When the Lionesses won the European Championships in 2022, the football mania that swept the country was palpable.
‘The Euros were a huge turning point for female football,’ former Lioness midfielder, Karen Carney, tells ELLE. ‘I remember being at the final and seeing this young boy and girl were in front of me and I looked out at what they were looking at and I thought "How amazing that they will see this and not know anything different?" Female football’s come a long way since I was a kid.’
Indeed it has. The BBC confirmed that the final of the competition averaged 11 million viewers, with 17.4 million in total tuning in – the highest figure ever recorded for women’s football in Britain. The Lionesses made their way into the history books when they beat Germany 2-1 after extra time in front of 87,000 supporters at Wembley Stadium, securing the first major tournament title for the country since 1966. Women's football has become the most played team sport for women and girls in England, with three million registered players and over 12,000 registered teams.
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But it doesn’t come without its pitfalls. In September 2022, the UK government asked Carney to examine the issues affecting the female game at both elite and grassroots levels. She has now released a 126-page review of her findings, which features ten key areas to address including criticisms of a lack of diversity within female football teams.
‘I haven’t shied away from acknowledging the difficult subjects,’ Carney says. ‘Diversity has been impacted because we need better facilities – and more of them – in more diverse areas. We need to make it more accessible for as many girls as possible.’
Another element of the review that Carney has pushed for change on is implementing salary floors so that playing football is as lucrative for women as it is for their male counterparts.
‘There are people working three or four jobs alongside playing full-time football because they’re only earning £4000,’ she says. ‘The problem with that is their injury rate is higher, they're dehydrated, their nutrition is poor, they're uninspired because they're treated as second class citizens. And that means that their performance suffers, then there's lack of broadcasting, the sponsors are uninspired because there's such a disparity, and then the quality in the competitive nature is changed, we can't do that.’
A clear solution for the future of the female game is for there to be ‘minimum standards and a minimum salary required to be an elite female footballer.’
Her belief is that creating role models, increasing accessibility and building more facilities are all key elements of establishing a clear and solid future of the game.
Football, in the eyes of Carney, is sewn into the fabric of British culture. ‘Football is really on a pedestal, it’s got this huge following and it’s at the forefront of people’s minds,’ she adds. ‘So if we can use that to build a better, more inclusive future for female football, then that’s a big win.’
Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
