The Beautiful Game, Tarnished: On Football’s Unseen Meritocracy and the Stubbornness of Misogyny

It is one of the great tragedies of modern sport that football—a game so exquisitely indifferent to anything but skill—should still be burdened by the prejudices of those who follow it. Here is an activity where, in its purest form, the only thing that should matter is one’s ability to control a ball, to read the game, to pass, to finish. It is a sport that, at its best, reveals the rawest meritocracy: there is no hiding behind inherited privilege, no disguising weakness behind rhetoric. You can either play, or you cannot. And yet, around this noble pursuit, an ugliness persists—an ugliness that insists on carving deep trenches between genders, reinforcing tired hierarchies as though the game itself had decreed them.

Football, as a sport, does not care about the gender of the person touching the ball. It does not grant a superior first touch to a man, nor does it rob a woman of her vision on the pitch. There is something almost miraculous about this—the way in which the sport itself rejects the very distinctions that so many of its followers refuse to abandon. And yet, misogyny lingers in the stands, in the comment sections, in the casual disdain toward the women’s game. This is not football’s flaw; it is ours.

Perhaps it is because sport—like so many areas of life—has become yet another battlefield for those desperate to cling to outdated notions of superiority. Perhaps it is because, in a world where masculinity often feels embattled, some turn to football as one of the last places where they can assert dominance. But how tragic this is. How limiting. Because in doing so, they do not only diminish women’s football—they diminish football itself. They rob themselves of the full breadth of its beauty, of the different styles of play, the different kinds of intelligence it nurtures, the different stories it tells.

To love football is to love its essence—the way it allows human beings, regardless of background, to demonstrate something close to poetry through their movement. It is to understand that the real injustice is not that women play football, but that so many refuse to see what is there, plain as day: skill, creativity, effort, resilience.

One imagines a different world—one in which every goal, every assist, every moment of tactical brilliance is appreciated for what it is, unburdened by the prejudices of those who watch. It would not be difficult to get there. We would merely need to watch football as it demands to be watched—with open eyes.