Sitting at the top table, Mcallister can serve up change for women in football
Mcallister’s football journey has taken her from modest beginnings on the playing fields of South Wales to sitting at the top table of the European game.
From being excluded by football’s law-makers and having nowhere to play her “first love” to being the only woman on Uefa’s 20-strong executive committee (Exco) and in a position to implement real change for women in the sport.
Last month Uefa agreed a new statute to protect two places for women on Exco, while the body’s president
Aleksander Ceferin has asked Mcallister to head up a new Gender Equality Committee.
It is a start in the quest for greater equality in a sport emerging from the fallout of Luis Rubiales’ three-year ban after the former Spanish football federation president kissed Spain player Jenni Hermoso on the lips during the World Cup final medal ceremony in August.
“The Rubiales incident showed there’s a huge underbelly of misogyny in football – in most sports, quite frankly – and we have to think how we change that,” Mcallister said ahead of International Womlaura en’s Day. “An obvious way is to get more women’s voices heard, normalise women in the boardroom and the committee room, on the coaching field and in the classroom – and to accept that men don’t have a monopoly on football. “There are still some men who think that because they’ve been in the game a long time they deserve to be in charge, but the game’s moved on.
“We’ve spoken about this at Uefa and we need more women on Exco. Not because men are not good, but because we are missing experience and knowledge, not just of the women’s game but of women in football. Until we get that right, we’ll miss opportunities for our sport as well.”
Mcallister’s own playing career in Bridgend and the nearby Llynfi Valley was put on hold at the age of 12 when, like scores of other girls, she was told she could not play with boys any more.
The fact there was no organised girls’ football beyond that age left a sense of “burning injustice”.
It would be a cause taken up in the 1990s after university days in London, to help organise a national women’s team recognised by the Football Association of Wales and one that she would captain.
“We were using the men’s cast-offs, extra large or large kits, and for those who were not as big it was not fit for purpose,” said Mcallister, who went on to become chairperson of Sport Wales and is now deputy chairperson of Uefa women’s football committee, appointed on a four-year term last April.
“At the same time, we recognised this was the first step, and we knew we had to suck up some of the disadvantages for the next generation.
“Now we’ve got equal pay [playing for Wales], similar conditions to what the men receive, and the women’s games are covered live on BBC. I don’t think any of us would have anticipated the growth as being as fast as it has been.”