doing the unglamorous work of building a talent pipeline, an audience and a secure funding base for women’s football.
The Lionesses themselves know full well that they stand on the shoulders of those who went before them, including former England players forced to fit training around their day jobs because they couldn’t afford to go professional.
When Chloe Kelly celebrated her winning goal on Sunday by whipping off her shirt and racing gleefully around the field in her sports bra, it was a thrillingly unfettered moment of glee; a rare instance of a woman’s body evoking athletic skill and power, not pliant, pouting sexiness. But it was also a conscious homage to the American player Brandi Chastain, who was criticised for doing the same thing in the 1999 World Cup. (Fifa promptly banned shirtless goal celebrations for both male and female players.) Asked for her advice to the victorious Lionesses, Chastain said it was to keep on doing what they were doing, and “show the world of football that you can play too”. After Sunday, that much at least should no longer be in doubt.
However, for all the progress made in the past few years, the future of women’s football is not yet secure in Britain, and it could yet stall without sustained support from whoever ends up occupying the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport this autumn. Whoever that may be, let’s hope they remember how good it felt to win, just for once.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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