Pitch Dreams
Collage created for Assemble’s Pitch for a Pitch vision document (image: courtesy of Assemble).
Solid defence by Toynton, she regains possession of the ball. Passes to Haste. Cueveara. Moving down the pitch quickly. Chapman. Long pass into the box and there’s no one there to receive it! Some hesitation from the defence, they’re not moving. Chapman has continued her run, could she see an opportunity? Oh...YES! She’s nicked the ball from under their feet! AND IT’S A GOAL! GOAL FOR CHAPMAN! GOAL FOR THE HIGH FIVES! Wonderful stuff! Scenes of wild celebration down on the pitch as the score goes to 2-0 in the thirtieth minute. And there’s smiles all round, but none bigger than Chapman’s. We’ve seen her confidence building over the past few weeks, but it’s the first goal after a very, very dry spell. Will this open the floodgates of more goals to come for the number six?
Reader, no floodgates were opened. I did not score another goal for the rest of the season and remain firmly stuck in drought. Despite this, the goal lives on in my memory, popping into my head in idle moments – squeezed between a backpack and an armpit on the delayed 7:53am tube to Tower Hill, or in the quick pause between two emails at work. Depending on who I am around, I’ll either smother or indulge the smile of thrilled and, admittedly, smug satisfaction that spreads from the corners of my mouth – “GOAL!” I hear the imagined crowd go wild. And even as I begin to grin, I know I’m being ridiculous. I have no right to feel so delighted by this goal. Truth be told, to anyone watching, it would have been an underwhelming goal. Average, perhaps, at best.
Reframing the Pitch, part of Emily Wickham’s MA graduation project from London’s Royal College of Art (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
You see, I am really quite shit at football and until quite recently, my involvement with the sport has been close to zero.[1] On the rare occasions when I had allowed myself to be cajoled into watching games by my football-enthusiastic partner, it was almost always with a sinking feeling of detached boredom in the pits of my ovaries. But in October last year, in a surprising turn of events, I joined a football team: High Fives FC. And each week, for the 40 minutes while I’m on the pitch, playing in our beginners 5-a-side women’s league, I get carried away in the thrill of the game and the unjustified feeling that I am an elite athlete of the astroturf. It is a strangely consuming and powerful feeling – one that quickly dissipates when I catch sight of my red-streaked face and sub-optimal football physique reflected in the window of Sainsbury’s as I trudge to the station post-game. But for just under one sweaty hour, the pitch is a site of transformation and a place of fantasy.
This level of delusion isn’t unique to me. Football performs a cheeky back-heel that convinces many average Joes, and more recently Joannes, Johannas and Josephines, that they are God’s gift to the pitch. Eleanor Watson, curator of the Design Museum’s 2022 exhibition Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, which is now on a global tour, believes that “a lot of people’s experiences of football are not real, they’re in their imagination.” She describes the sparkles she noticed in peoples’ eyes when describing a historic match play-by-exciting-play, or a particular detail in a new kit design, or an unbelievable goal they saw last weekend, “and it’s because they can imagine themselves doing it. People really willingly insert themselves into the game.” Even Zinedine Zidane, one of the GOATs of the football world, indulged in a similar level of fantasy as a child. Watson tells me about an interview she came cross where Zidane speaks of how he would imagine the voice of a famous French commentator in his head each and every time he played. If it worked for him, maybe it will work for me too.
