Women's football no longer needs to prove itself – Girls on the Ball

Two self-starting women’s football reporters covering the World Cup have said the women’s game no longer needs to “prove” itself.

Rachel O’Sullivan (34), from Dublin, and Sophie Downey (36), from London, launched Girls on the Ball – an online platform for women’s football in Ireland and the UK – in 2012 having been inspired by a trip to watch Britain against Brazil at Wembley during the 2012 London Olympics.

“We both went home then and said, ‘you know, let’s try and find out a bit more about women’s football’, and there just wasn’t really anything out there,” O’Sullivan told the PA news agency.

“So we thought maybe we could set up a website for women’s sport. But that we would start with football.”

Eleven years on and their platforms have tens of thousands of followers, while the pair are enjoying reporting on the latest Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.

“I don’t think we need to prove ourselves any more,” O’Sullivan said.

“I think we need to move away from ‘how many fans came’ or ‘look how many people came to the stadium’ – it’s here. We’re selling out stadiums, we’re getting thousands and thousands of people to games. The tournaments are getting bigger and better every single time.

“We don’t need to ask for permission to be taking up these spaces, the game has more than proved itself.”

After later attending their first Arsenal game, the pair were soon going to dozens of fixtures and clocking up more than 30,000 miles of travel a year.

Juggling other paying jobs, covering women’s football often required O’Donnell and Downey to go the extra mile, getting changed in the back of a car before going to work or phoning bosses up to request more time off to cover the latter stages of a tournament.

Both are now