Lionesses History: How England Women Reached the Top
How the england women football team history runs from the 1921 FA ban through the amateur rebuild to a Wembley final England finally won.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished England National Team19 min read
- FA ban imposed
- 1921
- Ban rescinded
- 1971
- First official international
- 1972
- Euro 2022 final crowd
- 87,192
Boxing Day 1920, Goodison Park. Dick, Kerr Ladies of Preston played St Helens Ladies in front of a reported 53,000 people, with thousands more turned away at the gates. Eleven months later the Football Association told every club under its jurisdiction to stop letting women use their grounds. Those two facts sit next to each other in the record, and between them they explain most of what follows: the story of the England women's team is not a straight line of gradual progress but a boom, a demolition, and a rebuild that took the better part of a century.
This page traces that arc through the institutions that shaped it — the FA, the Women's Football Association, UEFA, and the professional league structure that now sits beneath the national side. It deals in dates, rules and documented results. Where the historical record is contested, and in places it genuinely is, the page says so rather than picking the tidier version.
Munitions factories and the first English boom
Women's football in England existed before the First World War. The British Ladies' Football Club played exhibition matches from 1895, drawing curiosity and a good deal of newspaper sneering. But the game that filled grounds was a product of the munitions industry: factories running on female labour organised teams, and those teams played for war charities.
The best of them came out of the Dick, Kerr & Co works in Preston, which formed a side in 1917. They were extraordinarily good and extraordinarily well promoted. Their matches raised money for wounded servicemen's charities, which gave clubs a reason to open their grounds and gave newspapers a reason to cover them without embarrassment.
Lily Parr joined that side as a teenager from St Helens and became the most famous English women's footballer of the era, a left-winger with a shot the newspapers wrote about. In 2002 she became the first woman inducted into the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame — a strange sort of double record. The best-known player of the first boom, honoured eighty years after the authorities shut the boom down.
The crowd figures from this period are what carry the argument. Goodison on Boxing Day 1920 is the headline, but it was not an isolated case. Matches across the industrial north routinely drew five-figure attendances, and the fixtures were reported in the sports pages alongside the men's results. For a few years after the Armistice, women's football in England was a genuine spectator sport with a following in the same towns that followed the men's game.
The 1921 resolution and what it actually said
The FA Council met on 5 December 1921 and resolved that "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged". It then requested that clubs belonging to the Association refuse the use of their grounds for such matches.
Read the second half of that carefully. The FA had no power to stop women playing football anywhere; what it had was authority over affiliated clubs, affiliated grounds and affiliated referees. The resolution used exactly that authority. It removed the pitches, the turnstiles and the officials in one stroke, which was considerably more effective than a ban would have been.
Two justifications were offered. One was medical — an assertion, unsupported by evidence then or since, that the game was physically unsuitable for women. The other was financial: unease about how much of the charity receipts reached the charities and how much went on expenses. The second charge was never substantiated in any surviving form, and it arrived at a very convenient moment.
What the resolution did not do was kill the game. Women kept playing on rugby pitches, park pitches, cricket grounds and any patch of land not under FA control. The English Ladies' Football Association formed in 1921 in direct response. Without grounds, referees or fixtures against affiliated opposition, though, the sport lost its audience within a couple of seasons and spent the next five decades as something close to folk football.
- 5 December 1921The FA Council resolves that football is unsuitable for women and asks affiliated clubs to close their grounds.
- 1969The Women's Football Association is formed to run a national competition outside the FA structure.
- 1971The FA rescinds the 1921 resolution as UEFA presses national associations to take charge of the women's game.
- 1972England play their first official international, against Scotland at Ravenscraig Park in Greenock.
- 1993The FA assumes direct responsibility for women's football in England from the WFA.
- 1998Hope Powell is appointed England's first full-time national coach.
- 2009The FA introduces central contracts for a group of England internationals.
- 2011The Women's Super League launches as a summer competition with eight clubs.
- 2018The top tier moves to a fully professional licensing model with full-time contracts required.
The sequence of institutional decisions that shaped English women's football, not a measure of participation.
Fifty years in the margins
The half-century between the resolution and its reversal is the part of the history most often skipped, and it is the part that explains why the rebuild was so slow. There was no pyramid. No county structure carried women's teams. Coaching qualifications were not available to women. Schools taught girls netball and hockey, and in most of the country that was the whole of the offer.
Teams persisted anyway. Works sides, pub sides and occasional touring outfits played through the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, mostly unrecorded. Because the FA did not sanction them, almost nothing was written down in a form historians can now use, which is why the period is so thinly documented and why so much of the surviving detail comes from local newspapers and the memories of families.
