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Womens Football
Football is now the top participation sport for women and girls in England, but see how it's evolved
With almost three million active female players, football is the biggest women’s team sport in England – but there is plenty of room for more people to get involved.
And there are so many ways for girls and women to join in, no matter what your age or ability level, whether you just want to have a kickabout with your mates or whether you want to be the next Steph Houghton.
Do you have a pair of boots and are ready to go?
Women's association football, simply women's football, is the team sport of association football when played by women only. It is played at the professional level in multiple countries throughout the world and 176 national teams participate internationally.The history of women's football has seen competitions being launched at both the national and international levels.
Although the "first golden age" of women's football occurred in the United Kingdom in the 1920s, with one match attracting over 50,000 spectators, The Football Association initiated a ban in 1921 in England that disallowed women's football games from taking place on the grounds used by its member clubs. That ban remained in effect until July 1971.
The inaugural FIFA Women's World Cup was held in China in 1991. Since then, the sport has gained in popularity. The 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup Final in Canada was the most watched football game in United States history and over 1.12 billion people worldwide watched the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in France.
In Womens football, kit (also referred to as a strip or uniform) is the standard equipment and attire worn by players. The sport's rules specify the minimum kit which a player must use, and also prohibit the use of anything that is dangerous to either the player or another participant. Individual competitions may stipulate further restrictions, such as regulating the size of logos displayed on shirts and stating that, in the event of a match between teams with identical or similar colours, the away team must change to different coloured attire.
Footballers generally wear identifying numbers on the backs of their shirts. Originally a team of players wore numbers from 1 to 11, corresponding roughly to their playing positions, but at the professional level this has generally been superseded by squad numbering, whereby each player in a squad is allocated a fixed number for the duration of a season. Professional clubs also usually display players' surnames or nicknames on their shirts, above (or, infrequently, below) their squad numbers.
Football kit has evolved significantly since the early days of the sport when players typically wore thick cotton shirts, knickerbockers and heavy rigid leather boots. In the twentieth century, boots became lighter and softer, shorts were worn at a shorter length, and advances in clothing manufacture and printing allowed shirts to be made in lighter synthetic fibres with increasingly colourful and complex designs. With the rise of advertising in the 20th century, sponsors' logos began to appear on shirts, and replica strips were made available for fans to purchase, generating significant amounts of revenue for clubs.