1:1 Pitch — Reclaiming the lines of the football field, part of Emily Wickham’s MA graduation project (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
Football, Watson says, more than any other sport, has an aspect of fantastical projection, from its most ad-hoc grassroots level all the way to its billion-pound top because “it’s simple to follow, simple to play and simple to understand how to play it from watching it”. This ease of engaging with the sport makes it accessible, but also leaves room for imagination and creativity, both on and off the pitch. This unique mixture of simplicity and imagination is heightened by the fact that, on the most basic level,“there are almost zero barriers for involvement,” says Watson. All you need is a ball, a clear space and something to mark out a couple of goals – a few jumpers or water bottles will do. “But then there’s the ultimate reward for being at the other end of the scale,” she adds. “You can be a demigod if you are the best football player in the world.” Ultimately, however, you are still playing the same game, with the same parameters. This simplicity plays out across a huge spectrum of abilities, conjuring a magical sense of possibility. It is also what makes people so engaged with the sport. Across the globe, and in the UK specifically, Watson says, the “level of existing knowledge [about football] for the general population is incredibly high. Higher than any other subject matter.” With 5 billion football fans worldwide (if FIFA’s statistics are to be believed) it is unsurprising that people are engaging with the game so extensively. The combination of all of these factors creates a particular sense of “I could do that” and “I am a part of that” that underpins the so-called “beautiful game”.
It is in the spirit of this “I could do that” attitude that Assemble – a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art – launched its project Pitch for a Pitch in 2022, which seeks to “make a sports facility specifically catered to women and non-binary football players.” The project is in early stages – if it were a football game, the players probably wouldn’t have even left the changing rooms to parade, single file or with a child clutching their hand, onto the pitch. At the time of writing, there is no site for Assemble’s pitch, no confirmed stakeholders, and no money to make it happen. It currently exists in the form of a 25-page vision document that describes the collective’s goal of creating a grassroots football space and contains calls for collaborators to help them facilitate it. It exists as hundreds of conversations and it exists as thousands of emails. It is still fairly intangible, but Assemble believes it is achievable.
Reframing the Pitch (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
“There is a bit of, maybe, misplaced confidence,” explains Emily Wickham, the architect and footballer who is leading the line of Pitch for a Pitch, when I ask how Assemble is going to achieve the project’s goals. When she expands on where this confidence comes from, however, it doesn’t seem so misplaced to me. Assemble has a wealth of experience realising community-based projects in its 10-year-old portfolio. Most relevantly to Pitch for a Pitch, Assemble has founded, and now runs, three affordable workspaces in London that have provided studio spaces and workshops to hundreds of creatives. These initiatives grew from a similar “we could do that” mentality. The Blackhorse Workshop, for example, is an open-access community space in Walthamstow, London, that was set up in 2014. It came into being after two of Assemble’s team said “we’ve got this idea of a collectively run workshop that anyone can use,” explains Wickham. The next step, was “finding enough people who are interested in helping us to do that and then it became a project.” “So, maybe by accident,” Wickham summarises, “Assemble has become a workspace provider as well as an architecture firm.” Now, the collective seems to be one or two passes away from becoming a sports space facilitator, too. But why should it fall to an architecture firm to initiate, fundraise, design, build, and potentially manage, women’s and non-binary football pitches?
My entry into the High Fives unfolded in the spirit of access and imagination. It began because my good friend Fern Toynton was one of the 11.7 million people in the UK who watched and cheered as the Lionesses – England’s national women’s football team – kicked their way to victory in the 2022 UEFA Women’s Euro final against Germany. She has been watching women’s teams grow and play since childhood, and had been toying with the idea of setting up a team for a number of years. Inspired and encouraged by friends’ newfound interest in the sport, she thought it was perhaps the right moment. So, one quiet Wednesday evening, I received a WhatsApp that read “Are you keen?” attached to an invitation that said: “Victoria Park, 16.08.2022, 7pm. We are starting a woman’s (& non-binary) 5-a-side football team called the ‘High Fives’! As many of you know it’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while and with the winter league starting in October we thought now could be a good time to get something together!” It included a few other details about being beginners, what to bring and, importantly, plans to go to the pub after the first training session. And I thought to myself, “Why not? Maybe I could do that.”
High Fives FC and Hackney Parrots (image: courtesy of High Fives).
Within a week we had a team and a logo, and had joined a competition called the Super 5 League. We are now 30 games into our burgeoning football careers, playing week in, week out, come rain, weather- warning winds or -4°C frosty temperatures. But while my experience of getting onto the pitch has been as smooth as a well-controlled pass back to the keeper, this is not the norm for women and non-binary players. It is not the norm today and has not been the norm historically.
