Review: ‘Girls with Goals’

A few times during the first thousand words my eyebrows arched when a new nugget of information was dropped. But it was page 16 when “Girls with Goals” began raising my blood near the boiling point.

Not only do I have a wife, daughter, mother and two sisters, for more than two decades during my life I have worked with girl’s and women’s athletics. I was in junior high when Title IX became law and a young father by the time I worked the 1999 FIFA World Cup. I was well aware of the enduring grind for equal rights leading up to that triumphant final before a record throng in the Rose Bowl.

Yet on page 16 of local author Clelia Castro-Malaspina’s history of women’s soccer, she details the early meetings between England and Scotland picked teams, in 1881.

She writes: “Many people – mostly men – showed up to watch them, but not so much as fans. They were there to gawk and heckle and yell obscene things. There seemed to be anger in the air among the male attendees over the fact that women were playing ‘their’ sport. At two separate matches, rowdy spectators stormed the field. That’s right, the earliest female footballers were literally chased off the soccer field by men.”

It’s Been a Long, Long Journey

If you’re an amateur footy historian believing that the long slog to respect had taken most of your lifetime, you now had to accept that for at least two more generations women had been facing this open resistance to them joining the game. Boomers can recall a cringe-worthy Virginia Slims cigarette advertisement from the late 1960s, about women having come a long way, “to get where you’ve got to, today.” And in chapter upon chapter Castro-Malaspina, a player herself, illustrates that the war on women’s soccer dates back a long, long, long time – all the way back to the late 19th Century.

Readers of “Girls with Goals” will become engrossed early on, then frustrated by the fits and starts, and finally –  finally! – vindicated by progress in the events of the last decade, namely two World Cup championships, plus equal pay. This is a book that should be circulated among every team, every class and every library and especially those populated by young teens.

“I wrote this book for anyone who loves women’s soccer (and that’s a lot of people!),” Castro-Malaspina wrote to me, “but the real target audience are girls who are like whom I was when I was a teenager – the girls who love to play soccer and/or who are huge fans of the USWNT and the NWSL. As a girl this book would have been the most important book in my library, and I really believe this book can hold a lot of meaning for many young girls and women.”

Beyond the ‘85ers

Later this summer will mark the 40th anniversary of that very first match played by the U.S. Women’s National Team, in 1985. There had been a part-time coach who selected “paper teams” the two years prior because the program lacked proper funding. That coach and many of those first national team selections all hailed from Puget Sound.

Girls currently kicking balls around Seattle ought to know the names of those first World Cup champions who came out of our neighborhoods, and “Girls with Goals” is a well-crafted, evenly paced, superbly illustrated journey from the age of wearing knickers and billowy blouses to shorts and sports bras.

Yes, we should all have the names of Michelle Akers, Hope Solo and Megan Rapinoe stenciled on our brains. But Clelia also introduces us to Nettie Honeyball, Lily Parr, barnstorming British sides and that initial (unofficial) women’s world championship tournament in 1971, the one which got FIFA’s attention and would lead to that first sanctioned Mundial 20 years later.

“It was just so amazing to see these women in Victorian England have the courage to do something considered completely counter cultural at the time,” added Castro-Malaspina, an attorney and literary agent whose family lives nearby on Mercer Island.

“The biggest surprise,” she said, “was that women were essentially banned from playing soccer in many countries for decades, a trend started by England of all places, and that Brazil went as far as making it illegal. Women had to fight for the right to play for so many generations, and they all helped us to get to this amazing moment in the sport.”

By page 16, I was pissed. But by page 170, I was feeling better than ever, for all the women I know and all those who toiled on this journey toward equal and equitable treatment. I arrived at the end satisfied for now, and hopeful that the next Akers, Solo or Rapinoe will also read these stories and continue pushing forward for what’s right.

“Girls with Goals”, by Clelia Castro-Malaspina. Quatro Publishing, Beverly, Mass., 2025. $19.99.