Last Word 23 September 2025

Last word: Ban

Author of Pitch Invasion Karen Dobres on the progress made in women’s football since the 50-year ban was lifted on women and girls playing the beautiful game

A bold red rectangle with the word "BAN" in large, white capital letters at the top, set against a light peach background.

Karen Dobres, FRSA

Author and a former director of Lewes FC

reading time: Four mins

Communities Diversity and inclusion Gender

Summary

Karen Dobres reflects on her journey from football novice to director at Lewes FC, the first club in the world to equally resource men’s and women’s teams. Her story highlights the ban on women’s football imposed by the Football Association in 1921, which deliberately excluded women and limited opportunities for nearly 50 years. Dobres explores how this hidden history shaped girls’ perceptions of sport for generations, and how confronting and reversing systemic exclusion can open doors.

In spring 2017, my husband Charlie – an elected director at the local football club – asked, “What would you say if the club paid the women the same as the men?”

We were in the kitchen; I was making a cup of tea.

“You’re saying there are women there playing football?” I’d always assumed there was only a men’s team in Lewes, where we live. “Wait,” I continued, another thought landing hot on the heels of the first, “Are you saying there are women there, playing football like the men, and you don’t pay them the same?”

So began a five-year crash course in sexism in football, which saw me morph from someone who avoided the world’s most popular sport to a director on a football club board, all via one club’s pioneering quest for gender equality. By July 2017 (when Lewes FC did indeed become the first and only pro or semi-pro club in the world to equally resource and value men and women), I both understood and resented why I’d never heard of Lewes FC Women, or of any females playing football at all.

My ignorance had been rooted in a deliberate and under-reported ban on women playing; a ban I’d never heard of. A ban which creates a very particular type of long-term damage.

When men were sent to fight in World War I, women went to work in munitions factories, making weapons and parachutes for the war effort. Some started to kick a ball around in factory yards, and soon factory challenged factory. Although ridiculed at first, the women’s game became popular. Stars like Lily Parr of the Dick Kerr Ladies emerged, audiences grew, and England even played France – at least five times.

Women’s football became so popular that, post WW1, men couldn’t muster the same crowds. So, in December 1921 the all-male Football Association called a 15-minute meeting in which they solved this ‘problem’ by banning women and girls from playing, claiming the sport was somehow gynaecologically “unsuitable for females and not to be encouraged”.

The ban wasn’t lifted for some 50 years.

As a girl-child of the 1970s, I was used to footballing boys dominating our school playgrounds, and footballing men on TV screens of a Saturday afternoon. As a teen, I learned to avoid male football hooligans on trains and, understandably perhaps, had never imagined a football match to be a place for me. But here’s the thing: I’d never known or questioned why the world’s favourite sport, with some 3.6 billion fans around the globe, was so predominantly male. If I had thought about it (and I didn’t), I’d have assumed that women just didn’t like playing it, or that, again for some obscure reason, weren’t good at it.

But all along it turns out that men had an artificially created monopoly over the game, and so benefited from the lucrative broadcasting rights, the many health gains, and the easy access to role models of leadership, resilience and teamwork.

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So, what to do when you find out you’ve been deliberately excluded from something and didn’t know it? That a 100-year-old ban was responsible for shaping the worldview of several generations of young women, making them believe they weren’t properly built for the sport?

Show up that cultural gaslighting for what it is – an inherited and socially sanctioned marginalisation of half the population – and go welcome those unwelcome women in.

Karen Dobres, FRSA is the author of Pitch Invasion, the story of her time as a director at Lewes FC – the first gender equal football club in the world.

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