Despite its outward gloss of simplicity and easy access as a sport, football has a grim history of putting up deliberate barriers for those of us lacking a pair of (biological) balls. Our almost total exclusion from the game has been swept under the pitch’s perfectly laid turf. Because it always comes back to the pitch.
In 1921, women’s football was booming in England, having been played on and off since the 1870s. In the First World War, as women took on more physical roles in factories that had been vacated by men on the front, they also formed football clubs made up of factory workers who played against each other. “The most famous team was born in the Dick, Kerr [and Company] factory in Preston,” writes Suzanne Wrack, The Guardian’s women’s football correspondent and author of A Women’s Game: The rise and fall and rise again of women’s football (2022). The Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club was a team of 11 women who worked in a railway and tram plant turned munitions factory, and who played football in their tea and lunch breaks before going on to compete locally, nationally and internationally, boosting morale in difficult times. At the height of their popularity in 1920, one of their games drew a crowd of 53,000 spectators with “another 10-15,000 supporters turned away from the at-capacity ground,” writes Wrack. In just a few years, the team raised £83,000 (£5.16m in today’s money) for charities that supported injured soldiers returning from war and, later, other causes, including supporting striking miners and their families.
Reframing the Pitch (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
Women’s football clubs were closely linked to the suffragette and labour movements. Threatened by growing calls for equality that were amplifying after the war, the powers that be began to panic and football became tied into the perceived threat. In 1921, the Football Association (FA) of England, made an official statement that football was “quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged” and effectively banned women’s involvement in the sport. Other countries soon followed suit. However, the FA “did not have the power to ban women from playing football outright – that was impossible,” writes Wrack, “so instead they ruled that women’s games were barred from FA affiliated pitches.” Heavy-handed fines were doled out to FA clubs who let women hire out, play or train on their pitches. So for nearly 50 years the pitch became a powerful mechanism of exclusion. It was not until 1969, amidst a backdrop of the resilient international growth of women’s football and the second wave of feminism, that the FA quietly rescinded its ban. The legacy of its policy, however, lives on, as women remain mired in a struggle to level the playing field, trying to fit into systems and economies that have grown exclusively to support men’s football.
Unequal access to football pitches and facilities, in particular, continues to present huge barriers to playing at all levels of the women’s game. Take, for example, Liverpool FC’s £50m, state-of-the-art AXA Training Centre. Completed in 2020, it is considered one of the best training facilities in the world. It includes tennis courts, a swimming pool, a volleyball court, television studios and more – but no space for the Liverpool Women’s football team to train. For now, the women’s team continues to train at a ground that they share with the Tranmere Rovers men’s team (who are in the fourth division of the men’s league), while the youth women’s programmes use three different split venues. Although, since the AXA training ground opened, plans have been put in motion to find a training ground for the women’s team and academy.[2] Likewise, Manchester United Women’s team, who were only reestablished in 2018 – having been disbanded for producing a lack of profit in 2005 – were initially given a training ground with inadequate pitches, leading to a number of preventable injuries. To mitigate this, they were moved to the men’s Aon Training Complex in 2021, but had to fit their training sessions in between the men’s senior, under-23, and under-18 sides. At this site, the women’s toilets were a ten-minute walk from the pitch and, after training in their gym in a tent, the team could not have a shower between sessions and meals because there were no women’s showers. The lack of pitch access and basic facilities were factors cited by Casey Stoney when she quit as the team’s manager in late 2021.
