Almost 50 years have passed since they stepped off the plane and into a parallel universe but their memories of the full-scale assault on the senses remain as vivid as ever.

“It was utterly surreal, like going to Narnia; we were being transported to a different world,” says Chris Lockwood. “Nothing prepared us for the crowds, the noise. It was amazing.

“We’d gone from playing on park pitches and suddenly we were running out in front of 80,000 people inside huge stadiums and being invited to a cocktail party at the British Embassy. It was an unknown world. We didn’t realise it at the time but it was a moment in history.”

Lockwood was part of a band of pioneers who, during an era when the Football Association barred women from playing a game they deemed “quite unsuitable for females”, represented a rebel England side which in 1971 participated in an unofficial World Cup in Mexico. She and her teammates helped rekindle interest in a sport which burgeoned in Britain after the first world war but, in 1921, was banned for 50 years by the FA.

Timeline The history of women's football Show Hide Nettie Honeyball and Helen Graham Matthew found the British Ladies Footballers. A team of largely Suffragette-sympathising-middle class women attract 12,000 fans to their first game in Crouch End, north London. The first world war breaks out. With men away fighting, women begin working on farms and in factories - and many start playing football. Those working in munitions factories compete in the Munitionettes Cup. A French team managed by the leading feminist Alice Milliat arrives in England on tour. They are greeted in Preston by a brass band and streets lined with cheering fans. Dick, Kerr’s Ladies v St Helens Ladies at Goodison Park on Boxing Day attracts 53,000 spectators with a further 15,000 turned away. The FA ban women from playing at all its affiliated grounds; the block will last 50 years. The ruling body claim the decision was taken after consultation with medical experts who deemed the sport “quite unsuitable” for women. Martini & Rossi sponsor the first unofficial women’s World Cup in Italy. It is won by Denmark. Denmark win the second unofficial World Cup in Mexico. Harry Batt’s England team win plenty of friends but no games. Three months after their return, the FA finally lifts its 50 year bar on women’s football. Title IX is passed in the United States. The legislation enforces gender equality in high school and college education, both academic and sporting. It creates a legal imperative that dictates young athletes be afforded equal rights to federal financial assistance. The necessary framework is now in place for the US to become the foremost power in the women’s game. The Norwegian delegation persuade Fifa to take women’s football fully under its umbrella at a congress in Mexico City. The first official women’s World Cup - well sort of - takes place in China. Games last only 80 minutes and the tournament’s official title is “The First FIFA World Championship for Women.” Two goals from Michelle Akers give the US a 2-1 win over Norway in the final. The first “proper” Women's World Cup is staged in Sweden. Games last 90 minutes and Norway beat Germany in the final. Five years after the FA assumed full control of women’s football, Hope Powell becomes the first full time coach of the England women’s team. During her 15, often revolutionary, years in charge she becomes the first Englishwoman to gain the pro licence coaching qualification and leads the national team to the final of the 2009 European Championships. The World Cup finals sees the US beating China on penalties in front of a record 90,185 crowd at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. After scoring the decisive penalty Brandi Chastain whips off her shirt to reveal a black sports bra. Japan become the first Asian World Cup winners by beating the US in the final of a tournament held in Germany. In a year when the country has been devastated by a tsunami and earthquake the achievement of the Nadeshiko finally brings some joy to the nation. Goalkeeper Ayumi Kaihori makes three saves in the shootout.

Phil Neville’s fully professional England squad would do well to spare a thought for Lockwood, her fellow trailblazers and the man who made it all possible.

The late Harry Batt, manager of both that convention-challenging, prejudice-defying, 1971 team and Chiltern Valley Ladies, was a visionary. A prophet in the wilderness, Batt battled – often forlornly – to persuade the FA to open their eyes to the immense potential of women’s football.

Although the ruling body did lift the ban three months after his rebels returned from Mexico City, it was done in a slightly grudging manner, with women allowed to play at FA-affiliated grounds but advised, albeit tacitly, to “stay in your lane”.

Batt continued to be largely ostracised by Lancaster Gate’s top brass. He was met with a complete lack of interest, says Jean Williams, professor of sport at Wolverhampton University, as well as “outright chauvinism.”

