‘Fun and the beautiful game’: rise of women’s recreational football

It’s Saturday-morning 11-a-side at a football pitch squeezed between a scrubby path running along the River Lee Navigation and a technology campus in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney. A dark-haired woman in red defies a gaggle of defenders with a skilled pass to the front. “Yes! Beginner’s debut, right there,” yells coach Julie Leaff at the top of her Mancunian lungs. The player breaks into a grin.

The camaraderie and joy on the pitch, where women are playing football, some for the first time, is noisy and infectious. This is Clapton Community Football Club’s open access training, one of thousands of grassroots sessions in England that have sprung up as women’s football has advanced. Unlike many targeted at encouraging young women and girls to take up the sport, however, it is for all ages.

“We wanted it to be open to older women,” said Leaff, 54, co-founder of the training session for women and non-binary people of all ages and abilities. “We wanted mums who watched their kids play, to realise they could step over the line and play themselves. To get that same buzz we got when we were 10 or 11. Before you got to secondary and some boy pinged your bra strap and said: “It’s a girl.”

Leaff, who teaches at Grasmere primary school in Stoke Newington, and co-founder Ellie Guedalla, 45, who works in children’s services are part of the “lost generation”, football fans whose gender meant they missed out on the opportunity to play and to develop in the sport when young.

My own football journey began at CCFC open access after the pandemic hit. In my fifties, I had never kicked a ball, knew nothing about the sport but loved the training. Last year, I was asked to join a spin-off vets team, brazenly named Hot Flush, and now