Football has traditionally been a male dominated sport but as the most popular team sport for women it may be expected that barriers restricting girls’ involvement would have declined. But this paper demonstrates that gendered inequalities have continued to deny young girls’ opportunities to experience football at school across three generations of older, middle aged and younger women. These women attended school in the 1940s to 1960s, 1970s and 1980s and 1990s to 2000s respectively.

All women in the study were involved in football as fans so had an active interest in this sport. But playing football was not an option at school for older and middle aged fans, and even many of the younger group were denied opportunities to participate. Barriers such as sexist teachers, football conflicting with popular ideals of acceptable femininity, and peer pressure continued across the three generations. In some cases this was combined with pressure from parents to stop playing and watching so-called male sports such as football. Thus, women’s experiences in physical education and sport at school mostly played a negative role in influencing their interest in male football in adulthood and other factors were instead found to be influential beyond the school walls.

Read More: Pope, S. and Kirk, D. (2012) ‘The role of physical education and other formative experiences of three generations of female football fans’ Sport, Education and Society. Available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573322.2011.646982.