Reframing the Pitch (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
At the regional level, a lack of pitch equity for women’s teams is also common. Just a few weeks ago (at the time of writing) Colney Heath Ladies FC, who play in the Premier Division of the Eastern Region Women’s Football League, tweeted: “We are genuinely upset to have to inform you that @ColneyHeathFC decided that a bouncy castle takes precedence over a Women’s Football Match at tier 5. We were informed that we had to play on a park pitch today. We apologise to our opponents @bowersladiesFC.” In this instance, a community fundraiser by the club took priority over the women’s game, without consultation or communication. Between writing and editing this piece, the team have removed their initial tweet and accepted the club’s apology in a statement in another tweet on May 9 concluding: “We acknowledge the apology and hope everyone can learn from this incident, ensuring women’s football is rightfully developed and promoted, together.” Although not necessarily malicious in intent, these oversights, and many more like them, are born from a casual and persistent lack of respect for women’s teams at an institutional level, which has grown from the deliberate decisions to undermine women’s right to play football on the same grounds as men. Actions have been taken in each instance to apologise or attempt to remedy the situation, but it all feels far too little, far too late.
At the opposite end of the women’s football spectrum, grassroots football faces similar challenges. “The lack of pitch space is a huge barrier to the growth of women’s football across the whole country [the UK],” wrote Fleur Cousen in her article ‘How can Women’s Football Grow When We Can’t Get on the Pitch?’ published by iNews in 2020. Cousens founded Goal Diggers FC, a non-ability based team for women and non-binary people, (for which Wickham plays in midfield) in 2015. It took her more than five years to secure a stable, safe and decent-quality pitch for her club to train and play on, and she writes of other clubs who have faced similar lengthy and expensive struggles to find pitches. They are journeys full of compromise and frustration.
1:1 Pitch — Reclaiming the lines of the football field (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
At a grassroots level, the problem of pitch access persists because booking systems privilege longstanding and existing teams – in effect, this means that men’s teams or small groups of (usually male) friends who have held booking slots for decades (or have cash in the bank) receive priority. Pitch spaces owned by schools, local councils and leisure centres across the UK, and especially in London, see their booking systems managed by third- party, for-profit sports facility providers, who rent the pitches at inflated prices on first-come-first-served rolling and block bases. Given that women’s grassroots football is relatively young (thanks FA!), the slots, particularly at prime times after work on weekdays between 7-10pm, are almost impossible to come by. Cousens writes that the current booking system is “outdated” and “prevents teams that are new to the sport from getting a look in.” It is a system that functions to maintain the status quo, even when the demand for grassroots women’s football is at an all-time high and is set to grow further as the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup kicks off in July. This begs the question: why maintain a status quo that is broken for half the population and exclusionary when something more inclusive, equitable and potentially profitable could be built?
Powerleague, one the UK’s largest for-profit sports facility providers, says that the issue is one of occupancy. The company notes that “growth in female participation is a key objective for our brand and has been for several years” and adds that all of its “products and services are available for anyone in our communities, regardless of gender, age, or ability.” But the company also acknowledges that its pitches at super-peak periods are currently at over 90 per cent capacity and, as such, it is difficult to meet the huge demand for grassroots football across all genders and abilities. Within this problem of occupancy comes an additional issue of distribution. Dean Griffiths is the regional leagues operations manger for the south at Powerplay, a subsidiary of Powerleague. His role, he says, is “to actively encourage anybody to play football – that could be walking football, it could be playing disability football, student football, women’s football – whatever it is [that serves] to increase football is great.” Griffiths says that although pitches are available for anyone to book on a first-come first-serve system, women often feel that the spaces aren’t for them. “A lot of women see a football pitch and say to themselves, ‘That is where men play football, we won’t be able to get in there,’” he says. “And that is an awful perception that has been created, because that’s not true.” This perception, as well as other barriers that women face in getting onto the pitch, he says, is “something we need to drastically change.”