Yet in Mexico City, in August 1971, his 14-strong squad were treated like royalty from the moment they walked through passport control into a brave new world of flashing cameras and cheering crowds. “It didn’t matter to the Mexicans that we were female, it was football,” says Lockwood. “But it was thanks to Harry and his wife June, who helped run the team, that we were there. Harry had a big vision for women’s football; we hope that now he’ll finally be recognised.”

It was 20 years before Fifa staged the first official Women’s World Cup but their commercial department was made to look several yards off the pace by Martini & Rossi, sponsors of Mexico ’71, who funded travel and accommodation for the six participating teams.

A year earlier, the drinks company had also facilitated the first unofficial women’s World Cup in Italy but 1971 elevated the game to a whole new level, with 110,000 watching Denmark beat Mexico 3-0 in the final.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susanne Augustesen (centre) scores the first goal of her hat-trick as Denmark beat 3-0 in the 1971 Women’s World Cup final and captain Inger Pedersen hoist the trophy high as she’s chair around the pitch in celebration. Photograph: Polfot/Ritzau/Press Association Images

By way of heightening marketing appeal to a female audience, the goal frames were painted in pink and white hoops, all stadium staff wore pink outfits and pop-up hair and beauty salons appeared outside the Azteca Stadium.

“Mexico ’71 was a success because the organisers planned it very well and were very financially shrewd,” says Williams. “They never assumed it would be a commercial or sporting failure. It was sold and promoted as a proper football tournament that just happened to feature females.”

Indeed it was such a hit that Williams discovered the media coverage extended to a Mexican soft porn magazine. “The match reports were the only non-smutty thing in it,” she says.

England lost their three games but, considering they were unable to play on proper pitches at home and their squad contained three teenagers in Lockwood, then 15, Gill Sayell, 14, and Leah Caleb, 13, Batt’s side departed with heads held high. “The games were extremely physical,” recalls Caleb. “The one against Argentina was brutal – two players ended up in plaster casts.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paula Rayner celebrates England’s equaliser against Argentina at the 1971 Women’s World Cup, however their joy was short lived as Argentina went on to win 4-1. Photograph: National Football Museum

Not that anyone in England seemed remotely interested. The three teenagers simply returned to school and immediate anonymity. “In Mexico we’d been on television, had police escorts, done interviews, signed autographs and been welcomed by the British Embassy, but nothing was said at school,” says Lockwood. “No teacher ever mentioned it. It was as if it had never happened. There was nothing – and no one – to give us a voice, so we kept our story to ourselves.”

It would be another 15 years before Fifa embraced the women’s game and that came only after a hefty nudge from the Norwegians back in Mexico City – evidently the early de facto capital of women’s football. Perhaps it had something to do with the rarefied, high altitude, air but, at the 1986 Fifa congress, the delegation from Oslo succeeded in persuading the international ruling body to take “the fillies” fully under its wing. Seven years later the FA finally followed suit.

An awful lot of water had passed under the bridge since 1628 and the first recorded match involving women in Europe. Documents from south Lanarkshire dating back almost 400 years detail a Scottish church minister’s outraged condemnation of the men and women spied playing mixed football across Carstairs village green on the sabbath.

France 2019 may be Scotland’s first World Cup but, like Mexico, the country provided a significant staging post in the world’s game’s history. Edinburgh quite possibly witnessed the birth of international fixtures when, late in the 19th century, a team of English women crossed Hadrian’s Wall to face a home side led by Helen Graham Matthews. A riot erupted among 5,000 extremely excited spectators and, shortly afterwards, women’s football was outlawed across Scotland. Graham Matthews simply decamped to London where she joined forces with Nettie Honeyball in establishing the British Ladies’ Football Club in 1895.

Their first fixture, at the Crouch End Athletic Ground in Hornsey, north London, attracted a 12,000-strong crowd and stemmed from a newspaper advert placed by Honeyball – a pseudonym – seeking players. Thirty, mainly middle-class women responded with the sympathies of most resting firmly with the suffragette movement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The North Team, representing North London, who played against the South Team in the opening match of the British Ladies Football Club at Nightingale Lane Ground, Crouch End on 23 March 1895. Nettie Honeyball is second from the left in the top row. Photograph: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy

Women’s football has often developed along parallel lines to feminism, its periods of rapid growth invariably coinciding with waves of wider emancipation. Tellingly, Honeyball was anxious to demonstrate that, liberated from their uncomfortable and oppressively restrictive Victorian clothing, women could be athletic and physically capable.

