Observations from interviewing Arsenal Women legends
Since the beginning of last season, I have been interviewing former players for the Arsenal programme. I wrote a little more about the project and its intentions here. I have spoken to players from across Arsenal Ladies / Women’s 39-year history. I am writing this piece a few minutes after speaking to former Donny Belles and Arsenal midfielder Jo Broadhurst. Here are some themes that have consistently recurred speaking to former women’s footballers.
Lack of academy football
The vast majority of players I have spoken to, almost all of whom began playing in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s, played absolutely no form of girls football or academy football. Almost to a woman, players grew up playing with boys until the age of 14, at which point girls are no longer allowed to play structured football alongside boys.
At that point, players would just go straight into adult women’s football. Kirsty Pealling made her Gunners debut at the age of 14. She described how she had barely played eleven a side football at all before she signed with Arsenal, Kirsty had to re-learn to time her runs from full-back because she hadn’t played with the offside rule before. Her friend and contemporary Kelley Few confirmed her experience was very similar and how she had to learn, as a centre-back, to catch opponents offside while an Arsenal player.
Kirsty Pealling
There is a school of thinking that suggests this is one of many factors behind female players being far more susceptible to knee injuries due to a lack of conditioning in their formative years. Many of the players I have spoken to went from physically matching boys to physically matching women who were often 15-20 years older than them. In one respect, this forms part of why they became such good players. But it’s also part of why many of them were likely more susceptible to injury. Which leads me to the next point.
Early retirement
Female players usually retire from playing earlier than their male counterparts. This remains the case today and the reasons are, again, multi factorial. Millie Bright recently retired from playing at the age of 33. Karen Carney retired at 31. In both their cases, media opportunities are more plentiful now and players can earn more as a pundit on Sky Sports than they can by dropping down the WSL or even into WSL2.
The financial incentives are not as compelling to continue playing as they are in men’s football. Most female players come into the game on the expectation of not being able to play football for a living. This is especially true of former players, even at the height of Arsenal Ladies’ dominance in the 90s and 2000s, players were semi professional, which means women players usually had some kind of other professional grounding.
They knew and probably still suspect that they will have to work in another profession when they retire, up until very recently most Arsenal players had a full-time vocation alongside playing so retirement from playing football is a much more logical choice. In the 1990s and 2000s, Arsenal had a competitive edge over their rivals because Vic Akers would often find players full-time jobs around the club.
Alex Scott worked in the laundry, Emma Byrne held an admin position and sometimes worked in the Arsenal Box Office. Rachel Yankey worked for Arsenal in the Community. Even a few years ago, Leah Williamson was taking an accounting qualification alongside playing because she suspected she would need to get a nine to five after she finished playing. (I suspect that the growth of the game in recent years means that Leah could easily stay gainfully employed in football or as a media personality now).
There is also less of a pyramid in women’s football, there are fewer options for a player in their 30s who might leave an elite team. This was even more the case a decade or two ago when the drop off from Arsenal to one of their competitors in the same division would have represented a sizeable drop off, let alone dropping down a division or two. Kirsty Pealling made her Gunners debut at 14 but retired at 31.
Angela Banks
Her reasons were very familiar, she had been dealing with injuries and in an era of amateurism, the treatment and conditioning was not available, which meant injuries really would catch up with players. Angela Banks retired at Arsenal at 30 because, simply, she had become surplus to requirements at Arsenal and she did not want to play for another club so she halted her playing career. (This isn’t uniform, of course, Jo Broadhurst, whom I spoke to a few hours ago, played until she was 42).
Finding acceptance in different environments
Quite a few former players I spoke to described finding a sense of acceptance in women’s football that had eluded them elsewhere in life. Lianne Sanderson told me, ‘In my area I was like an alien, I was the girl that played football. Then I went and trained at the JVC Centre and I saw all these other girls that were like me, playing football.’
Angie Banks moved to Sweden to play prior to signing for Arsenal and she settled well in Sweden because women’s football was far more mainstream than in the UK. She even learned to speak Swedish and made a significant effort to inculcate herself with wider aspects of Swedish culture because she was so indebted to feeling accepted as a female footballer at a time when British culture was even more cynical towards women footballers than it is now. ‘In England I was seen as weird and strange for playing football but in Sweden it was completely normal for girls to play. It was a place I wanted to be.’
Sanderson, like many players, played in the US because it was one of the few places where being a professional female footballer was possible. She talked about how being a confident female player was often misinterpreted in the UK and how she still feels that being a confident female pundit connects far more squarely with American culture than it does in Britain. ‘People in America get me more,’ she explained.
Naz Ball scores against Donny Belles at Highbury in 1993
Naz Ball played for Arsenal at their inception until the early 1990s. Naz came from a very tough, working class background in Wigan and grew up in a single parent family. She joined the RAF because it was her route out of poverty and she described being a female athlete in the RAF in the 1980s as something that was initially very tough.
But her background had given her the fortitude to challenge a highly testosterone fuelled environment. Her route to acceptance emanated from the tools she had been forced to use in 1970s working class Wigan. ‘When they kicked me I just kicked them back. After a few months they accepted that I was a tough bird and I wasn’t going anywhere.’
While this route to ‘acceptance’ speaks to a toxic culture and unenlightened attitudes, Ball speaks warmly about how she eventually found acceptance and routine through the military and through playing women’s football. Lots of women’s players grew up (and still grow up) as ‘black sheep’, trying to navigate highly male environments. (Most of the players I interviewed had older brothers who introduced them to playing).
Many players also start to understand their sexuality against this backdrop and have to navigate being othered both on account of being women and being gay. Many players in women’s football can relate to those challenges and that continues to form a kinship among players. Regardless of their sexuality, all female players have to negotiate significant, male formed barriers to entry. All of them are politicised by the barriers they have had to negotiate. Being a female athlete is a life of friction.
Greater working class representation
Social mobility and women’s football remains a significant area of discussion, which also crosses over heavily into ethnic representation. Quite simply, a lot of former players I spoke to came from traditional working class backgrounds but women’s football has become notably more middle class over the years. I mentioned Naz Ball already, who experienced profound poverty in her childhood and witnessed all the trials and tribulations poverty spawned in her environment.
Kirsty Pealling grew up playing football on the street outside her council estate in Hackney, Kelley Few did the same outside her council estate in Romford. Mary Phillip still coaches Peckham FC, the local team where she grew up. These experiences are reflected far less in today’s elite players. Generally, being able to play girls football necessitates having a parent who can drive you moderate or long distances to reach one of the few places available for young girls to play.
Around 15 years ago, the FA closed a number of regional talent centres in the inner cities and highly suburban areas became the more typical backdrop of the modern female player. Chelsea train in Cobham in Surrey, Arsenal’s catchment area moved from the inner city cages that developed Alex Scott and Anita Asante’s talents to suburban Hertfordshire. (All this is recognised now by clubs and the FA who are making concerted efforts to reconnect with talent in inner city areas).
I was always aware of women’s football’s current issues with social mobility and race. Interviewing former players has really hammered them home. The number of former players I have talked to who came from humble backgrounds, kicking a ball around in courts and outside flat blocks that no longer allow ball games.
For many, I sense that growing up in working class families gave them the tools and the work ethic to really make a crack at being a footballer and negotiating the barriers erected for young female talent. Many former players not only had to reckon with gender and often sexuality based barriers, many explored their sporting creativity by playing ‘on the concrete’ and were used to having to fight for every thing they got in life.