Someone dressed as Marge Simpson, full with a big blue wig and a lime inexperienced costume, belts out “Hot to Go!” by pop icon Chappell Roan to a rapt viewers gathered inside a marquee in the midst of a area within the north of England.
There are a number of people within the massive tent dressed as Keira Knightley’s character in “Bend it Like Beckham” – a film beloved by queer people, and which is particularly popular with lesbians.
And elsewhere within the area, there are a variety of Sporty Spice – of the Spice Girls fame – lookalikes carrying sweatpants, their hair scraped again into excessive ponytails. While Sporty Spice herself, in any other case generally known as Melanie Chisholm, is not homosexual, she holds a particular place within the hearts of many queer women. Carabiners cling off the belt loops of these queuing at a bar and there are Pride flags being hoisted into the air.
Everywhere you look, there are queer signifiers.
This is Ball Together Now, an inclusive soccer pageant for girls and marginalized genders that was based in 2022. It has yielded three profitable occasions throughout the summers of 2023, 2024 and 2025. Non-professional groups from all around the United Kingdom, and generally even additional afield, collect in Manchester and play soccer by day, earlier than partying by night time.
Many of the shirts worn by the groups are emblazoned with rainbows and lots of others adorn the names of Lionesses – the England women’s national soccer team – stars. There is little doubt that this is a distinctly queer occasion and one which displays the importance of women’s soccer for LGBTQ+ people.
The women’s recreation has developed a fame for being one thing of a haven for queer people – and Ball Together Now is a distinguished instance of that.
“I’ve never seen so many lesbians all in one tent!” Lois Kay, one of many organizers of Ball Together Now, advised NCS Sports. “Our space is for everyone and anyone that feels it is a space for them. The fundamentals of BTN (Ball Together Now) are to ensure that inclusion is at the forefront of what we do. We wanted to create something that also specifically included trans and non-binary players.”
The pageant even hosted its personal “Blind Date,” during which LGBTQ+ soccer gamers in search of love have been arrange with potential matches, and the occasion was acquired with rapturous applause and laughter from its viewers of different sweaty and muddy gamers trying to wind down after a day of hard-fought contests.
Loads of LGBTQ+ people watching and taking part in soccer collectively is not a sight distinctive to Ball Together Now. Many queer people feel drawn to the women’s game and the crowds at matches are sometimes populated by LGBTQ+ followers. It’s frequent to see rainbow scarves across the necks of spectators and queer {couples} can typically be noticed exhibiting affection to each other within the stands.
“Arsenal women’s games are the only place you’d find as many lesbians and queer women as you would at Pride!” Emily Calder, an Arsenal women’s fan advised NCS Sports. Calder attended the 2025 UEFA Women’s Euros together with her girlfriend, during which England, who she was supporting, emerged victorious to repeat and defend its title.
Calder has been a Gunners fan since childhood and remembers, when she was a child, asking her father if “girls were allowed to play” for the membership. Throughout the years, although, she step by step felt that the setting at males’s video games was not at all times a very pleasant one, and as she acquired older, she drifted away from the game.
The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup reignited her love for soccer, nevertheless, and she or he was “bitten by the bug.”
Calder now frequently watches key members of the profitable England squad – from captain Leah Williamson to clutch 2025 Euros penalty-taker Chloe Kelly and Beth Mead – play for Arsenal ladies on the Emirates Stadium in north London. She says she finds the ambiance at women’s video games way more welcoming to queer ladies than the boys’s matches she grew up attending.
“There’s a shocking difference in the culture around the women’s game compared to the men’s. There are so many out gay women players and so few in the men’s game,” Calder provides.
Indeed, whereas quite a lot of distinguished gamers within the Women’s Super League – England women’s top-flight in soccer – and the National Women’s Soccer League within the US are homosexual, there are nonetheless only a few out queer gamers within the prime divisions inside the males’s recreation. For instance, there are at present no out LGBTQ+ gamers within the English Premier League, the most-watched soccer league on this planet.
Josh Cavallo, a homosexual Australian soccer participant who got here out in 2021, recently told BBC Sport that “being gay in men’s soccer is a very toxic place.” He says he receives every day demise threats and abuse on social media. When he advised the general public he was homosexual, he grew to become the one brazenly homosexual top-flight male skilled footballer on this planet.
And cases of homophobic occasions aren’t unusual in males’s soccer in each Europe and the US.
In June, two excessive profile gamers in France’s prime division, Ligue 1, have been handed bans for concealing the anti-homophobia badge on their membership’s shirts. A fiery match between the US males’s nationwide crew (USMNT) and Mexico in 2023 had to finish early due to homophobic chanting – a difficulty seen throughout a number of soccer leagues all through current years.
In sharp distinction, a number of the world’s most well-known women’s soccer gamers are out. Christen Press and Tobin Heath, who each starred for the US women’s nationwide crew (USWNT), are a married couple. Vivianne Miedema and Beth Mead, who used to be teammates at Arsenal, are in a relationship and even joked concerning the awkwardness of getting to face one another as rivals for the Netherlands and England, respectively, on the 2025 Euros.
According to PinkNews, a minimum of 78 gamers that competed on the 2025 Women’s Euros have been out. Each nation’s squad included 23 gamers and 16 groups have been current on the match, making up 368 gamers in whole. That implies that greater than 1 in 5 rivals (or over 20%) on the 2025 Euros have been out – a big quantity. In a 2023 survey performed by Ipsos throughout 30 nations around the globe, 3% on common recognized as lesbian or homosexual, whereas the common share of LGBTQ inhabitants averaged to 9%. Comparing to figures from the 2025 Euros, the numbers present proof that women’s soccer is a very distinctive area for queer people.
