At the 1986 Fifa Congress in Mexico City, the “mother of Norwegian football” Ellen Wille asked Fifa for a Women’s World Cup.
Wille had strategised her speech before heading to Mexico, including the fact that it would best be delivered by a woman. It wasn’t good enough that women’s football wasn’t considered or mentioned in Fifa’s documents, Wille argued when she addressed the room full of more than 100 men: it was, she said, time for women to have their own tournament.
Fifa had periodically teased the possibility of staging a Women’s World Cup, with women’s football advocates and players having their hopes raised and dashed countless times. (“Fifa was toying with the women, I think,” says the former football administrator Heather Reid AM.) But 1986 was the first time Fifa officially committed.
Two years later China hosted the Fifa Women’s Invitational Tournament, which was, for all intents and purposes, a pilot Women’s World Cup.