The speech that changed the course of women’s football

(BBC) “I got very angry and I said we have to do something about it.”

It was 1986 and the focus of Ellen Wille’s ire was football’s world governing body, Fifa. She was part of the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF) executive committee at the time and had just read a Fifa report that did not make a single reference to women’s football.

The science teacher from Oslo would take matters into her own hands and deliver a speech which would force those at the top of Fifa to take notice.

BBC World Service’s World Football programme has been looking back at what impact that speech had for the future of women’s football.

Female footballers around the world were fighting many battles for recognition and facing significant resistance from those inside and outside the game, epitomised by the lack of support from the sport’s own world governing body.

At the start of the 1970s, the Football Association in England had ended a five-decade ban on women’s football.

The first unofficial Women’s World Cup was held in 1970 in Italy and a year later another unofficial global tournament was held in Mexico, attracting crowds of more than 100,000, but neither of those competitions was supported by Fifa.

Wille, who was herself an amateur footballer, had joined the NFF in 1976 – the same year it had given its approval to women’s football in the country – and she was not prepared to accept the status quo.

“I said ‘we must have a World Championship for women and we have to be a participant in the Olympic Games’,” she explained.

Her colleagues at the NFF decided she should go to Fifa’s congress which was being held that year in Mexico City – incidentally the same city that hosted the unofficial 1971 global tournament – and make a speech about women’s football.

“They thought it would mean more if a woman did it and not a man,” Wille said. She did not hesitate.

But come the morning of the speech, the nerves had set in.

“When I came to the place where it would happen, there were only men, apart from female translators,” she said.

To make a speech, you had to raise a card and wait to be selected. No woman had ever spoken at a Fifa congress before.

Wille, standing at 4ft 10in tall, was called to the stage, but it got off to an inauspicious start when she was too short to be able to reach the microphone.

“So someone had to come and help me with it, and then I started to talk.”
The exact contents of her speech have been lost to time, with no transcript or recording of the speech still in existence, but among those who witnessed it in person were two of football’s most influential figures – the then Fifa president Joao Havelange and general secretary Sepp Blatter.

While Fifa does not have a copy of the speech, it did manage to obtain minutes which confirmed Wille had asked the general secretary to “draw more attention to women’s football, particularly in terms of refereeing and the form of international tournaments”.

Official Fifa reports of the 1986 congress state that Havelange responded to Wille, directly thanking her and telling the congress that Fifa was dealing with the topic and working towards the first world tournament for women, to take place in 1988.

According to Wille, after he spoke all eyes turned to his right-hand man – Blatter, who would later succeed Havelange as president and hold the role from 1998 to 2015.

“It became quiet and then Sepp Blatter took the stand and said I should have a world championship,” Wille recalls. “That was very nice to hear. I hoped for it, but I didn’t think it would [happen].”

What happened next?

Perhaps the biggest indicator of the impact of the speech was the impression it made on Blatter. “I talked to him after [the speech] and I saw him years later,” said Wille.

“He invited me to Germany when the World Cup was in Germany. I got there and then he made a speech during a dinner for me.

“He said I had frightened him.”

Another Norwegian who had been working on the development of women’s football for more than a decade was Per Ravn Omdal.

The former footballer, who became president of the NFF in 1987, believes Wille’s speech – and Blatter’s response at the congress – was key to what happened next.

“They [Fifa] reacted extremely quickly and came back with a test World Cup in China [in 1988] which was very successful. I was there,” Omdal said.

“Then it started rolling until ’91 and we had the first [official tournament].”

The 1988 invitational tournament was a turning point for women’s football. After years of lobbying, Fifa was backing a World Cup. And the 1986 congress was considered the catalyst for change.

The first tournament in 1991 was given the lengthy title of the “1st Fifa World Championship for Women’s Football for the M&Ms Cup” – although it was retrospectively rebranded as the World Cup. It also involved matches that lasted only 80 minutes.

The women were given the full 90 by the time the 1995 edition came around in Sweden. Norway, the trailblazers, lifted the trophy that year.

But still a long way to go…

Some 36 years after Wille’s appearance, a Norwegian woman was once again making waves with a speech at a Fifa congress.

This time it was the NFF’s first female president – and former Norway international – Lise Klaveness.

With echoes of 1986, Klaveness addressed an almost entirely male audience of football heavyweights who had gathered for the 2022 congress in Doha, in the months leading up to the Qatar World Cup.

She told them they needed to do more, particularly around equality.

Speaking to the BBC’s World Service, Klaveness said: “We have come a long, long way since Ellen took the stage in 1986, but we also have to be very realistic that nothing has come by itself for women’s football.

“It has always been someone that has to fight for you, but we’re still in it.

“It’s still the case that most countries have never had female presidents, most countries have very few female representatives on their board, most countries struggle to get women in as coaches, and most countries struggle for their top league to have professional athletes so they can live from it.

“It’s still a long way until we have a professional environment that reflects the power women’s football has.”

But with the 2023 Women’s World Cup attracting nearly two million spectators, and millions more on television, it is hard not to look at the progress that has been made.

Wille plays down the impact of her speech all those years ago, saying it was “just a little step along the way” to progressing women’s football.

Klaveness has a different view.

“It’s not a women’s fight, it’s a humanity fight and it has been driven by Ellen, but also by guys like Per who has changed the lives of all of us.”