The comparatively frequent sight of high-profile women’s soccer gamers being in relationships with teammates, or their opponents, is typically a draw for LGBTQ+ people with no earlier curiosity within the sport on any stage – women’s or males’s.
“Lots of queer friends have come with me to Arsenal women’s games over the last few years, who weren’t remotely into soccer before, and that’s partly because the games have become kinds of queer gatherings,” Calder mentioned. “Now, they’re hardened fans themselves.”
Women’s soccer’s fame as a queer hotspot is additionally evident within the variety of LGBTQ+ venues throughout the UK that now host crossover occasions that mix soccer and queer nightlife.
For England and Wales’ opening video games on the 2025 Women’s Euros, Baller FC, a collective of women’s soccer followers based mostly in London, hosted a celebration at a brewery aptly titled “Slaying the Field,” which screened queer brief movies centered round soccer, concerned an arm wrestling competitors introduced by a lesbian bar on wheels generally known as the “Mobile Dyke Bar” and even descended into line dancing – a storied pastime that has turn out to be distinctly queer over the previous few years.
As queer nightlife throughout the UK stutters – with data from the Greater London Authority exhibiting that greater than half of London’s LGBTQ+ venues have closed over the past 20 years – women’s soccer has come to signify one thing greater than only a sport for queer people. It has impressed the creation of latest, queer areas resembling Studs – which started as a web-based platform for women’s soccer followers and now hosts its personal occasions at a gay cabaret bar – and demonstrated a need amongst many LGBTQ+ people for neighborhood as conventional areas wither.
For many queer people, women’s soccer has turn out to be an important car for connecting with others within the face of shrinking nightlife.
And for those who don’t actually take pleasure in ingesting or going to queer bars, women’s soccer additionally serves as a 3rd area, as Laura Graham – who performs for a grassroots membership referred to as “Flaming Foxes” in Birmingham, England – factors out.
“Usually, the only other time you’re around as many queer people as you are at women’s games is at gay clubs. But that’s not ideal if you don’t want to drink or you don’t enjoy late-night partying. But women’s soccer feels like it has something for everyone,” she advised NCS Sports.
Graham says that the Flaming Foxes make up the “biggest queer friendship group I’ve ever had,” including that Ball Together Now, the aforementioned LGBTQ+ soccer pageant, was her “favorite weekend of the year.”
In the US, the place the Trump administration has been curbing LGBTQ+ rights over the past yr and has reduce grants for research into LGBTQ+ health matters, women’s soccer has an extended and proud historical past of not solely being a welcoming residence for LGBTQ+ people but in addition serving as a weapon of resistance in opposition to bigotry.
2019 Ballon D’Or Féminin winner Megan Rapinoe, a star member of the vastly profitable USWNT crew that received its fourth World Cup in 2019 and herself a lesbian, famously rebuked the primary Trump administration by making it clear she would refuse to attend the White House if the crew was invited to rejoice its win.
Rapinoe was backed by her teammates, together with fellow American legend Ali Krieger, and went on to make it clear that she felt queerness was intrinsic to the success of that USWNT squad – telling reporters in the course of the match that you simply “can’t win a championship without gays on your team.”
Rapinoe is regarded by many queer soccer followers as a hero, epitomizing why queer people so typically really feel at residence on this planet of women’s soccer. During the primary Trump administration, the USWNT was a logo of queer pleasure and resilience, even when LGBTQ+ people have been dealing with a rolling back of their rights and progressive attitudes appeared to be dealing with a backlash.
Ed Fox, a fan of NWSL crew Washington Spirit, is happy with the queer visibility that women’s soccer within the US has lengthy supplied.
“Firstly, the women’s game avoids a lot of the machismo and issues of toxic masculinity that are found in the men’s game,” he tells NCS Sports. “I think the USWNT has set a tone by its inclusivity that has welcomed and invited queer people to enjoy the team and the sport that much more.”
Speaking particularly concerning the USWNT crew that included Rapinoe, Press, Heath and Krieger, Fox says that having such “powerful, vocal queer allies and heroes on that team made a huge difference,” with regards to queer visibility.
It is debatable that women’s soccer, by its very nature, is radical. For a lot of the twentieth century, the women’s recreation was subjected to severe restrictions the world over and, in some nations, banned altogether.
For 50 years, women in England were banned from playing on Football League grounds – forcing them to play in parks and fields. In 1922, Canada banned women from playing soccer following the FA determination in England. Under General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, women were banned from playing the game till the Spanish transition to democracy within the late Seventies.
It has lengthy attracted these that don’t really feel they’ve to comply with the principles of a heteronormative society and it has traditionally served as an area for these defying conventional societal conventions. Partially, because of this, it looks like a pure residence for queer people.
For a very long time, the women’s recreation operated on the margins of the dominant tradition. Even now, as gamers from around the globe have gained worldwide stardom standing, they’re nonetheless battling for better pay and having to take care of harassment on the world’s biggest stage.
As the women’s recreation grows more and more standard – setting new attendance records and breaking previous viewership figures on TV broadcasts – it is serving a much bigger neighborhood than ever earlier than. The sport is extra seen than it has ever been and its branding is evolving to enchantment to an array of audiences – however, in accordance to followers, at its coronary heart it stays a celebratory and joyous area for queer people.