The more beautiful game
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
When it started, it was just five or six girls trying to play a game,” says Una Burnand, one of the three captains of Shepherd’s Booters FC, a mixed-ability football team for women and non-binary players in west London. A photographer and filmmaker by day, Burnand, 27, grew up watching Bend It Like Beckham, the cult 2002 teen football film. “It was also shot in west London,” she laughs.
Burnand is standing on the sidelines of a pitch on Wormwood Scrubs, the 76-hectare park in Shepherd’s Bush. The team, which has amassed 30 core members since it was founded by Kitty Low and Rudabeh Gray in 2021, jogs and stretches in brightly coloured vintage Adidas and Umbro track jackets. There’s no match tonight; they’re here to train. Afterwards, they’ll pick up cones of chips and blue slushies from the local takeaway for supper en route to the bus. The mood is sweet, almost innocent.
They have England’s Lionesses to thank. In the Women’s Euro 2022 competition, the women delivered what the men’s team hasn’t since 1966: they actually brought home a cup. The Women’s World Cup in 2023 further ramped up interest; the Lionesses reached the final, eventually losing to Spain by one goal.
It’s led to widespread female football fever. “The cultural resonance of that visibility is massive,” says Felicia Pennant, a Chelsea fan and founder of Season, an independent football magazine. In 2016, there were only 5,632 registered women and girls’ teams in England; today, there are more than 12,000, with some 77 per cent of British schools offering “equal access” to football. Meanwhile, broadcast revenue increased by 40 per cent on the previous season to £10mn from 2022-23, according to Deloitte; attendance numbers crested to a record sell-out with 60,000 spectators showing up to watch Arsenal Women play Manchester United Women in the 2024-25 Women’s Super League. Likewise, player contracts are now breaking records. In January, Chelsea Women paid $1.1mn for American San Diego Wave defender Naomi Girma, making her the first woman to achieve a million-dollar transfer fee.
The Women’s Euro 2025, which kicked off on 2 July in Switzerland, has further increased momentum. More than 570,000 tickets of the 673,000 total capacity have been sold, and UEFA is expecting 137,000 international fans to fly in for the tournament. Spain are the team to beat – they’re ranked second in the world after the USA, and ahead of Germany. (England are fifth.) FIFA aims to facilitate 60 million women and girls playing football globally by 2026.
Back on Wormwood Scrubs, the players amp each other up with cheers and compliments. It’s clear the connections run far deeper than those at a Tuesday-night Pilates class. Though some are west Londoners, others have moved from America, Canada and Singapore. Many identify as LGBTQ+, and the team provides a safe space: in June, they co-hosted a Pride tournament to fundraise for trans charities. “It’s so much more than just football. It’s a family,” says Burnand.
Emma Darker is among the team’s top players. The football data analyst, 26, scooped the coveted Golden Boot trophy for scoring 49 goals last season. (When the team won the league their prize was a giant bar of Dairy Milk.) Nathalie Winter, 32, is described by Burnand as the Booters’ “guardian angel”. A social media executive at a women’s sportswear brand, she brings Tupperware filled with fruit and biscuits to practice, supplemented by teammates’ corner-shop contributions of Walkers salt and vinegar crisps and Lucozade. Winter designed the Booters’ logo for the pale-blue home jerseys to mimic a football being “booted so hard it’s curving”, she laughs. They also have a version in candy pink, “for fun”.
Winter values the Booters’ mix of competition and connection. “I felt like I couldn’t fit in or find the right circle before I joined,” she says. “I’ve found more than just people to play and watch a match with.” She’s travelling to Switzerland to watch the Euros with team-mates. Others connect over a shared sense of style: music agent Amirah Goodwin, 26, has a penchant for vintage tracksuit bottoms, while Sara Paowana, 24, runs a Depop page.
The camaraderie masks the challenges still facing women’s football. “More support is needed. Especially in terms of making sure women are paid to play professionally,” says Darker. In the top-flight Women’s Super League, a 2022 BBC report found the average salary of a WSL player to be £47,000 a year. By contrast, the Premier League’s highest-paid male player, Manchester City’s Erling Haaland, earns £500,000 a week. This is not just a UK issue. A 2024 Fifa report surveying 736 players across 12 countries and six continents found that more than a quarter of elite women players have secondary jobs; more than half were earning less than $5,000 a year from playing football.
The problem extends from salaries to training facilities and stadia. WSL matches are predominantly held in lower-tier stadia that typically have poor-quality pitches. Chelsea Women, who this year won their sixth league title on the bounce, play on a non-league ground a 30-minute drive from Chelsea Men’s Stamford Bridge stadium. Its women’s game is cheaper to attend – a ticket costs between £10 and £20 compared with the men’s games that charge £66 to £83 – but it reduces the incoming revenue. According to the Women’s Sport Trust, only eight per cent of UK broadcast coverage on key channels was given to women’s sport in 2024 (although this was during a fallow year without a major international women’s football tournament).
The four-time World Cup-winning USA provides a blueprint for success. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has seen surging women’s participation in high school and college athletics since the 1972 passage of Title IX, which banned sex discrimination in education. No sport has grown more than soccer, with rates rising from 1,855 players on 80 university teams in 1982 to 28,000 across 1,026 teams in 2020-21. Moreover, the US has built a successful National Women’s Soccer League underpinned by independent sponsorships. By contrast, many European women’s teams are extensions of established men’s clubs. “When the Man United men’s training facilities were getting refurbished, they kicked the women’s team out so the men could use theirs,” says Darker.
But things are changing. In 2024 Michele Kang, a billionaire philanthropist who owns Washington Spirit in the US, OL Lyonnes in France and the London City Lionesses in the UK, announced a $50mn-plus investment to launch a non-profit dedicated to performance research for female athletes, as well as $30mn to US Soccer to improve access for women and girls. She has said she wants to own “a team in every continent”.
Perhaps the biggest shift required will be in cultural acceptance. According to Darker, who studies viewership data across English football, “it’s not just women who are being entertained by women’s football now”. In Spain, 56 per cent of viewers for the 2023 Women’s World Cup final were men. And many find the atmosphere at women’s matches more appealing. “[Women’s matches make for] a very family-friendly and inclusive environment,” says Darker. Adds Burnand: “You’re in it together and you really feel you’re part of something bigger than yourself. It almost feels like girlhood all over again.”
Models: Shepherd’s Booters FC’s Emma Darker, Nina Stevens, Danni Winter, Natalie Klepáčová, Jing Coulson, Leah Brownlie, Amirah Goodwin, Scarlett Mackay, Siân John-Baptiste, Emily Good, Meg Davis Yuille, Imogen Louise, Vanessa Kwok, Ahilya Murkunde, Sara Paowana, Ella Pilkington, Una Burnand, Rose Norris, Clara Glynn and Kristina Abo. Hair and make-up, Maya Czarnecka. Photographer’s assistant, Arthur Finch. Stylist’s assistant, Flo Thompson
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