“At a grassroots level, the problem of pitch access persists because booking systems privilege longstanding and existing teams ”
Powerplay notes that it is “proud to offer women’s leagues, tournaments, mixed leagues and facilities to try to encourage female and non-binary participation,” but across the field there is a certain amount of juggling between making grassroots pitches available and welcoming to women’s teams, while ensuring profit margins are maintained. Griffiths explains that opening pitch spaces exclusively to women’s leagues can be seen as coming with “business risk” because it entails cutting down on guaranteed male pitch bookings. “Now, if we don’t get women to play,” he speculates, “we obviously have missed our business goals, and through that comes financial loss.” In other words, it would be easier and economically safer to stick to the existing game plan and distribution, which is based on a customer base of 95 per cent men. “It makes business sense to keep things fully booked: we make money and the business succeeds,” Griffiths summarises of this particular school of thought. Yet there are clear counterarguments, he notes – both economic and social. “There’s a 50 per cent split of women and men in the country,” Griffiths says, “so we’d be foolish not to go after that[...] One day it [women’s football] will be as profitable as our current system.” Particularly given that women currently make up about 1.5 per cent of the 4,000 teams that play in Powerleague and Powerplay, improving this mix and broadening the company’s offerings for women, Griffiths says, “is generally better for everybody.” “We want to fight for equal opportunities, equal places,” he says, “not because we’re trying to tick a box, but because it actually does benefit everybody, it does benefit the business, it does benefit the local communities. I don’t see why we can’t do that.”
Strange as it seems, my team and I are beneficiaries of this longstanding system that favours men or teams who have been involved in the sport for years. The High Fives play on the Mabley Green pitches in Hackney Wick at 7 and 8pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays respectively. We have access to these prime slots because Shahid Malji (or Shazz as he’s known to everyone on the pitch and sidelines), who founded the Super 5 League in 2016, has held these bookings for about 14 years. He first gained them when he set up an informal men’s league for his office colleagues and contracted operative staff at Hackney Council. Then, when he decided to quit his job and devote himself to championing women’s grassroots football full-time, he secured these slots for the following year by putting down £10,000 of his own money.
Spread from The Football Programme for Counter Culture by Emily Wickham (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
“I took a gamble,” says Malji, who wasn’t sure if there was the demand for grassroots women’s football at the time, but has slowly cultivated a community by offering mentorships and creating new economic models such as half-seasonal payment options to take down some of the barriers to entry. He explains that established men’s teams (who have years of playing under their elasticated waistbands) may have this kind of cash in the bank – or else established pools of resources, sponsors or contacts to draw from – but for new women’s and non-binary teams who are attempting to get involved in a sport that has historically been hostile toward them, this is a huge and prohibitive sum. This economic barrier trickles down to the individual players, who are often required to pay large deposits very quickly to secure spots that are in red-hot demand. This is all before they have ever properly played a game and tested their feet in football’s muddy waters.
In a very deliberate departure to how pitch systems currently work, Assemble and Wickam envision a pitch space with booking systems that would position female and non-binary players first, rather than profits. They are exploring all avenues as to how this could unfold. “We need a site that: has existing pitches and space for a new building or has existing pitch space and an existing building that can be adapted or space for a new pitch space and a new building,” their vision document reads. In the ambiguity of an early-stage project, there is room to dream. “The ideal scenario,” explains Wickham, is folded into Assemble’s hunt for a new office space and workshop for itself – the collective is about to be moved on from the meanwhile space[3] that has housed the studio and one of its affordable workspaces for the last few years. If (and it is a big if given London’s soaring prices and lack of outdoor spaces) they can find a new space that also has enough of an outdoor area to be converted into a pitch and whoever owns the site says “I’d really like to make this project happen”, then from that point onwards they could move forward. Wickham says that, with these all factors in play, Assemble could “apply for funding” and “be able to contact all sorts of teams and get official confirmation that they would use it”. Assemble might then manage the site with dedicated staff, in a manner similar to which it runs its workspaces. “If we did that, we’d have quite a lot of control about how it worked,” Wickham says, before adding that there are “pros and cons to that [approach], because there might be a whole load of more appropriate people to run it.” The options remain very much open, a blank pitch.
“It’s a truism in women’s football that you can’t be what you can’t see. Visibility is crucial and this is as true in your local park as it is on TV during the World Cup.”
But finding space isn’t simple. Large facilities providers can devote substantial time to scouting, approaching, negotiating and securing spaces for sport. Powerleague, Griffiths’ reports, has about 14 people who do so, for example, and there are also specialist companies who collate and sell data about pitch space availability and new sites. Wickham, meanwhile spends “about half a day a week” on the project, juggling it between other projects and responsibilities. Competition is tough.
