Eurocopa femenina!
The 2025 women's Euros and a brief history of women's football. WARNING: FOOTBALL RELATED CONTENT
Eurocopa Femenina 25, or the 2025 Women’s Euros as we say more prosaically in England, kicked off this week. The Goat divides its time mainly between England, current holders of the women’s Euros, and Spain, the reigning women’s world cup holders, where the Goat is currently holed up sweltering. That’s coincidence of course, even though pledging to relocate to the winning country is exactly the sort of gamified neurodivergent stalkerish weirdness that would appeal to me, given more money and fewer family ties. Only one of those is at risk of change in what’s left of the Goat’s time on the planet.
Spain are hot favourites for the Eurocopa. Their game is on a quite different level to the other teams, with all those interchanging of positions and beautiful sliding passes at unexpected angles that we have come to expect of the Spanish men’s team. It’s only in the last 25 years or so that men’s football in England has evolved beyond its previous muscular orthodoxy. Although the women’s game is more technically skilful than the old-fashioned men’s game, the most obvious difference between the top levels of men and women now, apart from the speed of the game, is that in general women suffer from what Arsene Wenger used to call “lacking a little bit the decision-making in the final third”.
But England’s women have a chance. They are good, even if some of the angles the Spanish pass the ball at have not been invented in England yet. In Euros 2022 England knocked out Spain then beat Germany in the final, with Chloe Kelly’s shirt-off celebration putting her on all the back pages and landing Lineker in familiar media hot water for a tweet saying “Kelly is England’s hero, bra none”.
The celebrations and post-match interviews were great fun - a lot of the joy and spontaneity of the men’s game has been media-trained out of existence and it was refreshing to see scenes like this, Chloe Kelly abandoning her post-match interview to go and sing Sweet Caroline with the rest of the team, and the England team invading the manager’s press conference, dancing on the desks and singing “football’s coming home”.
The women’s game for now remains uncynical, more sporting and more fun. There is some gamesmanship, for example England time-wasting keeping the ball in the corner for what seemed like the last 20 minutes of their final against Germany, and the near universal practice of a goalkeeper feigning injury each match to give the outfield players an impromptu coaching time-out. But cynical fouls or dangerous tackles are rare, and diving and feigning injury seems non-existent. Women are more used to pain and just get on with it, says Mrs Goat, darkly.
The Goat is a women’s football fan, and with Chloe Kelly signing for Arsenal this week it has even crossed its mind to put Kelly on the back of its Arsenal shirt, the sort of move that would undoubtedly look very creepy from any late middle-aged man other than Ian Wright. Hopefully that will all change as the women’s game continues to grow in popularity, though the Goat attending women’s games in a Nike sports bra may have to wait a few years yet.
Arsenal quite often sell out the Emirates for women’s games - 60,000 fans - and the 38,000 capacity stadium in Lisbon where they won the European cup this summer for the second time could have sold out three times over. Contrast when Arsenal first won the European Cup in 2007 and the attendance was 3,467.
There are still male football fans that disparage the women’s game but they are a dying breed, moronic dinosaurs like Joey Barton and Alan Brazil. The Goat was loitering at a bar window yesterday evening watching the Spain v Portugal game while family members bought cheap jewellery next door, when it overheard three English lads passing by. “Whats the match? Spain v Portugal. In what? No, women. Oh right.” I was sub-consciously conditioned for the mocking or disparaging comment but it never came, as it surely would have a few years ago. And these were not right-on posh Surrey boys, they were lads on the nick, unceremoniously ejected from the jewellery store shortly afterwards.
Spain is undergoing a painful reckoning with its machista culture, most notably with the trial of Luis Rubiales, the brutish Spanish football president who planted an unwanted smacker on the lips of Jenni Hermoso after Spain won the world cup in 2023. It cost him his job and a €10,000 fine, and having to keep at least 200 metres from Jenni for 12 months. Lucky for him she is not in Spain’s squad any more or he would have had a very distant seat indeed for Spain’s games in this year’s Euros. Worse than being at West Ham’s stadium.
Times have changed, a lot. Women’s football was banned in Britain for 50 years, from 1921 to 1971. After the first world war, as the suffragette movement was finally having success in gaining women the vote, women’s football was also thriving, some matches watched by tens of thousands. The FA had little control over the finances of women’s matches and was concerned it might damage revenues from the men’s game. It was also worried by many women’s matches being played for charity and raising funds for striking workers. The FA banned women from playing because “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”. It prevented women from playing on any grounds of any clubs affiliated to the FA, and used its influence to stop women’s matches taking place on venues used for other sports. It meant that women’s football was largely played in public parks until the ban was finally lifted.
In 1970, an unofficial women’s world cup took place in Italy, organised by the Federation of Independent European Female Football. In 1971, 112,500 fans attended the final in Mexico City, the subject of the film Copa 71. Fifa opposed the tournament and threatened the Mexico Football Federation with fines and bans if it allowed games to be played in stadiums it controlled, but the Mexico media giant Televisa owned its own stadiums and FIFA were powerless to stop it going ahead. The women went out there and “stuck two fingers up to FIFA”. The semi-final between Italy and Mexico ended in a mass brawl, rather undermining my earlier “more sporting” theory, though of course it’s all relative - the Italian male footballers in those days were like gang members from The Godfather (most famously in the Battle of Santiago, described by David Coleman in this clip as the “most stupid, appalling disgraceful and disgusting exhibition of football possibly in the history of the game”. (This was before Spurs’ capitulation to Manchester City in 2024 to avoid Arsenal winning the title.)
England had fielded a team in defiance of the FA ban on women’s football. They lost their matches 4-1 and 4-0 to Argentina and Mexico. On their return to the UK, where the ban had just been lifted, the manager and players were re-banned as a punishment. They were discouraged from ever talking about it and acquired the nickname the “Lost Lionesses”. “We were back in Luton on an old pitch with mud and ruts,” said one player. “We looked round and wondered what happened to the Azteca Stadium with all the fireworks going off and all the parades and everybody shouting and chanting.”
The Women’s Football Association was formed in 1971 and the first official international was played against Scotland in 1972 - take a look, the standard is dismal, as is the commentary (“it’s a far cry from when a lady fainted if a man said “damn” (?)).
It was not until the 1990s that FIFA finally agreed to a women’s world cup of its own, and not until 2011 that England had a fully professional women’s league.
Despite much higher crowds, the game is still miles behind the men’s in terms of money. The best player in the world, Aitana Bonmati of Barcelona, earns €1m a year, whereas 40 year old Ronaldo will be on a basic of £488,000 a day under his new two year contract in Saudi. The average salary in the women’s super league is around £50,000 a year, compared to around £3m a year for the men’s premier league.
One other disadvantage for women, without wanting to sound like a man from the FA in 1921, is their susceptibility to rupture of the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) - they are statistically four times more likely than men to suffer this injury, which means at least a year out of the game and sometimes never being the same player again. FIFA is undertaking research, with possible reasons being different body shape placing more impact on the knees and a role played by hormones during the menstrual cycle. FIFA will rake in over $1 billion from its club world cup farce in America, and it’s highly commendable that they have allocated the princely sum of $20,000 to this serious problem blighting the women’s game. Showing how much they care about the women’s game, yet again.
At Eurocopa 25 there are bound to be a few horrible leering FIFA apparatchiks besmirching the spectacle. But meanwhile, let’s enjoy a tournament that will hopefully be largely free of diving and injury-feigning on the pitch, and with more of the spontaneous unfiltered joy that the game is about.
Come on you Lionesses!!