Thread by @Leigh_Moore

I shared this story on Instagram and had so many people say they thought it should be shared wider. So here’s a thread 👇🏻

Yesterday, a group of four boys aged between 10-13 stopped @Sio_Chamberlain outside the house.

“Are you the goalkeeper? Could we please have a pair of your gloves?”

Siobhan came back inside and suggested she’d also give them a football, so they could have a kick about.

The four young boys went off and they were over the moon. An hour later, they had come back to tell us that they’d found Siobhan on Instagram and that she was ‘cool’.

Today, two entirely different young boys, perhaps aged 8-9, knocked on the door and asked if Siobhan would give them an autograph.

(I should point out that in two years of living at our house, this has never happened before, and now twice in two days!)

So Siobhan went and found two England photos and signed them for the two young boys.

From my office, I could hear the boys stood waiting outside, they were so excited.

“This is amazing!” One said to the other, as they waited on the drive, dressed head-to-toe in Liverpool kit.

After getting their photos, one boy turned to Siobhan and said:

“This is so cool, thank you. But why don’t you live in a mansion like other footballers?”

Without skipping a beat, the other boy jumps in:

“If she lived in a mansion, we wouldn’t have got these autographs!”

I sat in my office thinking, what an opportunity women’s football has, to help do something really important in this country.

These are 6 young boys, aged between 8-13, who thought it was ‘cool’ they lived near a footballer, not a woman that played football, simply a footballer.

Even cooler that they were able to knock on the door and ask for an autograph. No gates, no security, just a knock on the door.

Women playing football was once seen as an oddity. Something different and often mocked. Something women in many other professions still encounter.

But if young boys like this start seeing footballers, men and women, as equals, it has the power to do something important for the next generation.

It’s not just about how they see footballers, it’s about how they see women, it’s about how they see the world.

These boys are learning from the very beginning that the world is one where boundaries and barriers of gender are coming down all the time.

Women play football? And what?

I genuinely feel women’s football has the opportunity to do something way more impactful than getting more girls to play or more people watching, but if it can do that as well...

Then maybe one day, women’s footballers will be living in mansions too!