Kit in grassroots football
If you want an insight into the power of sports clothing, hand an obsessed kid their favourite club's top emblazoned with the name and number of the player they idolise. That name Messi? Suddenly said nine-year-old
Clothes have the ability to boost your confidence or tear it down; do not underestimate their power. But what if they don’t feel right on your skin? Or they make you feel like you can’t move at your best?
To be worrying about how you feel in the clothes you wear whilst playing the sport you love can take away focus from the game at hand. And when football kit has often been designed with men and boys in mind, many girls starting out in the sport are do so in boys’ strips that do not always compliment their body shapes.
Being a young girl can sometimes be like experiencing life through an out-of-body experience. Your body is yours but isn’t. Your body can feel policed and surveyed by everyone around you, even if no one is looking at you. You experience changes you don’t understand that don’t align with how you’re supposed to look as a young girl in a society that is quick to comment on appearance. It is crucial that women have attire that flatters their shape and makes them feel comfortable and strong in their appearance.
If the women’s game is to continue to grow as rapidly as it has in the past few years, issues surrounding kit need to be addressed.
Emma Lynn, voluntary coach at Busby Girls AFC, is passionate about issues surrounding kit. The East Renfrewshire club currently has over 120 girls that cater for all abilities and ages within their youth set-up. As someone who played football during her adolescence and is now a mother to two daughters, Emma has witnessed first-hand how unflattering kit can have an impact on girls’ confidence.
“One of the issues that I’ve got at the club is around their strips and even through schools, the strips are tailored towards boys,” Emma said.
“So even down to that level of granularity in terms of growing things, we need to be mindful of teenage girls and that their body shapes are different. We need kit that actually suits them. At the moment, we play in boys’ strips and we still do. It’s something we are looking at.”
Emma believes that if gender equality is to be truly delivered in football, kit needs to tailored for the differences between boys and girls’ bodies. But because Busby Girls are part of a wider club, decisions on funding a female kit is not currently a prioritised area in a time of scarcity of resource.
“There are more boys than girls at the club so, to some extent, decisions will often go against you. We’re not really getting an option to buy kit for females at the moment. They have said it will be looked at but it’s not a priority at the moment.
“For me, kit is a priority. I want the girls and boys to be kitted out equally. Boys as well. We’re on a slow start with it so we’ll get there.”
Emma identified kit being one of the potential barriers preventing young girls from participating in football. Boys’ football kits are not designed with young girls in mind. She witnessed how the effect of girls’ bodies being an afterthought regarding kit negatively impacted one of the girls at Busby.
“One girl came along to a game and her top was too tight and she was really self-conscious. She played for a bit but she ended up coming off because she wasn’t comfortable playing. It’s because it was a boy's top. She’s developing and she was self-conscious.”
For Leeanne Crichton, prominent BBC pundit and former midfielder for Scotland’s national women’s team, it's an important issue that needs to be addressed.
She revealed that up until the 2019 World Cup, the women's team would have to wear a small-sized men’s strip. And while the women's teams from the under-16s are now kitted out with appropriate tops, nobody should be complacent.
“There needs to be a continued review into the issue," she said "It’s an elite issue as well. A lot of sports kit is unisex; fundamentally it's made for male bodies."
Aileen Campbell, Chief Executive Officer for Scottish Women’s Football, agrees that proper kit for women and girls is essential for the sport and its growth. SWF administer the club and league game of women’s and girls’ sides from the age of 12 all the way up to the Championship, the league below the SWPL. Busby Girls is part of the youth set-up administered by SWF.
Last year, SWF made sure that kit criteria ensured that girls were kitted out in black or dark-coloured shorts to address the issue of period dignity and menstruation. However, Campbell agreed that the issues surrounding gendered strips have been highlighted by Emma’s work at Busby.
“I think Busby has hit upon an issue that has long needed to be addressed. I’m reminded of the book ‘Invisible Women’. It kind of talks about everything through life where women are disadvantaged because everything is geared up to be suitable for a man: a man’s physicality, a man’s shape, strength, and all the rest of it. “We’re always keen to advance and try and promote issues that need to be addressed and to use the platform of our sport to do so. I'm very keen to pick up with Busby and other clubs if there are something that we can do to make improvements to ensure that we can continue to grow our game and to make every girl feel comfortable playing.”
While you might think all this comes down to funding in a time where money is tight everywhere, that’s not necessarily a position taken by Emma at Busby. She feels that having women as part of the internal fabric of clubs is important to help highlight issues that don’t touch a male’s lived experience.
She said: “As much as its perhaps a funding issue, I don’t know whether it is. We might have the funding there but would the coaches consider that to be a priority or would they look to be spending that money on something else? Having women on the committees at teams would really help all the girls’ clubs. I think that we really do need that female representation.”
Campbell understands that issues with kit are rooted in a combination of funding problems and the need for more female voices at decision-making tables.
“We all know we’re living in financially constrained times,” she said. “There is always an issue around money and resources. If you had a bottomless pit then you could do lots and lots of things.
“But we need to make sure that the voices of women and girls within sport are heard at the top table to influence how resources are deployed and nothing can be better or rival than lived experience of what women and girls have gone through to play their sport and how about things could be made easier, better, and improved than having that voice, that ambassadorial voice, at a decision-making forum.”
Campbell also acknowledged that SWF is only a small organisation within football and that broader issues of manufacturing are necessary to take into account.
“It’s not easy dealing with big manufacturers and all the rest of it. We’re a very small organisation within football let alone within sport and a larger global context. But disrupting systems and being disruptive is what women have had to do.”
The Herald on Sunday reached out to multiple sports manufacturers to discuss the issue with only Hummel, football kit manufacturer and supplier for both the men’s and women’s Danish national teams, responding. They say they are committed to developing more jerseys for women.
“At Hummel, we recognise and embrace the increasing interest in women's football jerseys. Since 2018, we have been committed to developing jerseys for the Danish women's national team that are tailored and adapted to suit the unique needs of women's bodies. These jerseys are not unisex; they are specially crafted with women in mind. “However, we also understand the importance of inclusivity and providing options for all fans. Alongside the women's specific jerseys, we continue to offer unisex models to ensure that men also have the opportunity to support the national team by wearing the women's jersey. This approach allows us to cater to a broader range of preferences and promote gender equality in football.
“We are delighted to share that our efforts have been well received. The demand for women's jerseys has been on a steady rise. Between 2019 and 2022, we witnessed a quadruplication of sales for Danish women's national team jerseys. This upward trend indicates a growing interest and support for women's football, which we believe will only continue to flourish.”
Whilst it is evident that manufacturing football strips with women’s bodies in mind is happening, it is not yet the norm for everyone to have the choice to wear one. Without the option between a unisex or a women’s kit, gender equality will not be reached.
To empower young girls within a sport they love, the need for that choice seems obvious.
