ABSTRACT
This considers research respondents’ formative footballing experiences. The discussion draws on examples of footballing ambition and the extent to which sports characterised as appropriately masculine or feminine reveal discourse that genders sports. As this narrative is developed, respondents talk about how in formal institutional contexts (usually education), there was clear distinction made between girls’ and boys’ sports, and these formative experiences therefore highlight a broader context for understanding women’s football in England, especially of emergent masculine professional team sports practised in culture encapsulated in the ideology emergent from the mid-nineteenth century that women are physically and sexually inferior. In this context, cultural practices, or adaptations, emerge to an extent that respondents transgressed and complicated normative ideas of femininity which reveal the tenacity of respondents in pursuing ambitions to play football.
