The Rise of Inclusive Sport Teams
A warm summer’s day, 2019. Morgan Brennan stands alone in the middle of east London’s Victoria Park with a football. She nervously checks her phone. “I’m here,” she messages six total strangers who had previously responded to her Instagram story saying “Looking for women wanting to play football!”.
The pre-match nerves felt closer to a blind date than a kick-about in the park, she says today. But all six women turned up, and Victoria Park Vixens was born. The next time they played there were 12 of them. Within a year, they were up to 50. Now the squad is at capacity. So far they have done campaigns with the likes of Kappa, Jameson, Admiral and Sports Direct. When the England Women’s Team — the Lionesses — won the Euros in summer 2022, in front of the largest-ever crowd at a women's game in England (90,000 spectators), the Vixens were in the pub. “We were all in tears,” says Brennan. “In the UK at least, it felt like a turning point for the women’s game.”
Bump into Brennan and she’ll likely be wearing purple Adidas Sambas and a matching jacket, draped in her club’s colours. For her day job, the 31-year-old runs Indivisa, a platform dedicated to women’s football and the Vixens’ primary shirt sponsor. Growing up in Australia, she’s played football from a young age. But when she swapped Sydney for London in 2016, she struggled to break into the established cliques of women’s teams made up mostly of university friends and colleagues. So she decided to do it herself: to build her own community in a new city.
The “Lioness Effect” has seen the number of female football teams in England double in the last seven years, from nearly 6,000 registered women's and girls' teams in the 2017 season, to over 12,000 this season. The Euros win came almost exactly 100 years after women’s football was effectively banned in Britain. In 1921, the Football Association barred women from playing on any of their pitches in a catastrophic ruling that lasted half a century before being lifted in 1970.
The Lionesses' win was the first silverware for any England national team since the 1966 World Cup. There was a new respect and appreciation. “People were messaging us congratulations, even though we didn’t win that cup,” says Brennan. And soon enough, the boys wanted in on the action. After much deliberation, Vixens launched a men’s team.
“ ‘The purpose of our men’s team is not for it to be another aggy five-a-side team’”
Brennan decided to flip the classic notion of a women's team being bolted onto an established men’s football club as an afterthought. “It's been made very clear from the start of the men’s team that this is a women's club,” she explains. The men’s team will never be called the Foxes, for example, and they are all expected to support the women and back the women’s game. So far, they have been fine mascots, supporting the women’s team on a recent tour to Athens to play FC Abalos.
For both teams, selection rules follow the mantra of “availability over ability”: first come, first served. “In the men's game, even at an amateur level, it is so normalised to be like, ‘That guy is shit, we're not playing him again,’” says Brennan. “The purpose of our men's team is not to be another aggy five-a-side team.” Toxic behaviour operates on a three strikes and out policy. Instead, it's a sanctuary for men and non-binary people who have felt disenfranchised with the toxicity of men’s football — much in the same way that the women’s team exists for those who have felt excluded from the women's game.
Baesianz FC. Image: Jess Govinden
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