How do you expect women's football to grow when you don't give it the space to grow?
Goal Diggers FC (GDFC) is a non-profit grassroots team for womxn and non-binary people set up in September 2015 by Club Founder Fleur Cousens. From just 20 members, the club has quickly grown alongside the exposure and popularity of women's football globally and now has over 200 members.
"Finding a pitch that is big enough for us has always been the main barrier that Goal Diggers has faced," explains Fleur. "It's never been people wanting to get into the sport - that's easy, everyone wants to play - it's been finding the space to play on." Fleur and GDFC are challenging the pitch booking system in London to come up with a fairer, more inclusive way to ensure that all grassroots football clubs can get their feet off the ground and provide a safe, welcoming and secure pitch space on which to train.
In the early days of 2015, the Club trained on a small community concrete basketball pitch in King's Cross, which was all they could afford after four months of searching. "When the numbers got bigger we used to spill over into the car park and train in the puddles," she said. They secured their current training pitch at The Bridge Secondary School in Holloway around 2 years ago but have quickly outgrown the space. "Searching for pitches has become my life," expands Fleur. "We have such a need for space that we have a dedicated pitch finder on our committee team. If we can't find a bigger pitch we'll have to cap membership for the first time in the Club's history; we'll have to put up our own barriers."
Currently, pitch booking works on a first come first-served basis, which GDFC have repeatedly been told is a fair system. But since women's football was banned in 1921, Fleur argues, the clubs and leagues using those pitches has been dominated by men. Getting a new womxn's and non-binary people's team off the ground means trying to disrupt that order amongst push-back and apathy from those in charge. "We never get a response that's in any way helpful!" she says. "We're always told it's first come first-served and that is a flawed system because it means the only times we're offered pitch space is Friday nights at 10pm, which is just not accessible." Part of the Club's ethos is to create routines for players to keep them coming back each week, and the day and time of training is hugely important to keep momentum.
"Pitch bookers, the council and the FA need to look at changing the system and introducing pitch quotas," she argues. "We need to look at who is using the space, whether it's a club or a community group, what gender they are and how many people are using it. We're a non-profit community club who get over a hundred womxn and non-binary people signing up each week. Simply by numbers alone, we could use the space to five times the capacity of a men's 11-aside match."
The other important issue, of course, is that you can't be what you can't see. There are pitches all over London solely used by men and boys alone. The danger of a subliminal message like that for young players in the community is that football is a men's game. In a time where the professional women's game is seeing higher attendances, more screen time and fixtures in men's premier league stadiums, the exposure at grassroots level shouldn't be underestimated to attract young players to the sport.
In the session before at The Bridge School, a men's 5-aside match is used in just half of the pitch while 60 GDFC members jostle for space to warm up on the concrete corridor outside. At the moment men's match ends, GDFC stream onto the pitch and fill it in just seconds. Watching such numbers of womxn and non-binary people eager to play football, no matter how small the space, is heartening . The post-Women's World Cup boom has seen 605 new girls’ youth teams and 260 new women’s clubs registered to play in the 2019/20 season. Clearly, this a special time for women's and girls' football - from professional teams to grassroots clubs. Now the onus is on the FA and the local councils across the UK to give these clubs the space they need to grow the women's game.
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