This unequal competition could be mitigated by the FA, and equivalent national bodies elsewhere, stepping up to the task of creating pitch and booking equity. Malji believes that it is essential the FA buys or rents new pitches before the big bookings companies get in there. “They’ve got money,” he says, “why don’t they spend a million quid to book the prime times out, promote the hell out of it, and give women first refusal? If they don’t do that, then as soon as the organisations hear about a new pitch, it’s a battle with them all outbidding each other to get that slot.” But instead, he says, “I have seen nothing” from bodies like the FA and FIFA to support women’s football at the community end of the spectrum. He feels that any interactions he has had with them have amounted to nothing more than “a tick box exercise.”
The Football Programme for Counter Culture by Emily Wickham.
The case for the FA, FIFA and other international bodies paying substantially more for women’s football is highlighted by sports writer Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski in their 2022 re-edition of their book Soccernomics and a summary article published in the Financial Times. They calculate that reparations of billions of pounds are due to women’s football because of the 1921 ban that courts today would consider “an unjustified violation of competition laws, probably on the grounds of limiting markets. After all, some teams (but not others) were excluded from profit-making activities. The bans could also be an abuse of dominance, given that the football federations had market power and could in effect dictate the rules of competition.” While they believe that a retrospective antitrust case would be very difficult to bring to court, “under the EU Damages Directive, time still runs for historic violations with continuing effects until they cease. With interest, damages awards could be even higher than fines.” In summary, Kuper and Szymanski feel that there should be “a large-scale programme of investment in the women’s game, paid from men’s football’s revenues, to start redressing the damage.” It seems appropriate that that they should focus these funds on the mechanism of exclusion that was used in the first place: pitch access. Perhaps these bodies could pay some of their dues by investing in projects such as Pitch for a Pitch.
In light of the FA’s lack of support, Malji is pursuing another route towards pitch equity by working with existing sports facilities companies, such as Powerplay and Powerleague, to silo women into their systems. He and Griffiths have collaborated to launch a short-term 7-a-side women’s league in Stratford, which plays at prime time on Tuesday evenings. Malji recounts discussing the idea with Griffiths: “I said, give me a discounted rate, forget about earning money for now, see how it goes over a period of time, build a relationship and be visible[...] This is your opportunity, as powerhouses, to come into my world, build relationships with my community and understand what they want, what they need.” From its side, Powerplay has demonstrated a desire to help establish the women’s grassroots game further by opening up a popular pitch venue at prime time to a new community of players that will reduce short-term profit margins.
Reframing the Pitch (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
“We are not getting the fulfilment that that we normally would and [at the time of writing] we are making a financial loss every week,” says Griffiths, yet the initiative has been supported by the company because “we can see that the potential and the feedback from the women is great, so it’s worth doing.”
It will be a long game to redistribute in-demand pitch spaces and cultivate communities who feel a sense of shared ownership of those spaces and who will eventually use them at capacity. On top of this, more pitch spaces across the country are needed because the demand is already too high across all grassroots football for existing capacity.
Wickham, with an admirable measure of fairness, highlights that the FA, the premier league and the UK government have recently launched a new website for their joint charity, the Football Foundation (FF) which she feels is “really new and really great.” In addition, according to its website (the FF declined an interview for this piece and Wickham is also struggling to reach it), the FF aims to build 1,000 new artificial-turf pitches in the next 10 years, provide financial support for improving existing grass pitches, and in 2020 pledged that any new-build pitch spaces have to include provisions for women and girls. Good news. However, if its website, whose presentation of the women’s game is largely illustrated by photos of elementary school girls with cheesy grins in oversized bibs playing football, is any indication of its plans, the investment seems to be aimed at the very young. While admirable, Wickham feels that it leaves out a huge number of women in their 20s, 30s, 40s and upwards who “missed the opportunity at school to feel like football was something that they could do.” We discuss whether the money spent by the FA to support sub-20s grassroots football might be justified in terms of potential investment for the future. It comes down to motivation, says Wickham. “If your thing is about getting young girls to become professionals,” she reflects, then this approach is fine, but she stresses the equal importance of “making a really lovely space for women to come after work. Women who are never ever going to be professional, but have gained this real sense of community and empowerment that they wouldn’t have had otherwise from discovering football as young adults.”
