Editorial team
- Verity Postlethwaite
- Julie Brice
- Andrew Grainger
- Adam Beissel
As global interest in women’s football continues to accelerate, the relationship between the sport’s past, present, and future has never been more dynamic, or more deserving of sustained historical inquiry. Off the back of the most successful women’s international sporting event – the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia – the years ahead mark equally significant moments in the global sporting calendar, with the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Brazil and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games poised to shape the next chapter of women’s football on and off the pitch. These upcoming events provide fertile ground for fresh historical analysis, inviting scholars to reconsider the narratives, structures, and cultural forces that have shaped the women’s game in diverse local, national, and transnational contexts.
This special issue seeks contributions that explore the histories of women in football in all their complexity and at all levels. We welcome papers that expand, challenge, and reimagine dominant historical narratives, that highlight lesser-known experiences from across the world, and speak to the experiences of all who shape the sport. In particular, we encourage authors to situate their work in relation to the political, social, and cultural significance of major tournaments past and present, including the rapidly evolving global profile of the women’s game leading into 2027 and 2028.
We invite submissions that examine women’s roles on the pitch, in the stands, behind the scenes, within communities, and across wider society. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Mega-events and legacy: historical analyses of previous tournaments and their impacts, as well as historically informed perspectives on the forthcoming Brazil 2027 and LA 2028 competitions.
- Athletes and athletic labour: histories of players’ careers, training cultures, professionalization, migration, injuries, and embodied experiences.
- Governance and leadership: administrators, organisers, policymakers, activists, and the institutional politics shaping access, visibility, and legitimacy.
- Media and representation: sports journalists’ experiences, press coverage, broadcast innovations, digital fandoms, visual culture, and historical patterns of bias and erasure.
- Fandom and community histories: supporters’ groups, local club cultures, diasporic fan identities, and intergenerational traditions within women’s football fandom.
- Coaching, officiating, and sport science: underexplored histories of women as coaches, referees, trainers, and specialists involved in shaping the sport’s development.
- Intersectional experiences: how gender intersects with race, Indigeneity, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, disability, and religion in football’s past.
- Policy, politics, and social change: the use of women’s football in social movements, diplomacy, education, urban policy, youth development, and community activism.
- Everyday footballing lives: grassroots histories, informal play, school and youth structures, and community-centred narratives that build the foundations of the elite game.
We are especially interested in scholarly articles that are based on original research and foreground historical methods and sources, including archival collections, newspapers and periodicals, oral histories, memoirs and autobiographies, visual and material culture, league and federation records, or digital-born evidence. We also welcome comparative and transnational histories that illuminate connections across regions, traditions, and political contexts.
By encouraging authors to engage creatively with both past trajectories and imminent future events, this special issue aims to enrich historical understandings of women’s football while contributing to broader debates in sport history, gender studies, political history, cultural history, and the sociology of sport. We welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages and from any disciplinary background with a historical orientation.
Submission details
- Abstract submission deadline Friday, 03 April 2026.
- Abstract outcomes will be circulated by the end of April 2026.
- Manuscript submission deadline Friday, 02 October 2026.
- We seek scholarly articles based on original research.
- We expect a Summer 2027 publication for the special issue.
- Final papers should be 8-10,000 words, inclusive of endnotes. Please see IJHS website for submission format.
- Abstracts should be 300-500 words. Please add a short author bio with the proposal.
- Submit abstract to v.a.postlethwaite@lboro.ac.uk
