These Days Many Women Are Devoted And Knowledgeable football fans, But Until The Last Few Years That Was Definitely Not The Case

These days it’s quite usual to see a group of women attending a football match and being just as passionate and knowledgeable as the males at the match, but this is a fairly recent development. Even if you go back just twenty years, women were still a small part of the crowd at matches and even then it seemed that a lot of them were had turned up with their man in the hope that he would reciprocate by going shopping with her the following weekend.

I was introduced to football as a child, due to the influence of my neighbour – a teenage boy whose obsession with, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was amazing. Because of him I started to watch football on television (back in those days, this meant only Match Of The Day late on Saturday night and the F.A. Cup Final annually). Even this little amount of viewing disturbed my parents, who thought it peculiar for a girl to want to watch sport, but I was a strong-willed person and my passion for the sport and my understanding of it grew quickly.

By the time I was in my teens, this was a full-blown addiction. Pop singers, film stars…the other girls could keep them – my pin-ups were footballers. Even now I can recollect sitting near the school hall, about to take my German exam, and whilst all the others were still desperately scanning through the language course book, I was nonchalantly flicking through a football magazine. (I didn’t do very well in the exam!)

After I had got out of school and was financially independent, I wanted to go and experience football live. My parents were horrified at the very thought, so I recruited a family friend and his son, who was a few months younger than me, to be my chaperones. We went to various matches around our area, including most of the London clubs and teams like Brighton (a top division club in those days). At one point, my dad for some reason decided that he should make an effort to try to build more of a bond with his daughter and went with us on an excursion to Chelsea. My eternal memory of the afternoon was being embarrassed about the swearing from the fans around us that my father was having to hear, and I never invited him on our football trips again!

Once I had left home and transferred to a new place with my employers, I soon got friendly with a group of guys who all loved football. When the World Cup started, four of us took it in turns to have a crowd round to our houses to watch all the important matches. I can recollect seeing one World Cup Final perched halfway up an open plan staircase as one of my friends had invited so many folk into his small terraced house that it was just about standing room only! With the state of my eyes these days, I’d probably need binoculars or Laser eye surgery just to be able to focus on the screen now!

So, there was a basic gang of five of us, and since this was in the era when there were nearly always matches on a Wednesday night, we often attended a midweek match when we’d finished work. in the south eastern corner of England gave us a wide selection of clubs to watch, from the First Division (as the top division was referred to before the days of Sky’s money) through to an adequate level of non-league teams. It was extremely therapeutic to arrive at halfway through the working week in a grotty job and then go to football and clear out pent-up stress or frustrations by shouting at the referee and encouraging the players. (I wonder why football chants have never developed from asking if the ref needs glasses? In this day and age, with such vast sums of money and sponsorship involved, surelythe fans should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? In fact, I’m amazed that the decision makers haven’t already brought on board a sponsor who will provide Laser eye treatment as part of the deal!)

the years passed, the members of our little group changed to other occupations in other locations and the football trips stopped, although I now and then tagged along to watch a local team with another acquaintance who mostly went on his own, and who was happy to have company every now and then. Even that arrangement ceased when he moved to the north of England, and I returned to watching football on TV just like I did years before. However, the over commercialisation and endless saturation broadcasts on satellite television, as well as the blunt refusal to embrace Laser eye or similar technology to assist decision making, soon made me come to dislike the game. I simply lost interest in it.

That is, until recently. A good female friend has always disliked football, and having listened to me telling her many times that it is really different live to how it is depicted on television, she finally decided that she would like to attend a match with me. I let her select what team she wanted to see, as she had two local league clubs to choose from and then I got the tickets. Knowing that she had no knowledge of the rules, I discreetly outlined the referee’s decisions for her and pointed out things that she might have missed. By full time, she was really enthusiastic to go again. And, on the occasions when time and money permit, we’ve been turning up ever since!
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