Ellen Wille: Speech that changed course of women’s football

Female footballers around the world were fighting many battles for recognition and facing significant resistance from those inside and outside the game, epitomised by the lack of support from the sport’s own world governing body.

At the start of the 1970s, the Football Association in England had ended a five-decade ban on women’s football.

The first unofficial Women’s World Cup was held in 1970 in Italy and a year later another unofficial global tournament was held in Mexico, attracting crowds of more than 100,000, but neither of those competitions was supported by Fifa.

Wille, who was herself an amateur footballer, had joined the NFF in 1976 – the same year it had given its approval to women’s football in the country – and she was not prepared to accept the status quo.

“I said ‘we must have a World Championship for women and we have to be a participant in the Olympic Games’,” she explained.

Her colleagues at the NFF decided she should go to Fifa’s congress which was being held that year in Mexico City – incidentally the same city that hosted the unofficial 1971 global tournament – and make a speech about women’s football.

“They thought it would mean more if a woman did it and not a man,” Wille said. She did not hesitate.

But come the morning of the speech, the nerves had set in.

“When I came to the place where it would happen, there were only men, apart from female translators,” she said.

To make a speech, you had to raise a card and wait to be selected. No woman had ever spoken at a Fifa congress before.

Wille, standing at 4ft 10in tall, was called to the stage, but it got off to an inauspicious start when she was too short to be able to reach the microphone.

“So someone had to come and help me with it, and then I started to talk.”