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Professionalism in women's association football

Like men's association football, women's football had amateur origins, but faced bans in several nations that slowed its growth and professionalization compared to professionalism in the men's sport. Growth in the women's league game intensified since the end of the 20th century alongside the profile of the FIFA Women's World Cup introduced in 1991.

History

Early fundraising successes

Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., an early women's football club in Preston, Lancashire, England, were closely associated with charitable causes during World War I and the interwar period. As demand for coal dropped after the war, coal-mining communities in England faced disputes with increasingly privatized mining companies that led to miners organizing their labour. During a wage dispute between miners and mine owners, the owners locked miners out in Wigan and Leigh on 1 April 1921, and the charitable success of Dick, Kerr Ladies inspired the formation of women's football clubs that began playing matches in May 1921 to raise funds for distress relief. This included matches to fund soup kitchens for locked-out miners, leading to some of these matches being named "pea soup" matches. Fundraising games for distress funds continued after the end of the miners' dispute in June 1921.

Despite being more popular than some men's football events — one match saw a 53,000 strong crowd — The Football Association (The FA) prohibited women's football from association members' pitches in December 1921, with the FA stating that "the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged" and citing in part complaints about "the appropriation of the receipts to other than charitable objects" in its rationale.

Players and football writers have argued that this ban was due to envy of the large crowds that women's matches attracted, and because the FA had no control over the money made from the women's game. Dick, Kerr Ladies player Alice Barlow said, "we could only put it down to jealousy. We were more popular than the men and our bigger gates were for charity".

In 1925, Spanish footballer Irene González of A Coruña founded her own club and charged money to play matches during tours of Galicia and in tournaments that she organized. While González was the only woman on her team, she has been credited as the first woman to professionally play football.

Era of bans

The FA's ban, which lasted from 1921 to around 1971, inspired or coincided with other bans of women's football in Europe over a similar span, some of which did not end until UEFA required European national associations to incorporate the women's sport. Bans sometimes also coincided with political change, such as bans in Francoist Spain beginning in 1936 and ending after the Spanish transition to democracy in the late 1970s.

Bans were not limited to Europe, with nations under the British Empire, including Australia and Canada, following the FA's ban, and nations such as Brazil and Nigeria also banning the sport for decades during the 20th century.

Simon Kuper and economist Stefan Szymanski, authors of Soccernomics, have argued women's football wasn't just "some potential untapped market, but a business sector that was regularly selling tens of thousands of match tickets. These revenues would surely have grown over time, as men's revenues did." Even after bans were lifted, investment in women's football was reduced to levels relatively lower than before them. Such factors have contributed to the relatively slow professionalization of the sport, with full professionalization coming to England's Women's Super League in 2018, more than 110 years after the men's game initially professionalized.

Post-ban era

Most bans of the sport were lifted by the 1970s. During the 1970s, Italy became the first country to have professional women's football players on a part-time basis. Italy was also the first country to import foreign footballers from other European countries, which raised the profile of the league. Players during that era included Susanne Augustesen (Denmark), Rose Reilly and Edna Neillis (Scotland), Anne O'Brien (Ireland) and Concepcion Sánchez Freire (Spain).

In 1970, the Torino-based Federation of Independent European Female Football (FIEFF) ran the 1970 Women's World Cup in Italy without the involvement of FIFA. In the finals of the 1971 Women's World Cup, hosted by Mexico and played at Estadio Azteca in front of an estimated 110,000 or 112,500 attendees, the Mexican team protested their lack of pay in the face of the tournament's profits from ticket sales, television revenues, and merchandising, and threatened to boycott the match. After the 1971 cup, FIFA forbade the Mexican Football Federation from organizing further women's tournaments. In 1975, Jamaican forward Beverly Ranger received enough sponsorship while playing in Germany to make a living off the sport, a first for a woman in Germany.

The first professional league for women's football would not start until Sweden's semi-professional Damallsvenskan in 1988, three years prior to the first FIFA-sanctioned Women's World Cup. The first fully professional league, the United States' Women's United Soccer Association, launched in 2001 after the United States women's national soccer team's victory over China in the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup raised unprecedented levels of interest in the sport.

Labor disputes

Professionalization of women's football has at times been the subject of organized labor action or legal intervention. For example, Argentinian player-activist Macarena Sánchez led efforts to professionalize the nation's club league Primera División A, but was released by her team UAI Urquiza in January 2019 under terms that prevented her from signing with a new team. She in turn sued UAI Urquiza and the Argentine Football Association (AFA), alleging discrimination where professional women's players were wrongly treated as amateurs. The AFA announced in March that it had agreed with the footballers' union Futbolistas Argentinos Agremiados to support professionalizing the women's league. Three months after her lawsuit, Sánchez was one of fifteen players who joined San Lorenzo on a professional contract, a historic first for Argentine women's football.

Negotiations, and in some cases strikes, led to collective bargaining agreements between players and clubs toward professionalization in several nations, including Australia and Spain, and also among women's football referees in the United States and Spain. In some nations, legal reforms also helped facilitate professionalization, such as in Chile, Denmark, Italy, and Spain.

Timeline by nation

This table details the year in which professionalism was systematically introduced to women's football, by nation. Some nations might have had individual professional women's footballers before these dates but lacked professionalization organized at the club level or higher.

Glossary:

Professionalized: Clubs, leagues, or legal reforms introduce professional contracts for players.
Semi-professional: Players are financially compensated for play, but are employed only part-time.
Professional: At least some players in a club or league are financially compensated, full-time footballers.
Fully professional: All players in a club or league are full-time professional footballers.