Reframing the Pitch (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
It is this space that we see on the cover of Pitch for a Pitch’s vision document, which features an image of a football changing room, filled with women and non-binary players in various stages of gearing up and winding down from games. Football shirts hang from the ceiling, a large, glossy drinking fountain takes centre stage, colourful posters line the walls. Beyond the foregrounded changing room, we look out onto an expanse of pitches where people are playing, walking, juggling balls and chatting. It is a busy scene brimming with a sense of community and ease. It is also a scene of fantasy that Wickham has created by carefully piecing together existing images assembled from a number of grassroots women’s football teams. Gathered from many fragments, the scene doesn’t quite exist yet, but it represents something that could.
And if it does, then what? The cynic in me cannot help but wondering whether one new pitch, founded on radical ideas, democratic ideals and a not-for-profit model run by people who are passionate about building communities of women and non-binary footballers, would really make a difference? Of course, and very importantly, a small community would benefit. However, if the powerful players in the larger game of football economics and politics simply continue on their merry (cash, cash, cash, men, men, men) way, the culture will never shift. Pitch access is ultimately not a design problem, at least not in the conventional understanding of design being about building objects and spaces thought-up by designers and architects. “It is a societal problem and it is a policy problem,” says Wickham. “It’s a legislation problem.” She feels design, and architecture, are “tools to help consolidate new legislation that could then be put in place,” but that it comes down to ensuring the right policies are introduced and upheld.
Spread from The Football Programme for Counter Culture.
Cousens advocates a similar policy-first approach after finding the institutions’ responses to her persistent calls for pitch access “patronising at best.” She highlights their outrageous inadequacy through the example of frankly condescending guidelines published in 2016 by Sussex County FA, a not-for-profit governing body of football, which, Cousen writes, “advised pink whistles, lighter balls and giving out pink compact mirrors” as solutions to increasing women’s involvement in the sport. Instead of banging her head against the FA’s walls, Cousens is now focusing her efforts on pressuring local councils to instigate change. Goal Diggers FC are calling for councils to introduce quotas and policies to ensure that women have prioritised access to pitch spaces. She cites three factors that should be taken into consideration to create a policy for allocating pitches. “Firstly, numbers. Currently some 11-a-side pitches are used by roughly 20-30 people booking,” while clubs (like the Goal Diggers FC) could triple this number. “Secondly, gender. It’s a truism in women’s football that you can’t be what you can’t see. Visibility is crucial and this is as true in your local park as it is on TV during the World Cup. If young girls see women play football, they will want to join in. They will realise that football is a sport for them. But at the moment the vast majority of pitches are used by men every night of the week. The effect of this is catastrophic. It means these spaces are seen as masculine and this simply re-enforces the harmful narrative that football is a man’s game.” And, “Finally, community.” She believes that cost and booking practices means that the current focus leans towards individuals rather than teams or communities, and that this must change.
With all this in mind, Pitch for a Pitch could be read as a statement, even in its unrealised form. It is a statement that asks: Why do we have to do this? Whose job should this be? Who bears the responsibility to ensure that grassroots teams have access to pitches? In the long term, when the pitch is built, the space could serve as an example of best practice from which others could learn, a prototype of a dream that could help shift reality into something more inclusive, but it needs to be backed up by those who have the power to make policies around football for all.
1:1 Pitch — Reclaiming the lines of the football field (image: courtesy of Emily Wickham).