The consequence for the national team is straightforward. When England finally fielded an official side in 1972, it drew on a player base with no junior structure behind it, no professional clubs, no full-time coaches and no reliable fixture calendar. Every other nation that later became strong in the women's game — the United States through its college system, the Nordic countries through club and municipal sport — had been building something across that same period. England had been prevented from building anything.
That gap took roughly thirty years to close, and arguably was not closed until the league went professional. It is the single most useful fact for anyone trying to work out why a country with England's footballing infrastructure was not competitive at the top of the women's game until the 2010s.
What was lost that was not the national team
It is easy to frame the fifty years purely as a delay to international success, which understates the damage. The 1921 resolution removed an entire spectator culture that had already formed. The crowds at Goodison and elsewhere were not curiosity audiences; they were repeat attenders in towns where the works side was a local institution and the players were known by name in the streets around the factory.
Rebuilding a team is a matter of a decade. Rebuilding an audience that regards a fixture as part of its weekly routine takes considerably longer, because it has to pass through a generation that grew up going. England lost three generations of that. Every attendance milestone celebrated since 2011 is, in one sense, a recovery of ground the game already held in 1920, which is a considerably less comfortable framing than the usual one about unprecedented growth.
Rescinding the ban and the WFA years
The Women's Football Association formed in 1969, created by clubs that had simply carried on regardless, and it did what the FA had refused to do: run a national competition. The WFA Cup began in 1970-71, Southampton winning the first final, and the association went on to organise a league structure and, crucially, the national team.
UEFA's involvement was the lever that moved the FA. European football's governing body was pressing member associations to bring women's football under their own control, and in 1971 the FA rescinded the 1921 resolution. Affiliated grounds were open again.
Here the record gets untidy, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Different accounts date the FA's internal votes to 1969, 1970 or 1971, because the reversal happened across more than one council meeting and the practical effect took longer still. The 1971 date is the one most commonly cited for the formal lifting. The honest summary is that the ban was dismantled across about two years rather than lifted on a single afternoon.
Recognition brought no money with it. The WFA ran the game on subscriptions and volunteers for another two decades. England players paid their own way to matches, took unpaid leave from work, and in some cases bought their own kit. The team existed because a small number of administrators refused to let it not exist.
The first official internationals and the amateur era
England's first officially recognised international was played on 18 November 1972 against Scotland at Ravenscraig Park in Greenock. England won 3-2. Sylvia Gore scored the first goal by an official England women's international — a neat piece of symmetry, given that the first men's international was also England against Scotland, exactly a century earlier in 1872.
Amateurism defined everything about the following decade. Squads were assembled from club football with minimal preparation time, tours depended on fundraising, and the fixture list was whatever could be arranged with whoever would arrange it. That England were competitive at all is the surprising part.
The 1984 UEFA European Competition for Women's Football is the proof of that. England reached the final of the first European championship for women, played over two legs against Sweden, and lost on penalties. A team with no professional players and no central funding had reached a continental final within twelve years of its first match.
For most of the 1980s and 1990s, though, results tracked resources. England missed the first Women's World Cup in 1991, qualified for the 1995 tournament in Sweden, and went out in the quarter-finals to Germany. The pattern repeated itself: qualify, be well organised, run into a country whose players trained full-time. For the club-level version of the same story, the Women's Super League explainer covers what eventually changed underneath the national team.
From the WFA to the FA, and the arrival of central contracts
In 1993 the FA took over the running of women's football in England from the WFA. That transfer of responsibility is the administrative hinge of the whole story — the body that had shut the game down in 1921 became the body responsible for growing it.
The first decade under FA control produced structure rather than money. A national league was reorganised, the competition calendar became predictable, and the FA Women's Cup replaced the WFA Cup as the flagship knockout, a competition covered in more detail on the Women's FA Cup page. Fulham turned professional in 2000, briefly, and demonstrated two things at once: that full-time women's football could be played in England, and that a single club doing it alone was not a sustainable model.
Central contracts arrived in 2009. The mechanism matters more than the money, because it is what changed daily life for the squad. The FA paid a group of England internationals directly, which meant those players could reduce or drop outside employment and train properly between camps. It did not make them wealthy. It made them available.
The effect showed up in tournament football almost immediately, and it set the template the professional league would later scale up. A national association funding players directly is an unusual arrangement in men's football and a common one in the women's game, for the obvious reason: the club game could not yet pay.
Professionalisation and what it did to the national team
The Women's Super League launched in 2011 with eight clubs and a summer season, an attempt to avoid competing with the men's winter calendar and to give the competition its own space in the year. The summer experiment was eventually abandoned and the league moved back to a winter season, aligning it with the European calendar and the rest of the pyramid.
