Trouble ahead as playing with the boys becomes mainstream
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With the grassroots football season about to commence, boys playing in the under-10 and under-12 age groups should set themselves for a completely new challenge. For the first time the thousands of boys’ clubs in leagues up and down the country will be joined by 68 teams made up of elite female players.
In May the Football Association announced changes to its elite player pathway for girls’ football. The former girls’ centres of excellence (GCOEs) were scrapped and replaced with a tiered system of 34 regional talent clubs (RTCs). However, the most important development was buried in the detail. At under-10 and under-12 (unlike boys, girls at elite level are banded into two-year age groups) the RTCs would not be playing each other as they had in the past – they would be competing against boys’ teams in their local leagues.
Front cover of the book Playing with the Boys by Niamh McKevittThis represents a radical change of direction for the FA. After decades of active discouragement, it seems to be finally embracing the idea girls can compete with boys on the pitch. When I played mixed football, it was as the only female in otherwise all-male sides. This takes it to another level. Next season whole teams of girls from clubs such as Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City will be lining up to take on the boys.
It could have a profound impact not only on how women’s football is played but also on how it is perceived. Yet, like so many things in the female version of the world’s most popular sport, it has passed largely without comment.
However, in this case silence should not be mistaken for apathy. The lack of awareness belies the level of antipathy that exists towards mixed football: once more people find out about it, the handwringing will begin in earnest.
There are already hints a storm is brewing. My father, Steve, has coached boys and girls. He runs an under-16 boys’ team and was at a manager’s meeting recently when the rule change was announced.
“There were audible gasps of disbelief,” he says. “Someone said: ‘Well the FA have done some daft things over the years, but …’ From the reaction he got, there were obviously quite a few others who felt the same way. I think it comes down to ignorance. One guy enquired about the age limit for mixed football. When I told him it was under-18s, he just shouted: ‘Ridiculous!’ He had obviously never seen a game of mixed football in his life. His assumption is that every single boy playing football must be better than every single girl, which is ridiculous.
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This prejudice is not exclusive to boys’ grassroots coaches. During my time playing mixed football, I found the greatest opposition came from those involved in the women’s game. At school my PE teacher, herself a Premier League footballer, told me in no uncertain terms I’d never get anywhere playing with boys. On another occasion, a GCOE director emailed me – without ever seeing me play – to explain that boys’ football would not prepare me for the women’s game, because it “relies on pace and physicality; the girls (certainly at GCOE level) places a high priority on the technical aspects rather than technique.”
The benefits of mixed football have long been clear to me. In 2011, I gave up my place at a GCOE to join one of the top under-13 boys’ teams in my home city of Sheffield. For the next four years I was the only girl in the country playing boys’ football in my age group. Throughout that time it was a real struggle to convince the FA I should be allowed to continue playing, so while this change is welcome, it is also somewhat surprising.
Brent Hills, the FA’s head of women’s elite development, believes attitudes are shifting. “I think throughout the game there are still some people who perhaps aren’t as enlightened as maybe you or I but that attitude is not exclusive to football – it’s an issue for women’s sport generally,” he says. “Fortunately there are many people in the FA, working on both the male and female side, who do support the development of women’s football.’
Hills, who is responsible for the elite player pathway and England’s teams up to the under-20s, describes how the decision to include mixed football came about: “We have a couple of pilot programmes at the moment where we are encouraging some of our youth internationals at under-15 and under-16 to do extra training sessions with their equivalent boys’ academies. Twelve months in and we can already see mixed football is making a huge difference.”
The FA’s findings square with my experience. I spent a year playing with boys at Sheffield Wednesday and it is difficult to understate the contribution that made to my development. During my time there, I was called up to represent Republic of Ireland under-16s and by the end of the season was playing first-team football for Huddersfield Town in the Women’s Premier League.
However, being a girl in a boys’ team is one thing, being a girls’ team in a boys’ league presents a different set of challenges. Julie Grundy is RTC manager atDoncaster Rovers Belles. The club, who play in the Women’s Super League, lack the budget of rivals such as Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea. They are far more reliant on home-grown talent. As such, it comes as a surprise to learn that, until this season, Belles never had an elite junior section.
“We didn’t have anything in place for elite youth,” Grundy says, “so players were feeding in from places like Leeds United and North Riding CoEs. That wasn’t ideal as we couldn’t really oversee their development, so it was difficult to instil a club ethos or cascade down a style of play.”
Grundy is fully supportive of the latest mixed football development: “It’s a fantastic idea. A 10-year-old girl in an under-10 boys’ league will develop a lot quicker than one playing girls’ football exclusively. There’s no physiological disadvantage for girls at this age but the speed of the ball and the boys’ style of play tends to result in faster games. The Doncaster League has been really accommodating. This is our first season, so we are entering the bottom division and seeing how that goes. We’ll review performance at Christmas and depending on how the girls are coping will look for a division where the challenge is appropriate.”
This is all great news for the girls but it does beg a question: what is in it for the boys? Hills is clear mixed football needs to be “a two-way process”. Steve Featherstone, the manager of my former boys’ team, Beighton Magpies, feels they do have a lot to gain: “I think it can only be a good thing for the game. I found having a girl in my team had a remarkable, galvanising effect on the rest of the squad. Without exception, the lads responded terrifically, it really made them raise their level of performance.”
He does expect there will be some initial reservations. “But I am confident they will disappear as soon as the match kicks off,” he says. “Of course the girls will need to earn respect from the opposition but that’s true for every player. Once people witness the talent, the barriers will disappear: they’ll stop seeing girls and start seeing footballers.”
Featherstone touches on a broader point: respect. If the girls do well – and in my experience there is no reason to doubt they will – they could change the perception of women’s football as a whole. Cliches about girls being unable to play and their matches slow, boring, unwatchable affairs, become much more difficult to trot out if you have had first-hand experience of how well they can play. As a result, while I feel it is unlikely we will see a female player in the men’s Premier League any time soon, we may well end up seeing more fans of Premier League football attending women’s matches, and watching without prejudice, in the near future.
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