A solid contribution to the study of women’s football from a grassroots perspective

Payam Ansari
The Bournemouth University Business School

While the recent growth of women’s football in England, evidenced by soaring viewership, expanding sponsorship deals, and bold strides toward professionalisation, promises a bright future, there are also growing concerns about the sustainability of this progress. Some worries arise from professionalisation itself, which can heap new demands on players without supplying the corresponding infrastructure, resources or support systems. Others are more deeply structural, rooted in a football culture whose default lens remains male-centred, such as the divestment from women’s teams by clubs facing financial pressures, most recently Blackburn Rovers, and earlier, Reading. It is into this climate of both triumph and retrenchment that Kate Themen’s Women’s Football, Culture, and Identity lands, asking how female players themselves understand and navigate a sport that simultaneously embraces and sidelines them.

Themen begins with a deceptively simple question: now that women are visible on stadium billboards, whose voices actually shape the game? Her answer is layered. Across 170 pages and three parts, Themen first maps the conceptual ground in Part 1, Pathways for Marginalised Voices, then explores childhood experiences and community connections in Part 2, Development, Opportunities, and Friendships, and finally examines how inclusivity is, or is not, being challenged or reimagined in Part 3, Encouraging Inclusivity: Challenges and Reconfiguration. The book is structured into seven chapters, each of which returns to the two central analytical anchors that underpin the study: voice and nostalgia.

Themen makes a compelling case that English football culture, especially at the non-professional level, is neither monolithic nor fixed; it has been, and continues to be, negotiated week by week, in muddy five-a-side cages and on manicured county pitches alike.

Chapter 1 lays the conceptual groundwork. Drawing on feminist sport studies and critical football scholarship, Themen positions women’s football as a “space for contestation” where dominant cultural narratives around gender, legitimacy, and embodiment are both reproduced and resisted. She introduces the central themes of voice, who is heard, on what terms, and nostalgia. Voice, she argues, is not merely speech but an act of social negotiation, and “is the most important factor for sociological debate because this is a position from which to consider how most effectively to allow respondents [female players] to speak through experience, that these could be a method for understanding how women have, and do, negotiate spaces that have been traditionally a focus of masculine pastimes and leisure.” Equally powerful is nostalgia; a romanticised sense of the sport’s past, replayed most vividly during major tournaments, converges with the cherished mud-and-muscle folklore of men’s football and works like a gatekeeper that decides who belongs.

In Chapter 2, Themen outlines her empirical base: 18 semi-structured interviews with amateur female players aged 18 to 60, drawn from North West England and Wales. All were actively involved in 11-a-side, 5-a-side, or walking football. She uses this chapter to reflect on the ethics and politics of research, including her own positionality as an insider. The chapter foregrounds place as a key dimension shaping football cultures and women’s experiences and reinforces her commitment to eliciting and analysing stories through the lenses of voice and nostalgia. Chapter 3 explores the early life and school-based football experiences of respondents. Themen details how girls navigated opportunities to play football in environments often structured by gendered expectations and ideologies. Drawing on the “sportisation” thesis and literature on the masculinisation of national sports cultures, she shows how women’s aspirations took root in contested spaces, such as PE classes, informal matches, or local parks, and how early resistance helped forge lasting sporting identities.

In Chapter 4, Themen explores how women actively negotiated and created opportunities to play football, and sustained those opportunities, particularly in the years surrounding the lifting of the FA’s ban and the formation of the Women’s Super League. She highlights how networks of friendship and leisure participation allowed respondents to forge alternative football pathways when institutional routes were lacking. Chapter 5 explores representations of women’s football and issues and challenges of skills development, coaching, and structural support for women’s football. The chapter reintroduces the idea of place and emplacement, showing how football culture remains shaped by dominant narratives of masculinity and heteronormativity. Themen illustrates how women contest these norms through physicality and performance, but also critiques the FA’s developmental strategies, which have often failed to address deeper exclusions embedded in the game’s governance and culture.

Chapter 6 is structured as four “Spaces of Learning” that shows how mixed-sex football sessions function as spaces where women learn, adapt, and contest norms. Interviewees describe how playing with men often sharpened their skills and confidence, while also revealing the persistence of masculine benchmarks and structural inequalities. Themen refuses to cast interviewees as passive recipients of structural change. We read from Martha (one of the interviewees) who shrugs off bruises from eight-a-side indoor games because she “doesn’t mind getting shot in the back.” Teenage duo Jade and Hannah revel in “shutting up” sceptical boys with hard tackles. These stories illustrate women converting liminal arenas, such as school PE, mixed charity matches, into laboratories of competence and self-definition. Then Themen returns to nostalgia, showing how players use comparisons with men’s football not simply to mimic it but to reconfigure it, elevating finesse, tactical intelligence, and community over physical dominance.

Chapter 7 brings the book to a reflective close, wherein Themen argues that although the terrain has shifted, particularly in terms of media exposure and professionalism, the structural barriers remain deeply cultural. She reiterates that voice and nostalgia are not abstract concepts but lived dimensions through which players interpret, challenge, and sometimes embrace the game’s meanings.

Ultimately, Themen makes a compelling case that English football culture, especially at the non-professional level, is neither monolithic nor fixed; it has been, and continues to be, negotiated week by week, in muddy five-a-side cages and on manicured county pitches alike. By allowing players to speak at length, she crafts a counter-nostalgia that values bruises, finesse, and humour in equal measure. The recent decisions by clubs like Blackburn and Reading serve as stark reminders that structural equality remains far from assured. Yet Themen’s participants demonstrate how, match by match, women continue to carve new pathways through an old game, resisting historically embedded cultural norms that privilege men’s participation. Their stories resonate well beyond England, capturing lived experiences that will be familiar across many national contexts. For anyone interested in where women’s football might, and urgently should, go next, this book is both cautionary and inspiring.

Copyright © Payam Ansari 2025