Introduction

We write this chapter about women footballers in the United Kingdom (UK) because we are mindful that many published collections focused on football seldom acknowledge that much of the work is about men’s football. In published work, the term ‘football’ is often assumed to mean the game played by men; ‘football’ is synonymous with men’s football, and women’s active involvement is usually prefixed, as in ‘women’s football’. The tags ‘women’ and ‘women’s’ operate to position women as the ‘Other’: ‘women footballers’ instead of ‘footballers’. However, this is not our intention here. Instead, we seek to make obvious that our discussions are about women players. This is a strategy that writers could adopt when writing about ‘men’s football’ (Caudwell, 2018).

This chapter is timely because of the 2022 UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) European Football Championships (Euro 2022) and the rise in interest, among both the public and policy makers (UK Government, 2022), in women and girl footballers, and their opportunities to play the game in the UK. Research conducted during the championships evidenced the ongoing nature of sexism experienced by international players (Deutsche Welle, 2022). In addition to the documentation of persisting sexism, Caudwell (2022) highlights the specific issues surrounding race and racism: ‘The spectacle of England’s women winning Euro 2022 will drive change and progress. But from their first game on July 6 to the final, it was noticeable that every English starting line-up was made up of white players.’ The Whiteness of the team started an important discussion (Asante, 2022; Trehan, 2022), which included the particular legacies of racisms experienced by Eniola Aluko during her time as an England international. Aluko played for England over one hundred times, scoring more than thirty goals. She played at three world championships and two European championships and was in the Great Britain team at the 2012 Olympics. In this chapter, we consider the compounded operation of sexism and racism experienced by Eniola Aluko and Rinsola Babajide (Babajide has, to date, played 23 times for England Under 19s, Under 20s and Under 21s, and she played for Liverpool Football Club from 2018 until she left in 2022 to play in Spain).