A moment captured at the World Cup in France in June flipped the usual narrative in women’s football, in showing the game – at least in one way – to be lightyears ahead of the men’s.

Denmark striker Pernille Harder leaned forward in the stands at the Parc des Princes to kiss her girlfriend, Sweden’s Magda Eriksson, who had just helped her team to the quarter-finals. Chelsea’s Ramona Bachmann remembers seeing the photograph online a few hours later. She is herself in an openly gay relationship with a fellow footballer, West Ham striker Alisha Lehmann.

Bachmann says the image helped reinforce part of what she believes the game stands for: allowing women to be themselves. “It’s obviously amazing because what everyone tries to do is just be ourselves, and not to hide things, trying to show it’s normal for us in women’s football,” she says. “We try and bring that into the world.”

While Bachmann, 28, did not play at this World Cup for Switzerland, the 2015 tournament in Canada was her own coming-out moment. It was there, on the biggest stage for women's football, that she publicly declared her relationship with her girlfriend at the time. She shrugs at the memory though, saying it was not planned but just the natural order of events.