In the years immediately following the First World War, women's football in Britain attracted crowds that would be respectable in the professional men's game today.

The best-known match, played on Boxing Day 1920 at Goodison Park, is recorded as having drawn a crowd of around 53,000, with thousands more reported unable to gain entry.

The teams that drew these crowds had generally formed in factories during the war, when women's employment in industry expanded rapidly and works teams formed as a matter of course. Matches were frequently played to raise money for war charities, and substantial sums were raised.

The ban

In December 1921, the Football Association passed a resolution stating that the game was unsuitable for women and requesting that its member clubs refuse the use of their grounds.

This did not make women's football illegal. It made it effectively impossible to stage at any significant venue, since virtually all suitable grounds were controlled by affiliated clubs.

The stated justifications included suitability and concerns about the handling of charitable receipts. Historians have generally regarded the timing — following a period of rapidly growing crowds — as significant.

The resolution remained in force for approximately fifty years, being lifted in the early 1970s.

What fifty years costs

The scale of the interruption is worth stating concretely, because it is frequently discussed as a historical curiosity rather than as a cause of present conditions.

Two full generations of players had no organised competitive structure. Coaching expertise did not accumulate, because there was nothing to coach. Administrative and governance capacity did not develop. No commercial infrastructure formed. No broadcast relationships were established. Facilities were not built.

Meanwhile the men's game developed continuously through the same period, building leagues, stadiums, coaching systems, youth structures, media relationships and commercial arrangements.

The gap in institutional development between the two games at the point the ban was lifted was therefore not a reflection of relative interest. It was a fifty-year head start on one side and a fifty-year prohibition on the other.

Why this matters for present arguments

The revenue argument discussed elsewhere on this site treats the current commercial position of women's sport as an unexplained fact about demand.

This history complicates that considerably. A sport that was prohibited from using any significant venue for half a century did not fail to develop a commercial base. It was prevented from developing one, and the effects of that prevention persist in every subsequent decade.

The 1921 crowds are the relevant evidence about demand, because they precede the prohibition. Whatever the reasons for later low attendance, insufficient public interest in 1920 was not among them.

What the teams did during the ban

They did not entirely stop. Several of the prominent teams continued playing on non-affiliated grounds — rugby pitches, parks, private venues — for years afterwards, at drastically reduced scale.

An independent association was formed to organise fixtures outside the official structure. It operated with minimal resources and without access to any significant venue.

Some of the players continued for decades. Their careers, which under other circumstances would have been played in front of large crowds with press coverage, were instead conducted in near-obscurity.

The parallel cases

Britain was not unique. Restrictions on women's participation in football were imposed in a number of countries during the twentieth century, with prohibitions of varying formality and duration.

Several national federations did not organise women's competition until the 1970s or later, and some considerably later.

The pattern of an interruption followed by a slow rebuild appears in a number of countries, and the current relative strength of different national teams correlates reasonably well with how early organised competition resumed.

That correlation is one of the better pieces of evidence that institutional development, rather than any fixed characteristic, explains differences in standard.

The apology and what followed

The Football Association issued an apology for the ban in 2008, more than eighty years after its imposition and more than thirty after its removal.

Recognition of the 1920s teams has increased since, including commemorations and, in some cases, formal acknowledgement by clubs.

The players themselves were almost all dead by the time this occurred.

The lesson worth keeping

When someone argues that the current state of a field reflects the natural level of interest in it, the useful question is what the field was prevented from doing, and for how long.

Fifty years is not a period a sport recovers from within a generation, and the arithmetic of institutional development means the effects continue long after the prohibition ends. That is not a grievance. It is an explanation, and it is the correct starting point for any argument about what the current numbers mean.