Everybody round mine on Sunday morning! By 11am and the kick-off between England and Spain in the World Cup Final, my house will be rammed with friends and neighbours.
I’ve already started on preparing the food … and, yes, since you ask, there will be gin and tonic.
As we roar the Lionesses on, you’d never guess that for almost all my life I’ve had a strange relationship with football. On the one hand, I couldn’t stand it.
But on the other hand, I really hated it.
My loathing began in the 1970s, growing up in a working-class household in the North East where football was an unswervingly male game. Aside from the local minnows in Darlington, where we lived, the big clubs were Sunderland and Newcastle, the Mackems and the Magpies.
As we roar the Lionesses on, you’d never guess that for almost all my life I’ve had a strange relationship with football
On the one hand, I couldn’t stand it. But on the other hand, I really hated it
My family was divided by opposing loyalties, which caused endless rows. Football meant arguments around the dinner table, followed by shouting matches in front of the TV highlights, with the sound on full blast. My dad and grandad got more worked up as the show dragged on, and the endless terrace chants made our windows shudder. Match Of The Day was the most miserable hour of my week.
Next day, there’d be endless analysis of controversial moments — what the ref had missed, why that was never a penalty. I didn’t understand the game, and I definitely didn’t understand the attraction.
Of course I didn’t go to the matches. For women, that was practically forbidden, and it would certainly not have felt safe. The TV screens showed a sea of men’s faces, alternately angry and sullen, flushed with alcohol and wrapped in the hats and scarves of their team colours like opposing medieval armies.
Football came to represent everything I detested. Even as the game began to change in the 1990s, I saw little to like.
Paul Gascoigne emerged as a local hero in the North East — but my blood boiled at the way his skills on the pitch were regarded as far more important than his admissions of domestic abuse against his wife at the time, Sheryl.
England manager Glenn Hoddle made much of his own Christian principles, yet appeared to see nothing inconsistent in using a self-confessed wife-beater as a prominent national ambassador and a role model for young boys. The hypocrisy was sickening.
That set a trend whereby top footballers were seen as above the law in their treatment of women. Rumours of rape and the ritual humiliation of women were rife among Premiership stars, though players were almost never prosecuted and even more rarely found guilty.
One common allegation was that starstruck young women in nightclubs were plied with drinks, then taken to hotel rooms to be ‘spit-roasted’ — forced into sex with two men at a time — while teammates filmed the abuse.
That contempt for women was reflected both on the terraces and in the media.
The partners of players, whether in new relationships or married with children, were seen as brainless gold-diggers who cared about nothing but money and make-up — figures of fun and national mockery. Their nickname was Wags, an acronym for ‘wives and girlfriends’ that just happened to rhyme with ‘slags’.
These women were berated for their looks, their weight, their jewellery, their friendships, for everything they said and did. Even mainstream television got in on the joke with a hit ITV drama called Footballers’ Wives.
Paul Gascoigne emerged as a local hero in the North East — but my blood boiled at the way his skills on the pitch were regarded as far more important than his admissions of domestic abuse against his wife at the time, Sheryl
My loathing began in the 1970s, growing up in a working-class household in the North East where football was an unswervingly male game
That gave fans a licence to unleash an avalanche of abuse at women. The chanting at David Beckham in the late 1990s, when he was first engaged to Spice Girl Victoria Adams, defied belief.
I shudder to imagine what it did to boys and teenagers in the crowd, hearing that level of vitriol flung at a woman who wasn’t even in the stadium.
Football, it seemed to me, was not a force for good in Britain. And that didn’t change when billionaires began buying clubs and season-ticket prices increased tenfold. Working-class fans were priced out of the game: it was almost comical how pubs were no longer overflowing before every match but you couldn’t get a seat in a restaurant or a wine bar within a mile of every stadium.
Despite the shift to a more middle-class crowd, the divisions continued. Now, with so many more games on TV, everyone had a boring opinion about the offside rule — but also, about the spiralling wages of players.
I got so sick of hearing men in expensive suits express their outrage over footballers’ salaries, apparently unable to accept that teenagers from deprived inner cities were earning far more than they could. Those same men were quite happy to see bankers paid million-pound bonuses, and BBC commentators pocketing seven-figure sums. Once again, the hypocrisy was more than I could stomach.
All that changed with the 2012 London Olympics. In front of 70,000 spectators at Wembley, the first female squad to represent Team GB beat Brazil. That gave me a glimmer of understanding.
For the first time, I saw this game for what it was — elegant, skilful, balanced. Shorn of the sexism and the machismo, the violence and the posturing, it could be appreciated as a perfect sport.
And as the women’s national team went from strength to strength, I took pleasure in telling the men of my family that this was what the game had been missing for half a century. After all, the last time the men made it to a World Cup Final was 1966… and since then, they’ve made a tradition out of disappointing the nation.
It’s refreshing, too, that — unlike the men — many professional female players are open about their sexuality. The machismo around the game has prevented almost all top-flight gay male players from coming out. That can only add to the pressure on young gay men to hide their true nature.
A generation of girls will watch these games and realise they don’t have to wear pink frills or lashings of make-up, high heels or boob-tubes to be ‘real’ women
The women set a far better example. Many are ‘out’, and I hope they feel completely safe about it. The idea of homophobic abuse from their adoring crowds is unthinkable.
It’s not just the positive representation of lesbians that is so encouraging.
A generation of girls will watch these games and realise they don’t have to wear pink frills or lashings of make-up, high heels or boob-tubes to be ‘real’ women. The brilliance of women’s football is the best retort possible to old-fashioned sexist values.
I don’t even want to call it ‘women’s football’. It’s just football. Arguably, with the TV audiences topping seven million viewers and the results dominating front pages as well as back pages in newspapers, the World Cup has relegated last weekend’s launch of the new Premiership season to the sidelines.
Maybe the best plan is to give the lads a year off, a sabbatical. They could keep training but, instead of playing matches, their time would be better spent working for their favourite charities. Think how much the 20 top-ranking clubs could achieve if their stars hung up their boots and poured their energies into good causes.
Meanwhile, the rest of us could cheer the women on, and everyone would benefit from all the wonder of the Beautiful Game without the ugliness.
This became plain to me as I chatted to my five-year-old great-nephew on the phone, after the Lionesses beat the Aussie Matildas. He’d watched the game and thought it looked amazing fun.
‘Auntie Julie,’ he asked, ‘can boys play football, too?’
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