The ladies' football match: 'an extremely pretty sight' - archive, March 1895 Read more

Honeyball found a soulmate in Lady Florence Dixie. A Scottish war correspondent, explorer and feminist, Lady Florence variously reported on South Africa’s Boer and Anglo Zulu wars, traversed Patagonia and became president of the British Ladies.

She died of diphtheria before the first world war opened the game to a much broader, more working-class constituency. With so many men suddenly spirited away to fight on foreign fields, women staffed farms and factories and it was not long before many enjoyed regular lunchtime kickabouts.

Soon they were playing organised matches with spectators’ admission money funnelled to the charities which fulfilled the societal functions later performed by the NHS and the welfare state. “Women who had previously been in service worked outside the home for the first time,” says Williams. “It was a huge change.”

Perhaps the most celebrated factory team was Dick, Kerr’s Ladies in Preston, which raised a collective sum equivalent to millions of pounds in today’s money, but the game also blossomed among those employed by munitions factories, particularly in Northumberland and Durham.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dick Kerr International Ladies AFC, undefeated British champions in 1920-1921. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images

In 2018 a blue plaque was finally installed at Croft Park, home of Blyth Spartans, in honour of Bella Reay who scored 133 goals in a single season as the club’s Ladies won the Munitionettes’ Cup.

Little did she know it but Reay was playing in an era which laid the foundations of female football’s eventual globalisation and has turned some of her north-east-born successors, most notably Lucy Bronze, Steph Houghton and Jill Scott – very much the nucleus of Neville’s England – into international stars.

Accordingly the war’s end prefaced the advent of European competition and, in 1920, a French team managed by a leading feminist named Alice Milliat crossed the channel for a tour which kicked off with the players arriving in Preston to be serenaded by a brass band and streets lined by thousands of cheering fans.

Boxing Day 1920 suggested that women’s football was more popular than the men’s version when Dick, Kerr’s Ladies v St Helens Ladies at Goodison Park attracted 53,000 supporters with a further 15,000 turned away.

The famous Lyons coffee houses supported a number of teams, frequently decorating their cake boxes with pictures of women kicking balls. A 21st century equivalent would involve images of Houghton or Bronze adorning Starbucks or Costa merchandise.

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In 1921 the FA took fright and, after consulting “medical experts”, made the reactionary decision to bar women from playing on all affiliated grounds. For several decades the female game virtually disappeared from public view – and not only in England.

France banned it in 1932, West Germany in 1955, Norway in 1931 and Brazil from 1941. They were not alone. As an era of socially conservative rightwing dictatorships assumed power across South America, a sport the continent’s historians had noted women first playing in the early 1900s entered hibernation became an isolated, almost underground, movement.

West Germany’s DFB depicted their ban as a defence of femininity. “This aggressive sport is essentially alien to the nature of woman,” it decreed in 1955. “In the fight for the ball, the feminine grace vanishes, body and soul will inevitably suffer harm … The display of the woman’s body offends decency and modesty.”

An Englishman named Percy Ashley was among those infuriated by such blatant sexism. In 1949 he enabled his football-mad daughter, Doris, to play by founding Manchester Corinthians, a side comprised mainly of typists and machinists.

The Corinthians became so quietly successful that the Red Cross flew them to South America for a series of fundraising matches. Subsequent tours of Europe and North Africa helped raise a collective £275,000 for the charity and, in 1957, they won an unofficial tournament in Germany with Bert Trautmann, of Manchester City goalkeeping fame, acting as interpreter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester Corinthians players board a plane to Reims, France, in 1970, for an international tournament, where one of the teams they faced was Juventus. Photograph: National Football Museum

Yet without a national framework and institutionalised support, teams like the Corinthians represented rare oases in a footballing desert.

The importance of state endorsement was highlighted in the United States in 1972. No matter that North American women were late to the party and did not begin kicking balls in earnest until the 70s; a piece of federal legislation known as Title IX would not merely serve as a catalyst for radical change but alter an entire nation’s sporting topography.