The decisive change came for the 2018-19 season, when the top tier moved to a fully professional licensing model. Clubs applying for a WSL licence had to commit to full-time contracts and to minimum standards of facility and coaching provision. The second tier, the Women's Championship, sat below it on a part-time or hybrid basis; the promotion mechanics between the two are set out separately.
What full-time football does to a national team is measurable in preparation rather than in raw talent. A part-time player arrives at an international camp needing to be brought up to fitness. A full-time player arrives ready to work on the specific problem the coach wants to solve that week. Multiply that across a squad and across a four-year cycle and the difference becomes enormous.
Governance moved again more recently, with the top two divisions transferring from FA administration to a company owned by the clubs themselves — the same logic that separated the Premier League from the FA in 1992. Whether that produces better outcomes for the England team is genuinely an open question. Club-owned leagues optimise for club interests, and the release of players for international duty is precisely where those interests diverge.
Tournament progress, decade by decade
England's record across major tournaments divides into three phases, and the boundaries between them line up with the funding changes rather than with any shift in coaching philosophy.
| Phase | What the squad looked like | Typical tournament outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 1972 to mid-1990s | Fully amateur, self-funded travel, no junior pathway | Occasional deep runs, including the 1984 European final |
| Mid-1990s to 2009 | FA-administered, semi-organised club game, no full-time players | Regular qualification, group stage or quarter-final exits |
| 2009 onwards | Central contracts, then a professional domestic league | Semi-finals and finals as the expectation |
The 2009 European Championship marks the end of the middle phase most clearly. England reached the final and lost 6-2 to Germany in Helsinki, a scoreline that showed exactly where the gap still lay. Six years later, at the 2015 World Cup in Canada, England finished third — losing a semi-final to Japan to an injury-time own goal, then beating Germany in the third-place match, which was England's first competitive win over the Germans at senior level.
The 2017 European Championship ended with a semi-final defeat to the Netherlands, the eventual winners. The 2019 World Cup in France ended with a semi-final defeat to the United States. Two tournaments, two last-four finishes, no trophy: the record of a very good side that had not yet learned how to win the final match.
England also hosted the 2005 European Championship, staging it largely across the north west. The opening match at the City of Manchester Stadium drew a crowd of just under 30,000, a record for a women's fixture in England at that point, though the team went out at the group stage.
Qualification itself deserves a note, because the structure is not the same as the men's. UEFA has changed the format for women's qualifying more than once, moving between straight group qualifying, seeded leagues and play-off rounds as the number of competitive nations has grown. A tournament England qualified for comfortably under one format might have been a genuine scramble under another, so comparing qualification records across decades tells you less than it appears to.
The home tournament that changed the numbers
31 July 2022. Wembley, 87,192 people, England 2 Germany 1 after extra time, Chloe Kelly with the winner. That attendance was a record for a European Championship final of either sex, and it is the single figure that does most of the work whenever people describe what changed.
The hosting mattered as much as the winning. Group matches at Brighton, Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton, Rotherham, Leigh, Milton Keynes and Wigan put the competition in front of audiences that would never have travelled to it, and the organisers priced tickets to fill grounds rather than to maximise gate receipts. Sell-outs at the smaller venues produced the images that drove the coverage, which in turn drove the next round of ticket sales.
England went on to beat Brazil on penalties at Wembley in the 2023 Finalissima, reached the World Cup final in 2023 and lost 1-0 to Spain, then retained the European title in 2025, beating Spain again, this time on penalties. Whatever else is arguable about the period, the record of results is not. England became a side that reached finals as a matter of routine.
- 53000Goodison Park, Boxing Day 1920
- 50Years the FA resolution stood
- 87192Wembley, Euro 2022 final
Documented figures from three separate eras. The 1920 attendance is the widely reported Goodison figure, not an audited one.
Why the home effect was so large
Home tournaments convert casual attention into habit. The mechanism is not complicated. A competition shown on free-to-air television during the school summer holidays, in grounds people can reach by train, generates a first experience for a very large number of people at once. Retention after that depends entirely on whether there is something to attend the following month — which is why the timing relative to a professional domestic league mattered so much. In 1984 there was nothing for a new supporter to go to. In 2022 there was.
Caps, goals and the records that define the side
Fara Williams holds England's appearance record with 172 caps, a figure well beyond the record for the men's side. Her career spanned the amateur years, the central-contract era and the professional league, which is part of why the number is so high: she was available for almost every fixture across a period when the calendar was expanding rapidly.
