Banned, and Back: How England Shut Down Women's Football and Rebuilt It

A century ago, women's football in England drew crowds that would fill a modern stadium. Then the sport's own governing body shut it down for fifty years. The story of how the game reinvented itself explains the pyramid English clubs climb today. It carries both a warning and a hope for the pathway the United States is still building for women's soccer.

On 27 December 1920, at Goodison Park in Liverpool, roughly 53,000 people paid to watch a women's football match. An estimated 14,000 more were locked outside when the gates closed. The home side, Dick, Kerr Ladies, beat St Helens Ladies 4–0.

To measure that number against its own moment: the 1920 FA Cup final, the showpiece of the men's game, drew about 50,000 the same year. A women's club match out-drew it. This was not a novelty pulling in a curious few. It was one of the best-attended football matches in the country, of any kind.

The demand for women's football was not in question a hundred years ago. It had already been proven, in front of tens of thousands.

How it got that big

Women's football rose during the First World War. With men at the front, women went to work in the munitions factories. As workplaces always have, those factories formed teams. Dick, Kerr Ladies came out of a locomotive and munitions works in Preston. Their first organized match, in 1917, drew around 10,000 people. They played to raise money for wounded soldiers, and they were extraordinarily good at drawing a crowd.

By 1920 they were a national attraction. In that year alone they played some thirty matches and scored well over a hundred goals. Across their run, the club raised the equivalent of roughly £10 million in today's terms for charity. Their star, Lily Parr, was a teenager with one of the hardest shots anyone had seen. A pioneering openly gay figure, she was later among the first women inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame.

The women's game was being taken seriously. It had high-profile players, compounding gate receipts and strong momentum, the kind a game builds only once.

And then it stopped.

The erasure

On 5 December 1921, the Football Association passed a resolution that would define women's football for the next half-century. The FA declared the game "quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged," and instructed its member clubs to refuse the use of their grounds for women's matches.

The resolution dressed itself in more than disapproval. It also complained about how the matches were run. Specifically, it charged that too much of the gate was going to expenses and too little to charity. The players themselves had no control over the money taken at the turnstiles. They were not even paid. They received expenses. The financial complaint landed on the women who touched none of the finances.

The ban was not a law. No act of Parliament made women's football illegal, and no one was arrested for playing. It was a sporting ban. The governing body prohibited affiliated clubs from letting women play on their pitches. But the FA's affiliated clubs controlled nearly every proper football ground in the country. The effect was the same as prohibition. Overnight, the women who had filled Goodison Park had almost nowhere left to play. The game was pushed off the main stages, onto rough public fields, and out of public view.

The crowd had shown up. What closed the game down was not a lack of demand. It was structural, a lever of control over who could use the grounds. And it set the women's game back fifty years.

The players did not simply accept it. Within days, representatives of the leading clubs met and formed their own governing body, the English Ladies' Football Association, to keep the game alive on its own terms. It was a genuine act of self-organization. But they did not have access to the financial resources to build stadiums of their own. Without access to the existing grounds, the audience that had made the game a spectacle could no longer reach it.

Taken abroad

If England would not host them, others would. In 1922, Dick, Kerr Ladies sailed for North America. The plan was ambitious: almost two dozen matches. It was cut down before it began when the Canadian federation barred them too. It was an early example of how collusion between sports organizations has systemically oppressed women's sports for generations. So the tour became a United States tour. Because there were few women's sides of comparable standard, they mostly played men's professional teams.

On 4 November 1922 they played the Philadelphia Field Club, a men's side in the professional American Soccer League, and lost a genuine contest 6–5 in front of a few thousand spectators. Barred at home, the best women's team in the world crossed an ocean and went toe to toe with professional men. Yet the crowds still came. The demand did not disappear when the FA closed the grounds. It simply had nowhere at home it could go.

That ban stood, in one form or another, for fifty years.

The long silence, and the restart

Women's football never fully died. It survived on park pitches and in the memory of the people who had played it. But it lost two generations of momentum, the kind a sport builds once and cannot easily rebuild.

The turn came at the end of the 1960s. The Women's Football Association was formed in 1969. The FA Council moved to rescind the 1921 resolution soon after, and the change was formalized at the Association's annual meeting in 1971, allowing women's teams back onto affiliated grounds. In November 1972, half a century after the ban, England played its first official women's international, against Scotland.

What had taken decades to build was dismantled in a single afternoon in a committee room. Now it had to be constructed again, this time with none of the crowds, grounds, or standing it had once commanded.

