Relax, Recline & Enjoy #SK79! (Editor’s Letter)

Jen O’Neill writes at the end of a season she measures in crowds: an SWPL best of 15,822 at Celtic Park, a packed Kingsmeadow and Leigh Sports Village, almost 45,000 at the Wolfsburg-Freiburg Pokal final, and a Wembley bouncing for the Lionesses on mainstream television. She recalls being a ‘rentagob’ in the late 1990s, wheeled out to argue that women and girls should be allowed to play at all, and names the BBC as a repeat offender for treating it as a two-sided question. The letter then turns serious. Baroness Sue Campbell calls the record crowd a marker of how far the game has come; O’Neill asks how that support should behave, in and around stadia and particularly online, and argues that inclusivity is worth protecting off the field as well as on it.