Questioning everything is the answer – Match Of The Day’s first-ever female reporter on breaking the glass ceiling.
Multiple facets of football have been overhauled in recent years. How? Stakeholders have posed a question, and those in charge have applied solutions of varying effectiveness.
- Is there a way to ensure mistakes like disallowing Lampard’s goal at the 2010 World Cup are not repeated? Goal-line technology.
- Can we find a foolproof solution to ascertain that defensive walls remain a full 10 yards back from attacking set-pieces? The magic spray.
- What is a way to curtail time-wasting and ensure paying fans are not robbed of football? Increase stoppage time.
- How can we reduce the burden of on-field referees to make game-changing decisions? Video Assistant Referee. Conditions apply.
- Has football done enough to make women feel more welcome in its world? TBC.
Some questions have a reasonable answer (refer to points 1 and 2 above). Some have half an answer (3 and 4). For others, we’re still seeking (5). But as Sue Thearle tells us – the critical bit is to ‘question everything.’
Sue Thearle, the trailblazer who became Match Of The Day’s first-ever female reporter.
Why the imbalance?
Well, maybe because women’s football in the UK is running 50 years behind. The FA banned women’s football between 1921 and 1971. Their explanation said, “Football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” Back in school, Thearle faced similar treatment when she was restricted from playing football.
“It did make me question why there was this imbalance and this lack of equality,” Thearle says. “And I didn’t understand this as a young 10-year-old girl. And then when I began to become aware of the world and how few women there were on television, in print media, on the radio – I just couldn’t understand why because I understood sport so implicitly.”
Thearle is a pioneer in her own right. In the early 90s, she began working in press boxes at football stadiums and often found herself in uncharted territory.
“I would say 80-90 per cent of the time I would go to cover a match – which was Tottenham, by the way, because that was on my local newspaper patch, that was tough – I’d be the only woman, which was uncomfortable,” Thearle, an Arsenal fan, explained.
“I don’t, in any way, criticise the male reporters; they were getting as used to it as I was. They were friendly enough, but you were very much on your own.”
Did football do enough to be more inclusive?
Before the ban was enforced, Dick, Kerr Ladies was the great British women’s football team. Their popularity grew at an astonishing rate in the late 1910s and peaked on Boxing Day 1920 when they played against St Helen’s Ladies at Goodison Park.
The Dick Kerr Ladies from 1920-1921. Only three years after its inception, this side drew a record-breaking crowd to Liverpool.
The game attracted an audience of over 53,000 fans. This figure was a record for the women’s game, a record that lasted for nearly a century. Partly due to their massive popularity but largely due to the mind-boggling half-century-long ban on women’s football that brought their ascent to a screeching halt only a year after this record-breaking game.
The attendance record was first broken at the London Olympics in 2012 when Great Britain played Brazil at Wembley in front of 70,584 people. And multiple times since. So it’s fair to say that not only has the women’s game recovered from their 50-year hiatus, but remarkably, they’ve surpassed the benchmarks set in the past.
“The Taylor report into Hillsborough caused a full rethink of football, stadia, seating, safety, and that encouraged more women to come,” Thearle explains.
“And the Premier League started in the early 1990s, and that was another element which encouraged more female interest. So it all came in a wave, and the whole thing started to gather momentum.”
“It needed lots of people, foot soldiers like me, if you like, to coalesce as a bigger hole and make that pressure finally break down bigger barriers,” Thearle added.
“Women have certainly come in their droves, which is fantastic. It makes me so thrilled whenever I go to a match now that there are 10, 12, sometimes 15 women in a press box. That’s fantastic!”
Signs like these spotted at Wembley show how far stadium safety has come since the Taylor Report. These images were taken by the author at a UEFA Women’s Nations League game between England and Netherlands that attracted an audience of over 70,000 fans.
How do we keep the ball rolling?
If you’ve made the mistake of being on football Twitter of late, you would be aware of the misogyny that continues to exist in the sport. But as long as our game has its trailblazers and their allies, football and women’s football shall remain in good hands.
When Emma Hayes speaks, we listenpic.twitter.com/lf2D5gaEeR
— COPA90 (@Copa90) December 8, 2023
Football has come a long way, but clearly, it still has a long way to go.
“Question everything that you think because it’s really easy to have an unconscious bias, and I challenge my 16-year-old son on this all the time, about everything,” suggests Thearle. “It’s quite easy to have a snap decision about something without questioning, ‘Why do I think that?’
“Always question. Question, question, question.”