Title IX is the reason the US remain the foremost power in women’s football and head to France as World Cup holders. In enforcing gender equality in high school and college education, both academic and sporting, it created a legal imperative that female athletes be afforded equal rights to federal financial assistance.

Fast-forward to a sweltering Californian afternoon in 1999 as, with a single swipe of her supposedly weak left foot, Brandi Chastain converted the final penalty of the tensest of shootouts against China to win the World Cup for the US.

As she celebrated by whipping off her shirt to reveal a black sports bra, the 90,185 crowd inside Pasadena’s Rose Bowl swayed to Jennifer Lopez’s Let’s Get Loud. Admittedly Chastain’s iconic cameo would eventually be seen as a starting gun for evolution rather than revolution but, temporarily at least, the planet woke up to the potential of women’s football.

A defender with two reconstructed knees dubbed “Hollywood” by teammates in homage to her love of big occasions and bright lights, Chastain tricked China’s goalkeeper by deciding against taking the kick with her preferred right foot. “As I walked up I thought: ‘Don’t look at the keeper,’” Chastian recalls. “When I hit it everything went into slow motion, it was like being in a car accident. It was life affirming.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Front of tickets for first official Fifa Women’s World Championships, held in China in 1991. Photograph: National Football Museum

Eight years earlier the first official World Cup – well sort of – had taken place in China. Fifa’s concerns about its brand somehow being tainted by female involvement provoked a compromise whereby the word “Cup” was dropped from a tournament sponsored by Mars and named The First Fifa World Championship for Women’s Football. Games lasted only 80 minutes. “Fifa was afraid our ovaries were going to fall out,” deadpanned the then-US captain April Heinrichs in Gemma Clarke’s excellent book Soccerwomen.

Women’s football had been banned in China until 1970 and the tournament was televised merely on domestic channels but, contrary to expectations, grounds were packed. Almost 65,000 filled the Guangdong Stadium to see Michelle Akers score twice as the US beat Norway 2-1 in the final. Considering the Americans suffered debilitating stomach upsets and arrived clutching toilet rolls to equip them for Guangdong’s hole-in-the-ground lavatories it was quite an achievement.

Other countries started taking note. Denmark, Italy, Norway and Sweden were initially the most enlightened but Germany swiftly caught up. A side propelled by the free-scoring, three-times world footballer of the year Birgit Prinz proceeded to five straight European Championships in addition to the 2003 and 2007 World Cups. After Prinz’s retirement, they defended the Euros in 2013.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Despite pressure from Finland’s Tiina Salmen, Germany’s Birgit Prinz scores the 4th goal during their 4-1 win in the 2005 European Championship semi-final. Germany beat Norway 3-1 in the final Photograph: Martyn Harrison/AFP/Getty Images

Germany had aimed for a World Cup hat-trick in 2011, staged on home soil, but a star was rising in the east and the hosts were knocked out by the Nadeshiko in the quarter-finals. A Japan side starring midfielder Homare Sawa beat the US in the final, with those positions reversed at Canada 2015.

It was a far cry from 1980 when Japan staged its first women’s tournament. Played eight-a-side on mini pitches using children’s footballs, halves lasted 25 minutes and handballs were permissible if they protected players’ breasts.

Change was eventually driven by business behemoths. During the late 1980s, at the height of Japan’s economic boom, leading companies including Nissan began sponsoring teams in a new semi-professional league. Players were allocated office jobs allowing ample time off for training regimes big on technical skills.

As the years passed, exceptional women footballers around the world such as Brazil’s Marta – dubbed “Pelé in a skirt” – challenged accepted narratives about patriarchal cultures and male and female behavioural conventions.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marta (centre) is often regarded as the best female player of all time, she was named FIFA World Player of the Year six times, five of them being consecutive -from 2006 and 2010. With 15 goals, she holds the record for most goals scored at Women’s World Cup tournaments. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP

Yet as Lockwood prepares to cheer the Lionesses on in France she reflects on a wasted opportunity. “Mexico ’71 was the stepping stone for women’s football to move forward but the FA missed a big chance,” she reflects. “I feel sorry for the girls who came after us and didn’t get the same opportunities but I’m so pleased, so thrilled, to see today’s England players finally getting everything they deserve. I’ll be over the moon if they win the World Cup.”