In writing this piece, I have wondered what I would have done if my entry into football hadn’t been so smooth. If people like my friend Fern and facilitators like Malji hadn’t put in the hours to make it simple for me to join the High Fives and the Super 5 League; if they hadn’t worked so hard to cultivate a sense of enthusiasm; offered free tickets to Women’s Super League[4] games; provided half-season payment options; found sponsors to subsidise our kits. If I hadn’t had a pitch where I felt safe, comfortable and welcome to play, would I have ever played at all? The truth is, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It may sound shallow or lazy, but football wasn’t a world that I thought I wanted to be part of or could be part of. And my life would be less rich for it – I wouldn’t have a wonderful new group of friends; I wouldn’t have reconnected with old ones; I’d have far less to talk about with new acquaintances and colleagues and, as a result, likely many more awkward silences in my life; I wouldn’t be gearing up for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and feeling a newfound patriotism for the Matildas and Australian soccer from afar; nor would I have visited Wembley to watch England take on Brazil, winning by the skin of their teeth in a penalty shootout, while I held my breath and cheered with a temporary community of 83,000 other people; I wouldn’t feel a bit healthier and a bit fitter – more able to run for a bus at least. I wouldn’t have a smile of smug satisfaction lingering at the sidelines of my mouth, ready to strike at inopportune moments – something I could maybe live without, but now wouldn’t want to. I feel a deep disappointment for players who have been discouraged by barriers they may have faced getting into football, whose enthusiasm has lost momentum because it was too hard, too expensive or too intimidating to get onto a pitch. For all the teams never formed, all the goals left un-shot, all the post-match beers never drunk, relegated to dreams rather than realities, I feel incredibly sad.
“for it [Assemble’s pitch] to be really proudly catering to women and non- binary players, I think it would be a really radical project.”
Then I think back to my heartening conversation with Wickham. She says that beyond the challenging practicalities that Assemble faces of first finding, and then constructing, and eventually running a pitch site, she is “most excited to design something that is really beautiful, a really nice space to go and play football, and a really nice space to go and watch football specifically in the grassroots setting.” It will be, she says, a space “where you could sit on a bench and have a barbecue and be next to the people playing football because football is really embedded in what’s there, whether you’re playing or not.” The idea is that it will act as a kind of civic public space. “I think that’d be really nice,” concludes Wickham, a faraway glint in her eye, before adding that “for it to be really proudly catering to women and non- binary players, I think it would be a really radical project. I think it would be a great success, basically.” The fantasy is palpable – I feel she could do that. I hope that Assemble can and will do that.
Emblazoned above the collage on the cover of the vision document, in a large all-caps font, the document reads: PROVIDE THE STAGE AND THE PEOPLE WILL PLAY. The pitch is a stage that is full of contradictions and gender politics, and mess and mud, but it is also a space full of joy and dreaming and empowerment. What is most powerful about this as-yet unfinished project is its belief that, by imagining and then doing, we can make football – and perhaps society more broadly – more equal one pitch at a time, or more importantly one pitch policy at a time. Architects and designers can keep passing the ball and momentum of women’s football forward, setting examples and applying pressure where it is needed so that, hopefully, one day, projects like this won’t need to exist at all because pitch access has become equal for everyone at all the levels of the beautiful game. That would be the ultimate goal. The crowd goes wild...
[1] With the exception of a brief window at about 17-years-old, which ended with a lost grand final and lifelong ankle damage.
[2] As Design Reviewed #2 went to press, Liverpool announced that it had bought back its old Melwood training ground, which it had sold in 2019, to serve as a base of operations for the club’s women’s first team and professional game academy.
[3] A meanwhile space is a commercial space let out on a temporary contract to small businesses, community groups or individuals to allow them to use vacant sites until they can be brought back into commercial use. They are let on the understanding that the users will leave within an allowed period of time.
[4] A gendered league title that points to the ongoing disparity in football. The equivalent men’s tournament is simply called The Premier League. As Wickham points out in her MA dissertation on the subject, “the common assumption is that ‘football’ refers to the male sport. The female equivalent must be specified through the use of a gender signifier: ‘women’s football’.”
Words Lara Chapman
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #2. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.