Ellen White retired as England's leading scorer with 52 goals, having passed Kelly Smith's mark. Both careers illustrate the same point about eras. Smith scored her goals when England played far fewer competitive fixtures per year, and comparing raw totals across those eras flatters the modern player.
Anyone comparing these with the men's equivalents will find the shape of the two lists very different, and the most-capped England men's players page sets out why: a fixture calendar that grew in a different order, and a long period in which the women's side simply did not play enough matches for totals to accumulate.
The other records worth knowing are the ones that describe the shape of a career rather than its length. England's youngest and oldest debutants both sit outside what the men's team would recognise as normal, because the amateur era produced players who came into international football late, after years of club football alongside a job, and the professional era produces players who arrive out of an academy at nineteen. Two entirely different routes into the same shirt, roughly twenty years apart.
One honest caveat over all of it. Appearance and goal records for the women's team before the mid-1990s are less complete than the men's equivalents, because the WFA's record-keeping was volunteer work carried out without an archive budget. Historians have reconstructed a great deal and the accepted figures are reliable, but they were assembled after the fact rather than logged at the time.
The managers who built the modern setup
Martin Reagan managed England through the early 1980s, including the run to the 1984 European final, in an era when the job was part-time and the budget was whatever the WFA could raise that year. Ted Copeland followed, taking England to the 1995 World Cup.
Hope Powell's appointment in 1998 as England's first full-time national coach is the structural turning point of the modern era. She held the role for fifteen years and did far more than pick teams. She built the age-group pathway, pushed for central contracts, and established the principle that the England women's setup should look like a national programme rather than a representative side assembled twice a year. A great deal of what her successors inherited exists because she argued for it.
Mark Sampson took the 2015 World Cup bronze. Phil Neville's appointment in 2018 was contentious — a former men's professional with limited coaching experience in the women's game — and produced a semi-final in 2019 before results tailed off.
Sarina Wiegman arrived in 2021 having already won a European Championship with the Netherlands on home soil, and then did the same thing with England, and then did it again in 2025. Her record in tournament football with two different nations is the strongest available argument that tournament management is a distinct skill rather than an extension of club coaching. The equivalent story on the men's side is covered on the England managers page.
Where England play and how the crowds grew
England women have no permanent home ground, and that is deliberate policy rather than accident. Wembley Stadium hosts the largest fixtures — finals, marquee friendlies against the strongest opposition, the occasions expected to sell in six figures. The rest of the calendar rotates around club grounds across the country.
Ashton Gate, Elland Road, the Stadium of Light, Molineux, the King Power, the Riverside and St Mary's have all staged home internationals. The reasoning is partly commercial and partly about access: a family in Sunderland or Bristol is far more likely to attend a match twenty minutes away than one requiring a day's travel and a hotel room. The trade-off is that a rotating home venue gives a team none of the familiarity a permanent stadium provides, an issue the Wembley and England home fixtures page examines for the men's side.
Attendance growth followed a clear sequence: small club grounds through the 2000s, mid-sized grounds after 2015, sold-out Wembley fixtures after 2022. The change is real. It is also uneven, and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. A high-profile opponent at Wembley and a November qualifier against lower-ranked opposition at a Championship ground are two entirely different products, and the second still has to be sold hard to fill.
What the legacy work actually consists of
The FA has published successive strategies for the women's and girls' game — Gameplan for Growth, covering 2017 to 2020, then Inspiring Positive Change — and both set participation and access targets rather than performance ones. The core objective in each is unglamorous: get football offered to girls in schools as a matter of course.
That target exists because it had not been met. For decades, girls in English state schools were substantially less likely to be offered football in PE than boys were. After the 2022 tournament, members of the England squad wrote an open letter to government asking for guaranteed access to football in school PE lessons for girls, and the resulting commitment to equal access to school sport is the most concrete piece of legacy the tournament produced.
Below that sits the ordinary machinery of English football: county FAs running girls' leagues, clubs registering teams, the coaching badge pathway producing qualified female coaches in numbers that were negligible twenty years ago. The county FA page explains how that administrative layer works, and the practical route into a club side is set out in the grassroots joining guide.
Judging the legacy honestly means holding two things at once. Participation among girls has risen substantially, and the professional pathway now exists at every age group. Facility provision — pitches, changing rooms, floodlit training space — has not kept pace, and a great many girls' teams still train in whatever slot is left after the boys' teams have booked. The hard part of the rebuild was never the national team. It was the thousand small pieces of infrastructure that the 1921 resolution removed, and those take a great deal longer to put back than a trophy takes to win.
For the wider English game and the competitions the women's calendar sits alongside, start at the England guides hub or the football section.