Playing a Men’s Sport as a Woman
My experience playing football
Football and I go way back. I’ve always been one of those sporty girls, not that I was particularly athletic, but I enjoyed sports a lot. I got called a tomboy often when I was younger, and even as I grew older. I tried judo and basketball, but I’ve always had a special relationship with football.
I don’t know what it is. Maybe it was seeing my father watching games on the television or maybe I just liked the way the ball felt against my feet. Whatever it was, I started loving football as a kid, and I never stopped.
I’ve been playing or watching football for close to 20 years now, and I’m a Bayern Munich fan. Ha, yes, when I say football I should specify that I mean the European version. The real version. You know the one where you actually play ball with your foot? (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself).
I know that football in the US, or soccer as you call it, is a girls’ sport, but in Europe, it definitely isn’t.
Football is one of the most popular sports in Europe, and like all popular sports, it’s mostly seen as a men’s activity.
As I said, my love of football started when I was a kid, but as a girl, you can imagine that it didn’t always go as smoothly as I could have hoped. And that’s an understatement.
Playing as a girl.
I started playing in a club when I was about 9 or 10, and I was lucky enough to find a club that would allow me and my sister to join. I didn’t know it at first, but we were lucky to find a club at all. We had to drive about 20 minutes to get to training because our town’s club refused to let us in, but I didn’t find out about this until later. When I first joined the club I was just happy to have other people to play with. And that was enough.
I can remember a lot of training and games from that time. We had 6 girls in our team, but back then, I never paid attention to the fact that other teams never had any girls. It was just the way it was and I didn’t mind playing with girls or boys.
To be honest, some of our best players were girls, not that many of the boys would have admitted it.
I’m sad to say that I wasn’t part of those players, not that I would have admitted back then either.
I can remember having fun at practice and dreading games. I didn’t dread losing. I was afraid of being bad, and it took me a long time to understand where that drive to be good at sports came from.
Whenever we got out of the locker rooms and got onto the pitch, the opposing team would laugh and point fingers.
Some of the parents would laugh too like it was amusing. Like our coach was humouring us by letting us play. I can remember kids half-whispering that we were going to be so easy to beat. Some of them openly laughed at the fact that half of our team was made up of girls, others were a bit more discreet. But all of them laughed. Always. I think this is why I always felt I needed to be good at sports, to be better than most girls. I think that’s why I was so afraid of having a bad game.
I think this is why I always felt I needed to be good at sports, to be better than most girls. I think that’s why I was so afraid of having a bad game.
I remember one game in particular where we were beating the other team by something like 15 to 1 maybe, and the kids on the other team had stopped laughing a long time ago. I remember getting the ball in a good position and looking up, catching the goalkeeper’s eye.
I took my shot and that kid, who had stopped trying to play about 10 goals earlier, gave his all to stop the ball. And he did. I could tell that the humiliation of conceding to a girl would have been too much for him. I’ve always regretted not scoring that goal, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.
I have a lot of good memories from that time, especially with my dad. He would come to all our games. All of them. He could see the other kids making fun of us, and he would always say the same thing.
They always laugh when you girls come onto the pitch, but by the time you walk off, nobody’s laughing anymore.
That sentence has always stuck with me. It’s made me want to keep playing, to prove that he was right.
Playing as a teenager.
When I grew older, I had to switch to an all-girl team. When I say I had to, I mean that they made me. After a certain age, girls and boys aren’t allowed to play in the same team anymore, and so I had to find a girls team, however much I wanted to keep playing with the boys. Maybe it makes sense to separate boys and girls when they get older, but I never accepted this, and I started looking for a girls team with as much enthusiasm as someone who’s hungover might drink beer.
The team I eventually found was a bit further away, but still within a reasonable distance from my parent’s house. In this, I was very lucky. I only truly realised how scarce girls teams were when we had to travel for our games. It was about a forty-minute drive on average, but it could be longer sometimes. That’s how rare girls teams were. I’ve been told that it’s been getting better now, and I hope it has.
I remember the fields we used to practice and play on.
We played in different cities, and depending on the town, we played on the old pitch the boys didn’t already use, or on pitches that actually looked more like fields than anything else.
Most of them were full of holes and bumps and had flowers growing all over. We had to walk past the official pitch that the boys practiced on to get to ours.
Most of them were full of holes and bumps and had flowers growing all over. We had to walk past the official pitch that the boys practiced on to get to ours. I always wished we could use the part of the pitch they weren’t using for our practice, but we never could.
Despite this, I loved every second of it.
I loved finding other girls that loved football as much as I did. I was very lucky to find a coach that loved football as much as us, and who felt that girls could play football just as well as boys. I used to want to prove that I was better than my teammates, maybe because I’d been used to having to work twice as hard to prove myself, or maybe I’d always been competitive. Whatever the reason, it’s hard for me to believe that people’s reactions when I was younger didn’t influence my need to prove that I could be good, that I could play football, like really play. Of course, I wasn’t that good, but that didn’t stop me trying.
