For seventy five years, the Chiltern Youth Football League in Bedford had never seen a girls team win it; this year however, new history was written.
Phoenix Football Centre only created their Women’s and Girls section of the club in 2023, after recognising that in the area, there was a huge passion and appetite for young girls to play football, however, they were about to enter a world of issues, even to just play football.
The coaches that set the team up, Carl Perri, Kieran Alexander and Michael Taylor encountered several difficulties in setting the team up, sponsorship being the main one, and the side didn’t actually find the final player they needed for registration regulations until under a month before the season started.
Carl recalled the pre season chaos in an interview with MailOnline, stating:
“At the end of last season, we knew that we had a lot of really strong girls in the area that were exceptional at football.”
“We thought that we could do something special with them, so we started running training sessions with the girls.”
“We struggled to get the numbers to complete the full squad. Three weeks before the season, we didn’t even have a full squad.”
“We didn’t have a pitch, and we struggled for a sponsor.”
“In the end, we managed to get the girls in, and we kept building throughout the season.”
“We managed to find a local sponsor to help us with our kit, because in our first game we didn’t have a kit.”
They finally got their team together, however and entered the Chiltern Youth Football League. They won the majority of the games they played, only losing 2-1 in the trophy cup final as they almost completed a historic, unfathomable double for the 18 strong squad.
This is something that, right at the start, seemed outrageous, out of this world in fact.
Shockingly, the girls still faced prejudice in some of the matches they played in, with tales of some boys’ sides not shaking the girls hands after games, being told they shouldn’t be playing in a boys league, told to move down an age level in order to ‘compete’.
Carl Perri told Bedford Today of some of the doubts he heard about his team in the lead up to the season.
“At the beginning, we had doubters. People were questioning why we were doing this and told us we were going to get beaten every week. They said it wouldn’t be fair on the girls. We didn’t know we’d win the league – but we knew they’d be competitive and wouldn’t roll over.”
To not only overcome these doubts, but win a league where they were the only girls team, not only broke records and made national news, but it showed girls that it is possible to compete with boys, even when society tells you that that is incorrect.
Even thinking back to my own experiences playing football in England, growing up, I only ever played against girls twice, and they were the only two girls on a boys side at Under 13 level in the area I played in. This was often greeted with sneers from my teammates, “We can’t be getting beat by girls, lads’, or even the manager”, “They’ve got girls on their side, we can’t lose”.
It’s often stuck with me, those comments. I felt bad I never called it out at the time and I still wish I did. I do remember one of the girls scoring a stunner though, how good that must’ve felt for her.
It draws on a wider conversation of male allyship within Women’s Football, we as men need to enable women to feel like they belong in all areas of football, playing, coaching or managing. Why is it that other sports, Tennis, Cricket, Rugby and more recently, Darts, are way more accepting, certainly from the outset, than football is.
It’s why the Phoenix Girls achievement resonates with us so strongly at Beyond the Pitch, this story and this achievement deserves maximum coverage. This is a group of girls who made friends for life playing football, but they did so much more than that. They beat the naysayers, the people and boys who wouldn’t accept that girls could beat boys.
Everyone at Beyond the Pitch would like to extend their biggest well wishes to everyone associated with Phoenix Football Centre and will be watching as they create more history in the future.
