Reflections On Reading (the verb, not the football team)

The importance of reading, female football writers and what we lose with others interpretation of a narrative that's not our own

After playing football, reading is probably my favourite thing to do in the whole world and growing up, one of my favourite things in the whole world was a library on four wheels.

Because our tiny village was so remote, with only a tiny school and a tiny church and a tiny shop that’d had to close and a tiny football club, there was a big book bus that came around once a week and me and one of my best friends were always there, waiting impatiently for it as it pulled up along the side of the road. Her and I also played on the same tiny football team, she was a centre-back with the strongest kick in the league and I was a rapid left winger with lanky legs. We would almost get in to a fight about who got to ascend the tiny stairs to the bus first, racing to check out whichever were the new books of that week, and the librarians knew us on a first-name basis. The books were about mysteries and solving crimes, horses and friendships. Never girls playing football.

I spent an inordinate amount of time in my youth and teenage years at the library, eventually leveling up from the countryside book bus to the city libraries with their massive aisles and cosy reading nooks. As a commuter kid with divorced parents the library functioned as a safe landing space whilst waiting for the bus or the train or the pickup. Hours could go by in a flash flipping pages of many a book that ended up being one too many to bring with me, and it's a miracle my back is not more crooked from all of the books I would be stubbornly schlepping around (long before I eventually caved in and got an E-reader). There's nothing like curling up or spreading out somewhere, book and beverage in hand, and just disappearing into another world. It’s a place to step into someone else’s shoes through their story, and give them time and space to show you what that’s like. A place to learn. To be entertained. To be challenged.

But stories where the protagonist was a girl or a woman doing sports was seldomly available, certainly not written by women themselves. At the same time, growing up as a white girl in Sweden meant that I had more access to women’s sport, athletes that looked like me and their stories than many other people. I vividly remember one book series where the protagonist was a football player called Emma (unimaginative generation haha). The first book, called “Football and Kisses”, begins with 11-year-old Emma joining the football team and we get to follow her through the series as she deals with football alongside school, family, friends, *boys* and puberty. Overall, this sounds sweet (albeit heteronormative and lacking diverse characters) except maybe for that one book where they go to Gothia Cup (which is the world’s biggest youth football tournament taking place in Gothenburg) and her male coach Lasse “gets drunk and embarrassing” … Furthermore, the book series (which the publishing company in 2011, when book number seven was released, claimed was “the longest running book series on girls football in Sweden and ‘probably the world’”) were written by a man in his early 50s.

What?

By the time I found the aforementioned book series I was already a teenager with Gareth Bale and Fernando Torres posters in my room, and while I was starved of these stories the characters were going through a period that I had already left behind, vying forward toward adolescence with equal amount of terror and excitement. Nowadays I now see a lot more stories of girls playing football, especially in children's books. It's become somewhat of a trend amongst big female football players to write children's books, with the likes of Sam Kerr, Vivianne Miedema, and Ada and Andrine Hegerberg all putting their names on books about girls playing football. They bring their background and experiences into it, which includes their sexuality (two of these four players are queer and dating other female footballers). The possibility to get to see these characters are pivotal, not only for the girls reading these books but everyone else as well.

Sue Anstiss, in her book Game On - the unstoppable rise of women’s sport, points out that that while ‘vicarious confidence’ (seeing someone that looks like you achieve something and in turn giving you confidence in achieving that as well) is vital for girls and women, it’s equally as important for boys and men. It’s about respect, a respect that spills over into other aspects like work life and home life, once men and boys are taught to celebrate and be in awe of female sporting success too. It helps to see male athletes speak up for their female counter parts, like how Andy Murray is constantly highlighting and questioning sexism in sports, or Wilfried Zaha donating money to the Crystal Palace women’s team to cover the fee amateur players had to pay to keep playing.

Just because I’m now considered more grown up does not mean that I’m not in need of the road map-like qualities these stories offer (sometimes I think I need it now more than ever). Desperate to see where we overlap in our experiences of the world and where I can expand by learning new things. How looking down at the pages sometimes is like catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror, and sometimes it’s getting to travel to new places without leaving my seat. It’s not even looking for answers, as much as it’s about knowing that I’m not alone in going through this life. The support that someone sharing their story (fictitious or not) provides.

For too long the only female players to have gotten any attention are the ones conforming to societal ideas of an ‘acceptable’ woman - feminine-presenting, white, not too loud and complicated, not asking for too much. We need to leave this archaic way of thinking behind, which is why it’s important that women’s stories have space to be told, and not just a woman, but many different women, all with their own multidimensional narratives. So that everyone gets to find pieces of themselves in others.

I’m just not interested in yet another story written by yet another cis man, especially not his interpretation about being a girl in this world. He does not get to have an interpretative prerogative on it, and it can’t be that one of the longest running book series on girls football is written by a middle-aged man (maybe I need to change that?)

It’s not always easy to know where to start, which is why I’ve compiled this list on Goodreads called Football Books Written by Female Writers. If you’re a user on the site, you can also add your own books to the list which means that we can build this together! The criteria is simply that the book is about football and written by a female writer, which means that there might be a book or two in there which are not necessarily about women in football, but the writer is a woman - which is also interesting as a woman takes a bit of an interpretative prerogative on a world to which she does not ‘naturally’ belong (and has in fact repeatedly been told that she does not belong to) but has had to assimilate to in a whole other different way than men has had to do to a woman’s world. Important to note: no one is saying that any worlds need to be kept separate, it’s simply a matter of letting a range of voices through, and that people get to speak on their own experiences which historically has not been possible for women.

The idea is to exchange book recs! Discuss the books in question! I’ll be writing some reviews! Maybe we’ll even start a book club down the line! Support authors by buying books (uk.bookshop.org is good for indie bookshops) and support your local library by USING IT and taking books out <3