I played with girls, and women, for a long time, but there is something that I didn’t realise until much later on. I can remember there was always a lot of people at our games when I was a kid. I know that a lot of parents came to see their kids play and to cheer them on, but I know that it wasn’t the same when I started playing in my all-girl team. I remember that my parents always had to drive a couple of players to our games because their parents never came. We usually had to get by with two parents and our coach.
I’ve never been able to be sure whether this is due to the fact that we were older or that we were girls.
I can only know what my gut tells me, but I’m guessing it’s not far off the mark.
Being a football fan.
I eventually quit playing in a club altogether when I moved to Paris and started school. Based on what I’ve been telling you, it would be easy to assume that the lack of appreciation for women’s football eventually lead me to lose my drive, but I don’t think that’s the reason I quit. I just got busy and I couldn’t get in good enough shape to keep up.
Playing just became too difficult, and so I quit.
Maybe I would have stuck with it had I been a man, had it been easier to find clubs closer to my new place. Maybe. But I will never know.
The fact of it is that I did quit and that instead of playing, I was left enjoying the game as a fan. I kept watching a lot of games over the years, and I eventually fell in love with Bayern Munich. You might wonder how a French woman ended up supporting a German club, but that’s a story for another time. I actually like Bayern so much that I got a Bayern tattoo on my arm a few years back. People are always so surprised whenever I tell them what the tattoo means, and why I got it.
One time, a man came up to me and asked if I knew what my tattoo meant. I wanted so bad to tell him that no, I didn’t. That I got something permanently burned under my skin with ink, but that I had no idea what it meant, but would he please enlighten me. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the guts for that.
I usually avoid talking football with strangers because I know they’ll assume I don’t know anything about it.
It’s happened. A lot.
Of course, I can’t like football, it must be an act to get the attention of men.
I can’t tell you how much this has affected me over the years. How much it’s angered me, how much it’s made me want to prove them wrong. When I was younger, I used to like seeing the surprise on people’s faces when I told them I liked football. It made me feel special, that I wasn’t like other girls. I thought they were impressed. Now it’s just a constant reminder that, no matter what I do or how hard I try, I will never be fully accepted for who I am.
Things are changing, of course they are. The women’s world cup is breaking attendance records with every competition, but I can’t help feeling that change has come too late for me and that it’s still not enough.
I attended a game at the World Cup in 2019 in France, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried during the anthems. I cried thinking of all the girls who want to play football and who will grow up seeing women filling up entire stadiums for their games.
When the game started, I felt like maybe things were changing, and I couldn’t help but be happy to be alive to see this change happening. After a few minutes though, a couple of men behind me started laughing, wondering how it was possible that these women could run so fast, for so long. Then one of them made this joke.
“They must be used to it, what with all the shopping.”
I could hear them laughing, and it was all I could do not to spin around to throw my drink in their face. It might be a joke, but it isn’t funny. Not for all the girls out there who know they’ll never be able to play football as if they were boys.
Yes, things are changing, but not quickly enough.
Not giving up.
All those years playing and watching football have taught me that people are not ready to see women as serious about sports. That football is still very much a men’s sport as if women lacked the physical ability to kick a ball or score goals. Women may be able to play a bit for fun, but football is still not deemed a viable career option for them. A boy telling their parents he wants to be a professional player, later on, may not be taken seriously because, let’s face it, any career as a professional athlete is risky, but nobody will listen to a girl if she says she wants to play football for a living.
I feel like it’s alright for boys to give it a shot because they’re not wasting their time playing sports anyway, they’re building their strength. But if a woman can’t earn money from sports, she’d better focus on being attractive than on being athletic. It’ll be much more useful for her later on in life. Again, I don’t have any proof, but I keep hearing comments on footballers’ looks, people noticing that women footballers are more attractive, more feminine than before, so I’m probably not that far off.
What I know for sure is that my middle school teacher laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a professional football player. Granted, this isn’t the reason I didn’t turn football into my profession, but it says something, doesn’t it?
I wish I could tell you that things are better now, that women can play football just like men can do ballet, but it’s not true.
Instead, I will tell you what keeps me going.
A few years ago, I was playing five-a-side (an indoor football game) with my colleagues and we were playing against another startup. Just like when I was a kid, I could see the men in the opposing team laugh when they saw me coming onto the pitch, and even though I hadn’t had this experience in a while, it still felt very familiar.
About halfway through the game, we were winning by a couple of goals at least, and I got the ball in midfield. I could tell that the goalkeeper wasn’t focused, so I took a shot. I actually heard someone behind me saying “Oh no, not her”. The goalkeeper tripped over himself trying to stop the ball from going in, but couldn’t.
That day, I scored and I can’t even begin to tell you how amazing it felt. I looked back to the guy I heard yelling and the look on his face was almost worth all the shit I’d been put through.