The rebuild: into a pyramid

The modern structure comes from this rebuild, and it matters to this series. Structure had taken the game away. Structure is what gave it back.

As the game returned, it was rebuilt the way the rest of English football is organized, as an open pyramid connected by promotion and relegation. Regional divisions near the base rose, tier by tier, toward the top. In principle, a club could start at the bottom and climb all the way to the top league. Nothing about a club's level was fixed. It was earned, and it could be lost.

The top of that pyramid then professionalized in stages. The Women's Super League launched in 2011 and became a fully professional top flight later that decade. For the 2024–25 season, the running of the top two divisions passed from the FA to an independent company, Women's Professional Leagues Limited, built to steward the professional game. From 2025–26, the second tier came fully under that umbrella and was renamed WSL 2.

Those top two divisions are now protected in a way the lower rungs are not. A place there carries financial and infrastructure standards a club has to meet, so entry is no longer won by sporting result alone. Beneath them, the open pyramid of promotion and relegation continues.

That is the shape today: a professionalized, protected top, and an open ladder climbing up toward it. Stability at the top. An open ladder below.

That is the system English clubs live inside today. It is worth understanding on its own terms, because it is one of the clearest working answers to a question the sport is now asking everywhere: how do you protect the professional summit and still leave the climb open beneath it?

What it means for us

The English story carries a lesson that sits at the center of everything this series is about.

For a hundred years, the question assumed to be hardest in the sport was demand. Will anyone watch? England answered that in 1920, with 53,000 in the seats and thousands more at the gate. It answered again in 1922, when a banned team drew crowds against men on another continent. Whether women's football thrived was never really about whether people wanted it. It was about the structure. First whether the game was allowed to exist at all, and then whether it was built so that clubs could develop players, climb, and sustain themselves.

A sport that can fill a stadium can still be shut down by a single committee vote over who controls the grounds. That is exactly what happened in 1921. Demand is not the variable. Structure is.

In the United States, the demand is already proven. The crowds, the television numbers, the record expansion in the professional game all say what England's gate said a century ago. People want the women's game. The top of the professional game is thriving. What is still being built is everything beneath it.

And here the comparison turns. Where England has a single connected pyramid, one ladder a club can climb, the United States has no single pyramid. It has multiple leagues at nearly every level, run by different sanctioning bodies and overlapping one another. There is no single ladder to climb. So in this country the pathway does not come with the structure. It has to be built on purpose: the academies, the education alongside them, and the professional layer where young players turn pro and the value they create is established. That is the opportunity in front of us now.

England shows both what is possible and what is at stake. The demand was there in 1920. What determined the next hundred years was everything built, or not built, around it. Because the lesson of Goodison Park is that the players and the fans were always ready. In this country they are ready now. The talent has never been our issue. The USWNT and the NWSL have proven it. What we still have to build is the pathway beneath the top flight, and a structure clear enough to hold it.

Next week, the plan. The whole pathway this country can build for the women's game, from the record beneath it to the professional summit, and how the pieces finally connect.

Sources

• Dick, Kerr Ladies 4–0 St Helens Ladies, match record (27 December 1920, Goodison Park; 53,000 admitted, ~14,000 locked out). Wikipedia; National Football Museum.

• "The Boxing Day game that changed women's football," BBC News.

• Dick, Kerr Ladies, 1920 season record, charity fundraising, and Lily Parr. These Football Times; History.com; National Football Museum.

• The Football Association, "Kicking Down Barriers" heritage history: the 5 December 1921 resolution and its stated reasoning; the 1969 to 1971 reversal; the November 1972 first official international.

• English Ladies' Football Association (formed December 1921 in response to the ban). Wikipedia; Spartacus Educational.

• Dick, Kerr Ladies' 1922 North American tour and the 4 November 1922 match vs. Philadelphia Field Club (ASL). Society for American Soccer History.

• "Women's Championship to be known as WSL 2 in WPLL rebrand," ESPN; "WSL and Women's Championship control handed over from FA to Women's Professional Leagues Limited," Sky Sports. Current promotion, relegation and licensing under review by WPLL (ESPN; Sky Sports, 2025).

Accuracy note: the 1921 FA action was a sporting ban, not an act of law. It barred women's teams from affiliated grounds. The reversal ran from the FA Council's decision at the end of the 1960s to the formal rule change in 1971. The Philadelphia match was played on 4 November 1922, a 6–5 loss to the Philadelphia Field Club before about 5,000 spectators. The top two divisions now sit under Women's Professional Leagues Limited with their own entry standards; promotion and relegation at that level are under active review at the time of writing, while the pyramid beneath remains open.