FairFootball


Association Football has been played for over 150 years and is by far the most popular team game in history.   It is a game almost exclusively organised, played, supported, managed and profited from, by men.  Women were at first ignored, then banned, and latterly marginalised by being confined to their own game, even though they are just as skilful as men players; and despite the huge financial contribution, in one form or another, that they make to men’s football.     

There has been blind, cultural and an almost sacred acceptance of this segregation, with next to no questioning, debate or examination.   Indeed, even to raise the issue of men and women playing the game together, invites hostile disapprobation.

The only argument, of any substance, against men and women playing the game as a shared experience, is the perceived difference in physical strength between the genders.  Though the magnitude and scope of that difference is a matter of argument, it is nevertheless generally acknowledged as fact that women are disadvantaged; with the women’s game consequently viewed as ’inferior’.

Disgracefully, there has never been any effort to end this obvious and needless imbalance; a situation that has arisen from a lack of vision, misogyny, female passivity, male arrogance, gender prejudice, and blinkered corporate selfishness.

FairFootball challenges this status-quo by proposing modifications that would enable men and women to play the game together on a totally equal basis.  These are virtually cost free and remarkably simple, with the game retaining its essence; feeling the same to players, and looking the same to spectators.   The rhetoric for equality for women in football has been exposed as meaningless.

An added benefit of FairFootball is that it would open-up the game to other dichotomous groups, such as age difference (mothers/daughters, fathers/sons etc.).  This would make football truly inclusive; an ideal community sport.

‘This website uses football as an exemplar to show how easy it is to modify sport so enabling the genders to fully participate and compete together; reversing the corrosive misogyny and gender stereotyping that many sports promulgate’.  J G Harvey

For more information about this topic visit http://www.fairfootball.co.uk/