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LONDON — For over 50 years, English soccer followers have hoped, prayed and sung {that a} main trophy would “come house.” Now it lastly has. And so they can hardly comprise themselves.
Hundreds of supporters screamed and chanted on Sunday at Trafalgar Sq. in central London and at different viewing events across the nation, the place the ultimate of the ladies’s European Championship was displayed on huge screens.
On Monday, photos of the Lionesses, because the crew is understood, dominated the entrance pages of British newspapers after their 2-1 win over Germany at Wembley Stadium in London, the headlines lauding them as “recreation changers” or “historical past makers” and declaring “No extra years of harm.”
Politicians and royals despatched messages and congratulations to the crew on its victory — a dramatic conclusion with parallels to England’s final main championship, in 1966, when the nation hosted the boys’s World Cup and its crew defeated Germany within the last.
However the success held the potential to transcend nationwide satisfaction and euphoria, with girls’s soccer occupying the general public consciousness in Britain like by no means earlier than.
“I believe we actually made a change,” mentioned the crew’s Dutch coach, Sarina Wiegman, at a information convention after the match. The crew had performed loads for the game however for the position of girls in society, too, she added, a sentiment that was echoed by others.
“It’s been an incredible month and an incredible day yesterday,” mentioned Mark Bullingham, the chief govt of the Soccer Affiliation, England’s governing physique for soccer.
“I believe it would actually turbocharge every thing we’ve been doing within the girls’s recreation,” he mentioned in an interview on “BBC Breakfast” on Monday, including that the group had invested closely in girls’s soccer over the previous few years.
“There isn’t any motive we shouldn’t have the identical variety of women taking part in as boys and we expect it would create a complete new technology of heroes who women aspire to be like,” he mentioned.
There’s definitely room for enchancment. A report printed in March by “Truthful Sport,” a collective of 34 English soccer golf equipment, discovered {that a} gaping gender divide in soccer golf equipment all through England and Wales stored the game “dwelling within the Darkish Ages.”
Solely 11.1 p.c of board members at Premier League golf equipment are girls, and two-thirds of the league’s groups have all-male boards, the report mentioned. Considerably fewer girls have been attending video games in England in contrast with different international locations.
“That is at a time when public attitudes towards sexism and misogyny are altering, and soccer wants to vary too,” mentioned Stacey Pope, an creator of the report.
That change felt potential because the Lionesses emerged victorious on Sunday from a match that was attended by a file variety of followers — the group of greater than 87,000 was the largest for any European Championship last, males or girls.
Queen Elizabeth despatched a message of congratulations to the crew, writing that whereas the athletes’ performances deserved reward, “your success goes far past the trophy you’ve got so deservedly earned.”
“You’ve got all set an instance that can be an inspiration for women and girls at the moment, and for future generations,” she wrote.
Kevin Windsor, a graphic designer in London, watched the match together with his 3-year-old daughter, who was carrying a princess robe. “My daughter doesn’t need to have an curiosity in soccer. She simply has to know that it’s an possibility,” he wrote on Twitter. “That she will be able to grow to be something she units her little coronary heart on. From a princess to a lioness. And every thing in between.”
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