In 1920 a women’s football match attracted 53,000 spectators to Goodison Park. It was not unusual for women’s teams such as Dick, Kerr’s Ladies FC in Preston to have similar attendance figures as men’s teams. Not long after this, the Football Association released a statement that said they had received complaints about women playing football and “felt impelled to express the strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”.
And so a surge in popularity of the women’s game around the time of the first world war was quashed by a board of directors.