Anna Kessel

A note from our Women’s Sports Editor

When Marta, the world’s greatest-ever footballer, leaned into the television cameras and gave an impassioned speech at last summer’s World Cup, she could not have known the extra significance her words would have less than a year later.

“Women’s football depends on you to survive, so think about that, appreciate it more,” she said at the time, tears in her eyes as she departed the field of play at her fifth World Cup.

Fast forward to 2020 and, with the world in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, the future of women’s football – of all women’s sport – hangs in the balance.

Last month, Fifpro, the global players’ union, warned that the women’s game was under threat of “existential crisis” from the impact of Covid-19. A week later, and AFC Fylde became the first senior English women’s club to fold. Clare Connor revealed that England women’s cricket internationals could be scrapped to protect the men’s programme in an attempt to salvage a predicted £380 million loss. On a phone call with one senior sports administrator, I was told of one sport’s governing body combing through its budget

In times of crisis, it seems, equality is seen as a luxury item. Easily dispensable

lines to see where cuts might be made. The women, he said, were most at risk.

In times of crisis, it seems, equality is seen as a luxury item. Easily dispensable. Such a logic is on a par with taxing tampons. But women’s sport – like women’s bodies, and periods – is not optional.

The United Nations tells us that sport, for women and girls, can solve global gender inequality. At a time of deadly pandemic, when women are more likely to suffer – whether that’s violence in the lockdown home or being on the front line occupying 98 per cent of the UK’S three million lowest-paid, high-risk jobs relating to Covid-19 – we need women’s sport, and all the benefits that it brings, to be a priority along with men’s.

Women have a right to play sport; a right to access physical role models; a right to set foot into an arena of potential power and wealth, of influence and impact, of immeasurable significance.

If we deny women that right, what does sport become?

To the administrators who are holding our future in their hands, in their virtual boardrooms, think carefully where you place your axe.