Women face barriers in every field. One of these fields is sports. “They expected us to act like men but they were wrong,” Güzide Alçu, captain of Amedspor Women's Football Team, said that they struggle to not only have equal opportunities, pay, and rewards but also equal rights to play sport.

Amed – It is possible to talk about inequality wherever there are men and women. Everything is unequal, including their wages, opportunities, and chances to make progress. Women struggle against mindset saying, “Women cannot understand” in every field. Women experience this discrimination deeper when it comes to football. Football is still considered as a “men’s sport”; women are marginalized and they have been kept away from football for a long time.

Women’s football in history

Football, which began to be played as the "invention" of men in the early 19th century, has since then been a game mostly played by men and directed by men. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, women were banned from playing football in many countries. Despite various resistance and bans, women began to play football in the late 19th and early 20thcentury. Women founded their own football league in France in 1902; the first official football match between two women's teams in Sweden was played in 1918 and women participated in organized football in Austria in 1923. Football became popular among women during wartime in the UK. Women started working in many areas including factories. The women working in factories began to play football during lunch-breaks. In 1921, there were approximately 150 women’s football clubs in England. On 5th December 1921, the Football Association issued a statement and banned women from playing football by saying “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged.” Hostile attitudes towards women's football showed themselves not only in England but also in different countries in the 1940s. For instance, in Germany, women were banned from playing football between 1955 and 1970. In 1941, Brazil’s National Sports Council banned women from participating in sports such as football, boxing, and decathlon and that ban remained in effect until 1979. Thus, as a result of bans all around the world by sports organizations, women had to stay away from playing football until the 1970s.

History of women’s football in Turkey

The situation of women’s football in Turkey faced the same bans until the 1970s as all around the world. Women began to establish women’s teams and played football as teams in the 1970s. But the archives write that women played in football matches in the 1950s. Moreover, the newspapers wrote the Izmir and Istanbul women's football teams played a football match organized within the scope of the Istanbul Sports Festival held in 1954 and 1955. 

Turkey’s first women’s football team is the Kınalıada Girls’ Football Team (also known as Istanbul Girls’ Football Team) founded in 1969. They played with men’s football teams because there was no other women’s football team. In the 1980s, women’s football teams founded in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. In 1985, the first women's football tournament is held in Istanbul. In 1985, The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) took steps to form the Women's League; however, the establishment of the league was postponed on the ground that there weren’t enough women’s teams. Eight years later, The TFF decided to establish a women’s league and the league became active on April 2, 1994.

“We have proved that it isn’t a men sport”

Although women have been successful in this field for years, they have not worked under equal conditions with men, and female footballers, who are expected to prove themselves every time, demand not only equal opportunities, wages, and rewards but also equal rights to play football. The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) has huge budgets while football clubs, including women’s football teams, playing in the lower leagues have struggled with many problems. Amedspor Women's Football Team has brought firsts to women's football in the region (Southeast Anatolia and Eastern Anatolia Region of Turkey).

Being a women’s premier league team now, Amedspor Women's Football Team showed a great performance in the third league and was promoted to the premier league. The team has faced not only gendered discourses but also racist discourses. We talked to the team’s players about what they have faced.

“Women are not supported”

We first talked to Güzide Alçu, one of the female footballers of the Amedspor Women's Football Team. She graduated from the School of Physical Education and Sports at Dicle University of Diyarbakır in 2009 and she has been playing football for 12 years. She is a national football player and played for the National Football Team for two years. Stating that the women's football team and women’s league are not very visible, Güzide Alçu told us that this is due to the lack of support for clubs playing in the lower leagues.

“Football is considered as a “men sport”. But we have proved that it isn’t. The more they talked about how it is a men’s sport, the more we became more ambitious for playing. Our aim was to show that women can be successful in every field and we did,” Güzide said, “I used to see men playing football in the streets all the time. When I realized that I could play football, I started playing at home. I tried to understand why men could play but not women. After trying many times, I understood that I can also play football. Surely, my family and people around me didn’t support me. But I never gave up. People say, ‘behind every great man there's a great woman’, but we are great and not behind a man. They (men) expected us to act like men in playing football. But we had our hair done, did our makeup, painted our nails, and went to the football field. We broke all bias with our stance."

Amedspor’s top goal scorer

Zelal Baturay is also a National football player and she is the forward player of the team. She began to play football in the streets when she was 13 years old. She had her license in 2009 and she scored a total of 39 goals in 14 matches in the 2013-2014 season and she became the first female Diyarbakır’s top goal scorer. She began to play for Amedspor Women’s Football Team in 2017. “We had difficulties but achieved a lot of success,” Zelal said that they have faced many difficulties for being both women and Kurdish. Zelal told us that as football players from Amedspor, they constantly face racism and discrimination. “We have also a Turkish player in our team but we never marginalize her for being Turkish or having different thoughts.”