Fancy A Brew? It’s #SK62 (Editor’s Letter)

Jen O’Neill opens the August/September issue by congratulating readers for getting this far through 2020 and offering the magazine as an oasis from everything else – a women’s football-only zone. She then turns, carefully and without preaching, to the Black Lives Matter movement and what it has forced her to reconsider. Asked some years earlier about the proportion of BAME players in the FA WSL, she had not dismissed the question but had not thought it a major issue either; the women’s game had always seemed inclusive to her. She now acknowledges that this was her own experience speaking from a position of relative privilege, and that the player pathway designed to develop and select talent may be excluding youngsters without anyone deciding that it should. She points readers to the issue’s investigation and asks to hear their experiences.