This World Cup has stirred up contradictory feelings.
The tournament has been defined by the dichotomy between off-field excellence and what has happened in the shadows; by teams who have succeeded despite their federations rather than because of them; and players who have been forced to weigh up their personal ambitions against the cost of competing at all. Fitting, then, that not even the tournament’s champions, Spain, can lift the trophy without an asterisk next to their name.
That sense of ambivalence has hallmarked much of the tournament. It extends, in its own way, to the tricky question of what this tournament’s legacy will be, what this England team means to its country and how we should talk about it all.
Discussing the final as a match feels easy by comparison: two sets of players from golden generations, one side dominating possession, an ill-advised run from Lucy Bronze, and all the other bits. Pinpointing what has become of women’s football fandom, in the aftermath of a second major tournament final in as many years, is slightly trickier.
The most prevalent question has been: just how big is this for the country? We can point to the viewing figures — more than seven million for England vs Australia — but even they tell only a fraction of the story. An estimated 11.7 million watched England lose in the semi-finals to the U.S. in 2019 and the game has progressed since then.
In any case, those of us who have spent years inside the women’s football bubble are not always an accurate barometer of the wider nation’s pulse. I can only go on relatives who had hitherto been dismissive of the women’s game but were gripped by this, or Facebook posts from men who had never watched before and found themselves pleasantly surprised.
My Twitter feed is full of fans having the times of their lives, but what about everyone else? Where are the car flags? Where is the bunting? Where are the street parties? How can something so seismic and well-followed still feel contained in comparison to the men’s game?
The temptation to compare the two has lingered only because it has so often amplified the inferiority with which one is treated and how many of the tournament’s celebratory moments have got the tone wrong.
Hurrah for a message from Prince William, if that is your thing; then the cheers quieten when you register the presence of one daughter and the absence of two sons and what this says about the biases the president of the Football Association holds when it comes to who this tournament is for and who should be watching women’s sport.
You think internalised misogyny is dead when those same women who dismissed women’s football 15 years ago praise the vision of Sarina Wiegman and the athleticism of this England team, only for them, in the same breath, to take down scores of other women by drawing uncomfortable, overly simplistic comparisons that cast the Lionesses as far superior.
Then there is the difficulty in knowing how to talk about finishing second. Enough people have said the prize never mattered anyway when the social impact of this tournament is what it is, but at what point does that become patronising towards elite athletes and a manager who will recognise their own technical and tactical shortcomings?
We had the same conversation after Laura Bassett’s own goal against Japan in 2015 — which rerouted England into the third-place play-off — and Steph Houghton’s missed penalty against the U.S. in 2019. In eight years, with vastly different expectations and funding, the conversation hasn’t shifted. Should it have?
You cannot cast off the enormous social gains when generations of women, mine included, remember how playing football as ourselves too often made our skin itch with discomfort and our shoulders sag with the nagging, paranoid feeling that we were intruding on something meant for someone else. That environment left its scars and inevitably the great takeaway from the last month will be that girls will flood park pitches walking a little taller and a little more defiantly in the knowledge that football is meant for them.
All of that is true, but so, too, is the fact that millions of girls will still not have access to football in school, hamstrung by the preconceptions of parents and PE teachers, male and female, who grew up unable to name an England women’s international player. Countless girls and women will attend men’s football matches this season and leave having been sexually harassed.
That all girls can dream of a career in football is an easy, convenient soundbite, but we know the reality: players begging team-mates for spare boots while receiving scant financial remuneration for their efforts. That all those realities can exist at once makes it hard to know what to say at this point, but now — in front of some of the biggest audiences the sport has ever known globally — is the time to have the conversation.
All of which seems to suggest — with as little irony as I can, fully aware that formed thoughts like “push open the doors” have been bad enough at this tournament — that there has to be some space for unformed thought when we consider where all of this leaves women’s football in England. A myopic focus on the Lionesses blurs the broader reality, which in itself is a significant disservice to a squad that has pushed so forcefully for broader change.
It is possible to at once be blown away by how quickly the England national team became mainstream and concerned about just how seamlessly that will flow down to everything caught in the slipstream.
That shift is always slower than one would like and many responses throughout this tournament indicate that these players were still tasked with winning over hearts and minds and challenging preconceptions, even after last summer’s European gold medal. Maybe by the next tournament, people will support and follow them as instinctively as they do England’s senior men’s sides.
All along, we have spoken about England Women only in terms of ‘the before’ and ‘the after’ of a major tournament win; a structure it has been easy to subscribe to because each of us knows how much hinges on moments like Chloe Kelly’s goal at Wembley. With each, we have imagined the parallel universe: the world in which England go out to Spain in last year’s quarter-finals and the whole thing feels like a damp squib.
This summer, rather, has shown that the journey is more of a slope. England might be at the summit, or close enough — but we cannot convince ourselves that it’s all freewheeling from here.
(Top photo: Ulrik Pedersen/DeFodi Images via Getty Images)
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