State of play
A tale of long car journeys and a lack of opportunities. Molly Mcelwee on how girls’ grass-roots football still struggles despite the Lionesses’ rise
When Georgia Stanway was a teenager, her family faced a four-hour round trip to take her to training several times a week. From the family home in Cumbria to Blackburn, the nearest girls’ centre of excellence, it was a mammoth commitment to make – albeit not unusual in the women’s game.
Now 23, and England’s saviour in last week’s Euro 2022 quarter-final, damningly it remains the norm for aspiring young female footballers to travel up and down the country.
“Are those days behind us? Not quite,” admits Baroness Sue Campbell, the Football Association’s head of women’s football. “But are we getting there? Yes. Will we be there in three or four years’ time? Absolutely.”
Those years cannot pass quickly enough. Girls still face disproportionately tougher challenges compared to their male peers at grass-roots level.
Mae Lawfull, 14, has just signed for Charlton’s girls’ regional talent centre, which means that her parents, Mark and Michelle, will be ferrying her from her north-east London home three times a week for training. On a good day it might take 45 minutes, but with Blackwall Tunnel traffic it could take a couple of hours. It is a sacrifice they are prepared to make to help her pursue an elite pathway. With their nearest club, Arsenal, oversubscribed, Charlton is the closest option at elite academy level, with Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham one level below.
Mark says he has noticed a huge disparity between the opportunities available to their two daughters in football, compared to their son. He even helped to set up a girls’ team so that his younger daughter could play in their area. “There’s far less,” he said. “I’ve been involved in boys’ football for a long time and the sheer number of teams compared
to girls is staggering. With the boys, we can find teams to play against within a 15-minute drive, maybe 20 teams. But for girls’ football at grass-roots level, the Essex league is a lot of travelling.
“I’d say that’s the biggest issue, we were travelling for up to an hour for a match,” he added.
Tahalia Acheampong, 15, has experienced similar issues. Scouted while playing with boys at a grass-roots football club called Cre8, she was snapped up by Crystal Palace at age 10. Though their facilities are nearby, the travel involved in getting to matches in the Junior Premier League at the weekends is extensive, going as far as Yeovil to play.
The club do not provide
transport, so her parents are forced to spend the weekend driving her, burdened with the costs of petrol and the occasional overnight stay.
It is part of why her mother, Adge, is not surprised that diversity at the top of the women’s game remains so poor. “When we talk about diversity in the women’s game, it’s not because there isn’t talent, it’s the fact that parents have to take their children further,” she says. “If I won the lottery I would set up a trust for parents who can’t afford to travel for their girls, because I’ve seen it so many times. Even if we could get a minibus that could help. The Crystal Palace boys have a minibus, but the girls don’t.”
Ian Wright’s rallying cry for grass-roots girls’ football on Tuesday night, following the
Lionesses’s semi-final victory, summed up the urgency with which the FA needs to act.
More than 11 million watched England’s triumph, while 500,000 tickets were sold for the Euros before a ball was even kicked. The FA has detailed plans to try to translate those numbers into progress by 2024 across the girls’ player pathway. They include: 75 per cent of schools offering equal access to football for girls (currently 63 per cent), 1,000 grass-roots clubs offering a complete accredited pathway for girls and nearly doubling the number of Wildcats providers to 3,000, for girls aged five to 11.
They are also adding 60 new emerging talent centres, where clubs will nurture young players from age eight to 16 in their community, to make the game more inclusive. This will mean the number of young female players engaged in FA programmes across the country rising from 1,722 to more than 4,200 by the end of the 2023-24 season.
Both Tahalia and Mae have big ambitions and want to play professionally. Mae is excited to play for Charlton this season, but at 14, she is already very aware of inequality in football due to previous experiences with other clubs that did not prioritise their girls’ teams, from pitch allocations, hand-me-down kits and even having her team scrapped when she was playing in the JPL. “It’s like we’re doing the same things that the boys are doing, but not getting the same recognition,” she says.
Tahalia has seen it too, in the lack of opportunities for girls at grass-roots level in her community. She was nominated by her club – a beneficiary of the Barclays Community Football Fund – to become a Visa Ball Kid at the Euros and has seen her dreams up close.
She says she wants to play for England one day, but evolving the game is her passion too, and she is an ambassador with her old club Cre8 to help get more girls playing. “It’s important to me because I want to change it,” she says.
The pressure is now on the FA to use this moment to help deliver that change.