In a scene from the documentary film LFG that tells the story of the struggle of the players of the national team USA for equal pay, the lead Jessica McDonald (three times league champion and world champion in 2019) talks about her first years as a player of the NWSL. She says: “Nursery cost more than it earned. There were days when my son was sitting in his chair all training and shitting himself and had to stop in the middle of training to change him.”
In the world it is estimated that there are around 1 billion people who play soccer. Of these, just over 270 million do so in a regulated manner, in federated teams. In 2019 FIFA released the data that federated women add up to fourteen million. This leaves us with a total of 256 million men who will train with their teams this week. Does the reader believe that only one of those men will stop practicing to change a diaper?
This afternoon at the BBK room of the Gran Via from Bilbao, the Athletic Club Foundation projects this documentary within the programming of its film and literature festival Thinking, Letters and Football 2021, in whose organizing team I work. In recent years I have seen more than two hundred soccer documentaries, from all over the world. Many of them told the same story with different faces: that of a group of women who fought against the system to claim the same rights as men. I have seen European, African, Asian and American films, about women who resisted the threats of the fundamentalists, the vetoes of their husbands, the obstacles of the very clubs in which they played, the prohibitions of their families, the impediments of the system, the condescension of the authorities. Women who crossdressed to play in public spaces, who trained at night due to the threats they received, who rebelled against prohibitions and injustices.
LFG is an acronym for Let’s Fucking Go, which can be translated as “Come on, fuck!”. It is a war song, a cry of encouragement between them to which we men should also join. Because it’s justice, come on, fuck it!
#LFG