England banned women's football when it got popular

The 1921 ban was not a response to indifference; it arrived precisely because the crowds had become inconvenient.

The detail that matters is the timing. The Football Association barred women from affiliated grounds in December 1921, and by then women's matches in England had been drawing crowds in the tens of thousands, with a Boxing Day fixture at Goodison Park pulling a reported fifty-three thousand people through the gates two years earlier.

The teams had grown out of wartime factories. Munitions works ran sides, the sides played charity matches, the charity matches raised serious money for ex-servicemen's funds, and the football was watched by people who had every other option available to them and chose this one.

The stated reason for the ban was medical. The game was declared unsuitable for the female body. There was no research behind that, and there did not need to be, because the sentence was doing a different job. The unstated reasons were more mundane. Money was being raised and administered outside the FA's structures, questions had been asked about where some of the gate receipts went, and a women's fixture on a Saturday competed for a crowd with a men's fixture on the same afternoon. A ban resolved all three at once.

What makes it worse than a simple prejudice is how effective it was. The women's game did not disappear because women stopped playing. Teams carried on for years, on rugby pitches and public parks and in makeshift leagues, without a stand, without a groundsman, without the gate money that would have paid for either. Take a sport's infrastructure away and give it back fifty years later and you have not paused it, you have deleted the coaching lineage, the club identities, the local rivalries and every girl who never saw a match because there was nowhere to see one.

The ban was lifted in 1971 and the recovery took another forty years, which is roughly what you would predict, because rebuilding a pipeline is slower than dismantling one.

I do not think the interesting lesson is about attitudes in 1921. It is about the fragility of a sport that depends on other people's grounds. The women's game had crowds, players and money. What it did not have was access to the pitch, and one committee vote proved that was the only thing that mattered.