Around the Counties: Cumberland’s Cork-Popping Success

Cumberland FA sets out how it has grown the female game in a rural county that now has forty-three girls’ teams and eleven women’s teams, some eight hundred and fifty players in all. Its most distinctive idea is Prosecco Soccer: an informal Friday evening hour of football followed by a glass of prosecco with everyone involved, piloted last season to enough enthusiasm that it is being rolled out across the county. One participant explains that shift work had kept her from returning to the game and that the flexibility made it possible. A primary school programme has reached over eighty girls, seven in ten of whom play for no club, and The Pink Panthers have become the county’s fifth affiliated women’s disability side.